Turn the parody up to 11: the best spoof movies – ranked!

The Guardian

24-07-2025

Trey Parker's extraordinary puppet comedy may find its spoof status in dispute – perhaps because it spoofs more than one thing at a time: it spoofs action adventures and superhero combos as well as satirising gung-ho American nationalism and exceptionalism. Team America epitomises the belief that the US can and should get involved all over the world by kicking the ass of foreign people. Does it deserve a place on a spoof list? Fuck yeah!
Perhaps it is strange that a full-dress spoof of Alfred Hitchcock took so long to arrive – it could be that the master's own playful and self-aware sense of humour preempted it. But here is Mel Brooks's send-up of Hitchcock's psychological suspense thrillers, with Brooks as Dr Richard Thorndyke, the psychoanalyst neurotically afflicted with a fear of heights who somehow always finds himself in dangerous situations in which he is going to fall to his death. A sturdily impassive supporting cast includes Cloris Leachman, Madeline Kahn and a cameo for Brooks's co-writer Barry Levinson.
There have been so many spy spoofs and Bond send-up movies: Johnny English, Austin Powers and the first (non-canonical) Casino Royale from 1967 with David Niven as Bond. So, given that only one will have to stand for them all, here is Michel Hazanavicius's very closely observed and very funny spy spoof, riffing on the Bondian French agent Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, created by French author Jean Bruce in the late 1940s – starring the excellent Jean Dujardin as the suavely handsome daredevil with a touch of Clouseau-esque incompetence.
In what may come to be seen as the golden age of 80s' spoofs, Keenen Ivory Wayans produced his blaxploitation spoof, with the pedantically overextended title signalling its status as self-referential comedy. Wayans casts plenty of genuine titans of the blaxploitation world, including Antonio Fargas, Jim Brown, Isaac Hayes and Bernie Casey – riffing knowingly on the fact that black sports stars often graduated to the movies, although OJ Simpson was to appear in quite another spoof: the Naked Gun series.
Kanti Shah's spoof version of the revered Bollywood action-adventure Sholay from 1975 – widely regarded as one of the greatest Indian films of all time – was cheeky and, to some, even a bit sacrilegious. The film uses lookalike casting, mirroring iconic stars such as Sanjay Dutt, and madly inflates the already grandiose plot, which involved a retired cop hiring two criminals to bring down a ruthless kingpin. This parody version rounds up a whole crew of reprobates.
In any discussion of spoofs, there will always be debate about whether a certain film really counts as a spoof. When Python's Life of Brian first came out and was threatened with censorship by the religious right, the spoof argument was deployed in its defence – ie it's not an offensive attack on Christianity, it's a spoof of religious Hollywood epics. That's sort of true: the movie, starring Graham Chapman as the dozy bloke Brian Cohen who is mistaken for the Messiah in the time of Christ, used the locations and sets of Franco Zeffirelli's TV extravaganza Jesus of Nazareth, and its generic resemblance was part of what made it funny.
The Scary Movie franchise and the comparably self-aware if not out-and-out spoofy Scream series were a big part of the mainstream horror revival at the beginning of the 00s. Wayans, with his habitual pile-'em-high attitude to gags, gives us references to Friday the 13th, Halloween, I Know What You Did Last Summer and many more. He cheekily plays up the genre's trope of attractive young teen victims somehow always put themselves in harm's way, epitomised by the demon in the Ghostface mask standing between two road signs pointing helpfully in different directions, SAFETY and DEATH, boiling down the slasher plot form to a single absurdist meme.
A connoisseur spoof of 1940s noir detective stories, starring Steve Martin as the tough private investigator, directed and co-written by Carl Reiner, shot in black-and-white by Michael Chapman (who also shot Raging Bull) and accessorised with a gorgeously authentic musical score by Miklós Rózsa and costumes by Edith Head. Martin's character effectively speaks to the ghosts of the past as clips of old movies are intercut into the action, featuring the likes of Bogart, Cagney and Veronica Lake. Is that cheating in spoof terms? Maybe. But this is very well observed.
The porn spoof is a genre that is mostly under the radar and under the counter – the porn industry itself regularly produces porn-spoof versions of mainstream films (Shaving Ryan's Privates, Everyone I Did Last Summer, For Your Thighs Only, etc), but that is a matter of porn spoofing the respectable films. For the other way around, there is possibly the (woefully unfunny) Carry On Emmannuelle, but more amusing and gleefully crass is the brief sketch in John Landis's The Kentucky Fried Movie – a spoof of porn and a spoof of trailers. It's a coming attraction taster for the shocking new adult film Catholic High School Girls In Trouble: 'Never before has the beauty of the sexual act been so crassly exploited!'
Here is the original sequel-spawning Naked Gun, imminently to be revived with Liam Neeson playing the tough, stern detective: a movie spun off from the original Police Squad! TV comedy, which spoofed 60s TV cop shows such as The FBI. In fact, the original spoof targets of Naked Gun are so dim and distant in the pop culture collective memory that Naked Gun has its own kind of originality. Leslie Nielsen (carrying on from his brow-furrowing turn in the classic Airplane!) once again sent up the boilerplate heroic persona that he used to portray quite seriously, playing Det Lt Frank Drebin, and that rich baritone voice was vital to the absurd comedy.
Alan Parker's Bugsy Malone was a movie-musical that spoofed the Prohibition-era Warner Bros gangster-crime genre by simply casting the film's tough guys as children who hit each other with custard pies instead of shooting guns. However, Jodie Foster, appearing here in the same year as Taxi Driver, was so precocious that she was considered an honorary adult in an entirely different league from the innocent kids in the rest of the film. (The idea was not entirely original: the 1905 silent The Little Train Robbery spoofed The Great Train Robbery of 1903 by using children and a miniature railway set.)
