Latest news with #spoof
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The return of the spoof: can comedy's silliest subgenre make a comeback?
The Naked Gun, a sequel/reboot to the old movie series of the same name, represents the first of its kind in a long time. No, not a legacy sequel, nor a Liam Neeson movie; the in-demand Irish actor still does two or three of those a year. Like its predecessors, The Naked Gun is a spoof – part of a comedic subgenre with astonishing versatility, in that it can lay claim to some of the very best and very worst comedies of all time. Maybe that's why these movies, despite relatively low budgets and decent success rates, will sometimes disappear for years at a time. Now, in a period when a pure comedy hasn't crossed the $100m mark in the US in almost a decade, The Naked Gun seems to be leading a revival. A sequel to the rock-doc spoof This Is Spinal Tap arrives next month, follow-ups to Scary Movie and the Mel Brooks Star Wars spoof Spaceballs are on the way, and there have even been whispers of a fourth Austin Powers film. The leader of the latest comeback has a connection to some high-water marks: the original Naked Gun, yes, but more importantly 1980's Airplane!, a feature-length spoof of the then-popular disaster movies from comic film-makers David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker. ZAZ, as the team was known, didn't invent the idea of parodying familiar genres in a barrage of intentional (and subverted) cliches, sight gags, puns and other stupid-clever jokes. But Airplane! took on movies like Airport with such a deadpan density, and such a shockingly high hit rate, that it wrested the spoof crown from previous king, Mel Brooks (whose Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles are still standard-bearers for loving genre parody). Brooks often appeared on camera in his films, while the ZAZ boys did not; instead, Leslie Nielsen became the face of their efforts, and an unlikely catalyst for a youth-driven trend in the process. Following his flawlessly deadpan role in Airplane! as a doctor ('I am serious … and stop calling me Shirley'), Nielsen starred in the team's failed (but hilarious) TV procedural spoof Police Squad! which was eventually turned into the 1988 big-screen comedy The Naked Gun. The odd thing about the original Naked Gun is that, unlike Airplane!, it's not a particularly close parody of a classic or trendy film genre. It mostly takes the framework of the Police Squad! show, which was more akin to 60s cop dramas, and throws in some elements of neo-noir crime thrillers. (There's also a grab-bag of other assorted movie references throughout the trilogy.) Nevertheless, or perhaps because it didn't require any specific genre knowledge, The Naked Gun was a big enough hit to inspire a pair of sequels – and plenty of knockoffs. A spoof boom lasted for most of the 90s, peaking in 1993 with National Lampoon putting their name on Loaded Weapon 1, veteran film-maker Carl Reiner contributing the erotic-thriller goof Fatal Instinct, Abrahams himself directing the Rambo-inspired Hot Shots! Part Deux, and Mel Brooks returning with Robin Hood: Men in Tights. A later entry, a spoof of urban dramas with the omnibus title of Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, kickstarted the next generation of spoofs when writers/stars Marlon and Shawn Wayans moved on to savage resurgent horror movies with Scary Movie. A spoof built around a movie as self-aware and self-satirizing as Scream should not have worked – the Scream characters crack jokes, while The Naked Gun and its ilk tend to goof on seriousness – but it actually outgrossed its target. Later spoofs trumpeted the presence of 'two of the six writers' of Scary Movie, the non-Wayans-afilliated Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who also wrote the off-brand Nielsen-starring parody Spy Hard. Friedberg and Seltzer more or less got themselves appointed the ZAZ of the 2000s, even as an actual Zucker went on to make some of the later Scary Movie sequels. Their hits include Date Movie, Epic Movie and the 300 parody Meet the Spartans. Watching the Friedberg-Seltzer spoofs of the 2000s is like watching children attempting to draw their own Looney Tunes or perform their own Saturday Night Live sketches: there's a basic understanding of what their imitation should look like (and a compulsion to have characters crushed by falling objects) but a lack of basic craft that's years away from passably amateurish. At times, projects like their magnum opus Disaster Movie barely seem to understand what a spoof even is; Friedberg and Seltzer know that it sometimes involves referring to other movies and/or cultural figures, which they do constantly, but are at a loss beyond ordering up a playground imitation. Look, I'm Iron Man! I'm Juno! I'm Miley Cyrus! Splat! (It almost goes without saying that the most oft-splattered targets tend to be 'annoying' women.) Like Nielsen in his post-ZAZ phase multiplied by the force of a thousand suns, Friedberg and Seltzer made so many of these things, and so badly, that when they started to falter at the box office it felt like a relief. That loud, graceless sensibility has now migrated over to YouTube and TikTok, where at least the amateurs-at-heart aren't charging viewers 10 bucks a pop for sub-skit imitations. Even some well-liked spoofs were deemed stretched thin at 85 minutes; maybe stacking dozens of quick-hit joke is a practice better-suited to shorter-form parodies. Perhaps sensing that, or simply wanting to pay tribute to the spirit of Police Squad! rather than the more mugging-intensive later installments, the new Naked Gun doesn't do much direct-scene parody. Its opening mimics the bank-robbing sequence from The Dark Knight in set design and score, but no one shows up in imitation Joker makeup. Director Akiva Schaffer, who knows from short-form comedy from his work as part of the Lonely Island, counterintuitively avoids taking the proliferation of a particular type of movie (like superheroes) as an imperative to spoof 'em good. That was the instinct behind the biopic parody Walk Hard, one of the last genuinely good spoofs, and a box office bomb in 2007. Instead, The Naked Gun continues to goof on cop thriller cliches and pile on the absurd puns and/or sight gags ('cold case' files in a refrigerator, a car wreck cleaned up via claw machine, etc), with the benefit of Neeson giving it his absolute best, unsmiling