Despite brutal notices and breast jokes that got old around the time Neanderthals mastered the handaxe, the Movie Movies – you know, Epic Movie et al – have, to date, done a brisk trade out of the Friday night lobotomy crowd.
Not anymore.
Superhero Movie, the latest from the no-brow franchise, has finally proved an IQ plunge too far. Even the great Leslie Nielson, who reprises his zip speech from Airplane!, can’t save it.
Film will eat itself. But not, in this instance, nearly fast enough.
Star Wars fans will claim Superhero Movie’s relative failure at the US box office – $25 million compared to Scary Movie’s $157 million – as a victory. Their call for a boycott of Weinstein Company product – don’t ask, it’s a Wars thing – may well have dented the film’s fortunes. But we like to think that this decline can be attributed to good old common sense. Having lapped up a regurgitated 300 with Britney jokes as Meet The Spartans, The Chronicles Of Narnia mashed with Cribs as Epic Movie and War Of The Worlds with spliffs as Scary Movie 4, the public have decided to draw the line at Spiderman featuring Pamela Anderson and a Stephen Hawking lookalike.
Even the dim demographic that once made up the Scary Movies Plus faithful have realised these cobbled together parodies just aren’t funny “anymore”. Either that or they’ve all been shipped off to Iraq.
A sad end to an imprint once made bearable by Anna Faris.