Flick Picks 15: Epic (Failure) Movie

 Hello again Streakers! Boog here, with the second part of my reviews for this wonderful Friday. Unfortunately, this, 'film' is nothing less than an utter failure from beginning to end. Comedy is supposedly very hard to write well, and spoof comedy even harder, because it requires a least some first hand knowledge on the spoof subject for the audience to make the jokes work, and to make them work well, they have to be written strongly enough to take advantage of the comedy setting. For Good, and some Great examples of spoof comedy films, I direct you to Google the Naked Gun movies, the Hot Shots films, and some of the National Lampoon films made before 1995, like Loaded Weapon Part 1. Hell, even the Zucker classic Airplane! These spoof films work because, inherently, the base components of the films they're spoofing haven't changed, they're just being presented in a funny way through clever writing and the occasional sight gag.
Epic Movie, on the other hand, is just down right awful. So awful, I can't even get the trailer from imdb.com to link here. First of all, from a comedy standpoint, none of the jokes are focused, or drive the story forward, so it fails there, and from a spoof standpoint, well, most of the jokes are sex jokes, with little to no variation from that. There is no real connection to the films being made fun of, other than the writers going 'hey, we should do a bit on that Johnny Depp Wonka movie here! That would be AWESOME!', and frankly, it never is. SPOILERS!, and if you want to find out just how awful, read through the jump....

Okay, first, last and only warning: one, maybe two, of the pictures used in this review to illustrate the nastiness of this film is potentially NSFW. With that out of the way, I really want to hurt the writer/director duo for this film, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. You see, they once wrote a movie with four other people, and two of them were Wayans Brothers. The third directed that then called Scary Movie, and a legitimate franchise of horror spoofs was born. For Scary Movies 2 through 4, Friedberg and Seltzer had nothing to with them, and 2 was hilarious, while 3 and 4 faltered, but really only because the Wayans themselves were running out of steam for the franchise.

This is much more horrifying in context, I assure you.

Friedberg and Seltzer, however, decided to take their part of the show on the road, as it were, and try to make spoof movies on everything, and herein lies the problem. Friedberg and Seltzer weren't the funny part of Scary Movie's writing team, and it shows. There are nine names I recognize from the rather large cast here, and none of them are used well. Kal Penn, of the Harold & Kumar movies, and some episodes of House, and Jayma Mays, currently on Glee, are part of the main characters, but they just aren't good characters. Mays gets to play an extreme airhead, who will most likely make you want to break your television in frustration at her ineptness, and her only gag in the film is to repeat everything the other female lead says. Unfunny AND annoying. Penn gets a rather bland stock jackass role for the first third of the film, then changes into a bland, do-nothing follower type. His only jokes are reactionary to the characters around him, and, as most of them sex jokes, Penn's character comes off as again, one note, and that note is the key of E-www. Lame joke, I know, but just trying to illustrate the badness present here.

Perhaps unfortunately, the Harry Potter franchise would never quite recover.

So, as for the others, well, one of them is pictured to the left, one Kevin McDonald, here trying to be Harry Potter. And generally being disgusting. McDonald, when not making hamburgers, is part of the Canadian comedy group The Kids in The Hall. I personally don't think the group is funny, but certain members notably McDonald and Dave Foley, are funny when given the chance. Not here, as all we get are more variations on sex jokes. As this is all the film has to offer, by this point I am bored as hell. But we continue. Other notables are Jennifer Coolidge as the villain, cast because she was Stifler's Mom in American Pie. Yay, more sex jokes. Crispin Glover makes an appearance as Willy Wonka, this time a candy maker with a cannibalistic streak. Oh, and here we get a shit joke, some bad sight gags, and yes, more sex jokes. David Carradine makes a cameo performance in the opening of the film, and while there isn't a sex joke here, none of it is funny anyway, so let's move on. Fred Willard, seen in the above picture on the bed, he's the guy with all the chest hair, is here as Aslo, the li-man. He's a walking, talking, sex joke. Dwarf performer Tony Jay is here as the assistant to Coolidge's character. He's mainly here to get dropped on screen from off camera, because physical abuse of dwarves is funny, I guess.

Thankfully, X-Men was almost dead to begin with.

Then there's Carmen Electra. Here she plays Mystique, a character only in this film because we can make guess what, another sex joke. Oh, and Darrel Hammond, here playing the hilariously named Captain Jack Swallows. Ha. Ha. /sarcasm. You take one of the best impressionists from SNL in recent years, and you turn him into a sex joke. Seriously, guys? I mean, first you cant even make the damn thing reach the 90 minute mark with out padding the END CREDITS with a six minute gag reel, but really? The ONLY jokes you could come with when trying to spoof X-Men, Harry Potter 1-5, the 1st Chronicles of Narnia films, the Da Vinci Code, Snakes on a Plane, Nacho Libre, the Pirates of the Caribbean films, Superman Returns, and Borat, were sex jokes? Really? The fact that most of them were bad sex jokes only makes it worse. You see, spoofs, have to make fun of some aspect of the films they're spoofing, which here is completely nonexistent. Not one joke here made me laugh, because essentially this is just bunch of unconnected sex jokes masquerading as a spoof film.

Wha-KILL IT! KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!

And therein lies the problem. Friedberg and Seltzer need a reality check, and really need to learn to write a proper spoof film. Because, seriously, I don't want to ever, EVER, see anything like the man to the left of this, ever again. But we will, unless Friedberg and Seltzer can be shown the error of their ways. Please, tell everyone you know, stop watching their films. Once they stop making money, maybe we'll get a proper spoof film out of them, or they'll get out of the way and let somebody else do it right. This movie sucks. Really, really sucks. Avoid it at all costs.

Now, back to figuring out what to watch next, and more research for my 20th flick pick review.