deadpan. So what are the conditions required for spoof movies to multiply? Several confirmed follow-ups seem well-timed if not overdue; dozens of straight-faced horror trends have come through since the most recent Scary Movie, and there's been a 270% increase in Star Wars films since the first Spaceballs. But highly specific parodies are not always an advantage. Done well, they can be exacting, like Young Frankenstein, or a memorable compendium of cliches, like Walk Hard. Done poorly, and suddenly you've got unfunny mash-ups. Then again, it would also be reasonable to ask what, exactly, the new Naked Gun is satirizing. Schaffer does work in some mockery of older white men exerting an iron grip on the culture while grousing how bad the world has become. Mostly, though, this particular spoof revival offers the gleeful release of watching an intentionally fake, silly movie in a theater, sharing laughs with strangers. Spoofing a movie through at-home streaming or phone-bound TikTok is certainly possible. But gags built around violating a generally agreed-upon reality of cinema work better in its natural habitat. That's something The Naked Gun, with its technical imitations of a 'real' movie, seems to understand more than any particular cop-movie trends: that it can provide the too-rare experience of laughing throughout a deeply silly movie that's as relentless, in its way, as the big-screen spectacle more typical of the 2020s. If the Naked Gun redo becomes the biggest comedy in months or even years, it could ease moviegoers back into the habit. If a subgenre responsible for some of the worst comedies ever made can still make 'em laugh, maybe comedy on the whole will get the chance to leave the house again.
The Guardian
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Turn the parody up to 11: the best spoof movies – ranked!
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.
The Guardian
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Turn the parody up to 11: the best spoof movies – ranked!
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.
Geek Vibes Nation
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Vibes Nation
‘Hot Spring Shark Attack' Review – A Zany Shark Film That Spoofs And Idolizes
There is a sure guarantee that during the dog days of summer, there will likely be at least one shark movie. Summer 2025 has brought many a dorsal fin, but none as outlandish and outrageous as Hot Spring Shark Attack. In a send-up that runs through a grocery list of genre movie tropes and clichés, the story itself feels like a leftover storyboard from the Sharknado movies. So bad it's good? Yes, and that is a compliment, because this film goes out of its way to be one giant spoof of a movie. The earnest nature of the film's lampoon is worthy of praise. Set in a small hot spring town in Japan, a series of events reawakens an ancient shark that begins terrorizing the local hot spring facilities. As the threat escalates, the townspeople unite to protect their beloved town from the menacing predator, culminating in a fierce and thrilling battle. Hot Spring Shark Attack is one extended, winding spoof of every shark movie. A scene where a body on the beach is found is right out of the opening of Jaws. Our brave leaders do battle against the beast in a submarine reminiscent of The Meg. In addition to shark flare, the movie lampoons a multitude of genre films, including superhero films. There is a he-man seen throwing a hammerhead shark from the ocean in an exchange right out of Aquaman. They say imitation is the best form of flattery, and while I would not call this Hot Spring Shark Attack flattering, it is bold in its desire to create a so-bad-it's-good movie. The effects in the film are laughable. We're talking almost entry-level film school, or backyard movie-making that's not quite up to par, but that's the point. The ludicrous nature of both the story and its execution is intentional. If this film pretended to be a gripping drama, or even a melodrama, we'd need more than a bigger boat to bail out of this mess. However, the decision to go overboard with the blatantly crude effects and over-the-top story gives this film a flavor and credibility that few shark films achieve. Jaws set the standard, and no film has cleared the bar set by Steven Spielberg's now fifty-year-old masterpiece. The challenge for newcomers trying to make a shark film is over-exaggeration and finding a new way to give the shark new teeth, so to speak. By comparison, even films with the best intentions find themselves barely treading the water. In other words, Jaws did it so well in 1975 that every other attempt sinks to the bottom of the sea. Here is why films like Sharknado, which are blatantly ludicrous, have at least resonated with audiences. The art of the spoof, even when the cast is taking the material seriously, gives these films some buoyancy to stay afloat. Hot Spring Shark Attack is by no means a comparison to the other shark-lampooning movies. Still, it is clever enough to check all the boxes we associate with this particular subgenre. It still delivers a hilarious and outright bonkers story: levitating and airborne sharks, comic book-level explosions, and sharky shenanigans. Sharks in a hot spring, why not? The hilarious locale only adds to the film's earnest cleverness. Once we buy into this ridiculous setup, the rest is easy sailing. Every actor here is aware of the film's aims and plays it to the hilt. There are no brainless character decisions or blatant archetypes. Well, there are, from a police chief to a shark expert to concerned bathers. However, herein lies the film's silly brilliance. All the characters are playing to type. They are unaware that this is a spoof, yet they give us performances and reactions worthy of a Scary Movie entry. Hot Spring Shark Attack will overwhelm some by the sheer magnitude of its farce. Yes, the effects are subpar, but everything here is intentional. We roar with laughter as the film lampoons and lambasts the subgenre of shark films. The impact is both cringeworthy and somewhat refreshing, but overall, it's enjoyable. Hot Spring Shark Attack is playing in select theaters and is available on VOD courtesy of Utopia.
Daily Mail
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Bowfinger: Trailer, certificate and where to watch
Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy star in a hilarious comedy that gleefully spoofs both ends of Hollywood 1999