Amy Heckerling's 90s masterpiece achieved a kind of double spoof: the story of high-school princess Cher, played by Alicia Silverstone, spoofed the form and content of teen movies by virtue of being elegantly modelled on a classic of English literature – Jane Austen's Emma. (Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You did the same thing with Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.) But, by the same token, it also slyly spoofed the generic mannerisms of Austen, and did so with loving admiration.
Scott Sanders's blaxploitation spoof boasts a stream of outrageous gags, uproarious bad taste and strict attention to detail. It stars his formidable co-writer, the martial arts action lead Michael Jai White as Black Dynamite, who swears to avenge his dead brother and takes aim at the complicit white establishment in Washington DC and the 'Honky House'. Sanders lovingly reproduces the paradoxically old-fashioned imperatives of blaxploitation, masculinity and heroism, which were being affirmed at a time when the white American new wave was undermining them.
This is a screwball self-aware comedy, a crazy madcap romp that its ever-increasing number of fans believe is touched by genius. Originally a Broadway show, it's a spoof of Broadway romances such as Gold Diggers of Broadway and The Great Ziegfeld. Butit's also a spoof of cinema and of musical theatre as represented in cinema, and of showbiz generally: the forms, the conventions and the grammar of all these are lovingly foregrounded. Actors Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson (from the original show) play themselves in the midst of a chaotic swirl of misadventures concerning whether or not a certain stage show can work in the world of motion pictures.
David Wain is a film-maker who spoofed sex comedies in his Wet Hot American Summer of 2001. But this is surely his masterpiece: a devastatingly realistic, rigorously maintained spoof of a mainstream romantic comedy, played with absolute conviction by Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler, with the New York locations, cinematography, production design and supporting cast that would be in the real thing. Rudd and Poehler are the couple who come together in the big city (which is itself a character in the movie, as in any self-respecting romcom), and the film takes us through a complete story, while always making us aware that it isn't a 'real' romcom – the effect is fascinating, amusing … and even slightly scary.
Mel Brooks's outrageous spoof western was, in one respect, very unlike the classic westerns it was sending up: it had a black man in the leading role. Cleavon Little is the railway worker Bart, who is promoted to sheriff by corrupt and cynical forces who expect him to fail (and so Blazing Saddles is not unlike Brooks's The Producers). But Bart finds himself teaming up with boozy gunfighter The Waco Kid, played by Gene Wilder, a tough guy who is, of course, on the point of redemption in the classic manner. There are some sophisticated fourth-wall-breaking gags and very unsophisticated farting jokes.
Do spoof films have to generate comedy? And if their object is more serious, does that mean they need the posher title of homage? Todd Haynes's romantic drama Far From Heaven is a spoof of Douglas Sirk pictures such as All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life: films about the passionate inner lives of women in 40s and 50s America. But Far From Heaven is much more explicit on the subject of race, racism and gay sexuality than Sirk could allow himself to be – Julianne Moore is superb as the prim and proper housewife whose husband (Dennis Quaid) has a secret gay existence, and she falls in love with a black man, played with Poitier-esque dignity by Dennis Haysbert.
For some, this is Brooks's greatest spoof, and possibly anyone's greatest spoof: a lovingly detailed recreation in luminous black and white of James Whale's original Boris Karloff-starring Frankenstein from 1931 , pastiching the Gothic romance tradition of classic horror from the forested dark lands of central Europe and using some of the original film's props. Cobbling together a recognisable human from disparate body parts – is that an allegory for spoof itself? Gene Wilder is the troubled neurophysiologist Dr Frederick Frankenstein, who realises that it is his terrible destiny to recreate the experiments of his disgraced grandfather Victor Frankenstein, creating a monster played by Peter Boyle.
Rob Reiner's brilliant comedy spoofed the vainglorious and Brit-heavy rockumentary genre like Zep's The Song Remains the Same, but with superb incidental detail and observational flair that went beyond those films. Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer are Nigel Tufnel, David St Hubbins and Derek Smalls of the legendary but failing heavy rock colossus Spın̈al Tap, here shown on an ill-fated comeback tour. Tap more or less spearheaded mockumentary comedy, cringe comedy and embarrassment comedy – later revived by Ricky Gervais and Steve Carell.
It had to be. This is the highest plane (as it were) of pure spoof nirvana, marrying original gags to strictly observed satire and an unflinchingly deadpan delivery, symbolised by its most famous joke: 'Surely you can't be serious?' (You know the punchline, which brilliantly and economically enacts the repudiation of seriousness). The Abrahams-Zucker masterpiece is a brilliant, vibrant parody of the airline disaster genre, spoofing the Airport movies generally and anticipating Robert Zemeckis's later plane crash films like Cast Away and Flight. But it was in fact modelled with amazing closeness on one specific film: Zero Hour! from 1957 (by Arthur Hailey, who went on to write the Airport films), a melodrama that now cannot be watched except through a glaze of delirious disbelief. It was a masterstroke of Abrahams and the Zuckers to get veteran actor Leslie Nielsen to play the heroic lead in exactly the same straight-faced, resonant way as he would have if he was in the original – and the same goes for troopers such as Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges and Peter 'Mission: Impossible' Graves. Genius.