SUPERHERO MOVIE [PG-13]
Dear Mr. & Mr. Weinstein:
In that you did not take the time to screen in advance your latest pop culture spoof, Superhero Movie, I think it appropriate that someone like myself who was unfortunate enough to have to endure it opening weekend without the benefit of ether, vodka or a series of anesthetizing mallet strikes to the skull should not have to take the time to cover its release properly, either. That is why I am sitting in the back row of my local googolplex and reclaiming the two hours I lost watching it by writing this pissive entirely on my BlackBerry.
It’s baffling that with a name like producer David Zucker’s on your little movie that you couldn’t seem to make it funny. This is the same David Zucker who, with brother Jerry and longtime cohort Jim Abrahams, created the template for the modern spoof with classics like Airplane! and The Naked Gun, right? He’s not a clone with his talent gene selectively spliced out? You’re not ransoming a beloved Zucker family member, adored pet or prized PEZ collection, are you? He’s not strapped to a bed in some remote mountain cabin, hobbled by some loopy, cock-a-doody fat girl who maniacally spouts, ad infinitum, lines like “And don’t call me Shirley” and “Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue,” is he? Because really, your lazy and mechanical mash-up of the likes of the Spider-Man, Fantastic Four and X-Men movies – as if they weren’t self-parodies, anyway – plays like a MAD Magazine spoof that was written on the toilet (which would actually make it a Cracked Magazine spoof). Man, where do we start?
You can’t put a veteran like Leslie Nielsen in the movie and expect an audience to instantly forget that the script is all pee, poop and puke puns. This master bait-and-switch move reminds me of the whole Caligula disaster when the gents behind Penthouse Magazine shot the backbone of the film – Gore Vidal’s screenplay – starring luminaries like Sir Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud and Helen Mirren, and then later added gratuitous sex scenes featuring Guccione’s gals, making it the largest scale porn film ever made. It’s really disturbing to see you taking advantage of Nielsen’s name and our expectations of the grandfatherly go-to guy by putting him in your cumbersome clubhouse cut-up. And reducing the likes of darling “Happy Days” mom Marion Ross to the butt of a fart gag grosser than the one in Blazing Saddles, making her say “little penis” and involving her in a sketch about necrophilia? I’d say “shame on you,” but I reserve that for your crass mockery of one of the greatest minds of our time – Dr. Stephen Hawking – by turning the quadriplegic theoretical physicist into an ugly running joke and sight gag. But hey, at least there were no rampantly anti-gay threads in your scattershot Pigfield Follies. At least until you sign the Wayans Brothers for a sequel.
Damn, you left Disney for this?
Sincerely,
Robert Newton
P.S. Even though I didn’t pay to get in, I’ll happily take a refund of the $10.50 that a ticket in Boston costs now…which I’ll spend at my local video store…which doesn’t carry your movies because of your DVD embargo of all non-Blockbuster rental stores…which, now that I think of it, was a humanitarian act of the highest order.
