Epic Movie

Epic Movie (2007)

Written and Directed by: Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer
Starring: Kal Penn, Adam Campbell, Jayma Mays, Faune A. Chambers, Jennifer Coolidge, Fred Willard, Héctor Jiménez, Crispin Glover, Darrell Hammond, Carmen Electra (what is it with them and frigging Carmen Electra?)

I had hoped that this movie would be marginally better than Scary Movie (God knows why) those hopes were dashed to pieces about... three and a half seconds into the movie. It was actually worse than the Scary Movies, if such a thing is possible.

This takes the plot from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and sticks a bunch of crap from Harry Potter, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Da Vinci Code, X-Men, Nacho Libre (WTF?), Pirates and God knows what else in there for no apparent reason.

Problem number one: A lot of the movies that they spoofed can hardly be classified as "Epic Movies". Take Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for example. Sure, it's a big chocolate factory, and there's lots of special effects, but come on.  

Snakes on a Plane is not an Epic Movie (the other problem with this is that they actually didn't do any work at all on this particular parody - the jokes basically involve snakes getting stuck on peoples tits and dicks, which happens in Snakes on a Plane anyway, so it really defeats the purpose. Same goes for their spoof of Borat. I mean, why bother, really).

Right, so that's cleared up. Problem number two: There's no interior logic whatsoever. No continuity. Scary Movie has the same problem, but they often use it to their advantage.

Problem number three: It really wasn't funny. That should probably be the first problem, but it's so obvious I thought I'd tuck it away down here. I mean, I'll laugh at anything, but really. There were a few funny bits, I'll give it that - for example, making fun of The Da Vinci Code is always funny. The stuff with Captain Jack was funny because Captain Jack is funny, regardless of who's playing him.

Also, it seems a little weird that they had two Johnny Depp roles in there - I mean, if the same guy had been in both roles, it would have been rather amusing, but it wasn't so...

Anyway, the writers on this one were just lazy. They didn't even bother to make up their own plot (yeah, Scary Movie is a sick combination of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, but all those movies have the same plot so it's basically just a generic slasher movie. Scary Movie 2 was a generic haunted house movie). And they basically just copy and pasted dialogue from the films they spoofed.

Sad and pathetic. And the acting was agonizingly bad in most places. I have a soft spot for Jennifer Coolidge somewhere in my heart (I have no idea why), but everything else just made me sad.

END COMMUNICATION