How to Make a Good Parody Movie
Parody Movies have a long tradition throughout movie history. They also have a tradition of not being like by critics. Even Space Balls, a movie beloved by millions of fans was only given 2 1/2 stars by Roger Ebert. Getting 3 stars for a parody movie is considered an achievement and the last parody movie that had done so to my recollection was Scary Movie which received 3 stars by Roger Ebert. Naked Gun is considered almost a masterpiece at 3 1/2 stars.
My favorite parody movie as of late was Superhero Movie but that was not reviewed by Roger Ebert. I thought that the first 45 minutes were brilliant (especially the spoof on Spider-man's origin) but the last part sort of abandoned spoofing movies and went on it's own plot. Tropic Thunder was a borderline parody movie and that received the achievement of 3 1/2 stars. It's borderline because not a large part of the movie was spoof material, it contained only small homages here and there.
I think that may be where spoofs need to go in the future. Take a movie like Meet the Spartans. It essentially takes the movie 300 and adds gross out blue humor. The reason the movie was so bad was that it based the jokes around the need to rigidly follow the storyline of 300 rather than drawing from a larger source material and finding things that were funny.
Great spoofable moments in movies like "You Can't Handle the Truth", the death scene in Robocop 1, the twist at the end of The Usual Suspects, Rosebud in Citizen Kane, the love scene in From Here to Eternity, and Arnold moments have been spoofed numerous times and I never get sick of seeing them. If a movie is spoofable there are always new twists that can be added to make a new spoof of it original.
The problem that movies like Vampires Suck has is that it feels the need to pander to the audience because it wants to be a commercial success. It's trying to capitalize on the success of the twilight movies rather than trying to capitalize on the success of being funny. Pure parody movies need to find their success on videos where devoted fans can appreciate obscure references.
The original Austin Powers movies found most of it's success on video among fans who can appreciate references to movies that didn't come out five minutes ago. The other ones didn't do so well because they started to pander to the audience.
Good pure spoof movies need to go direct to video so they can be matched with fans who can appreciate subtlety. Movies with the odd spoof here and there like Tropic Thunder go to the big screen where less knowledgeable moviegoers can appreciate the film for it's own merits.
Tyler Davis writes for a height increase blog recently writing articles about whether masturbation stunts growth and BMP-7 increasing height.
Article source : Tyler C Davis
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