Epic Movie (2007)
Directed by Jason Friedberg, Aaron Seltzer
Written by Jason Friedberg, Aaron Seltzer
Starring Kal Penn, Adam Campbell, Jennifer Coolidge, Jayma Mayes, Crispin Glover
Release Date January 26th, 2007
Published January 27th, 2007
One movie parody after the next gets worse and worse. Further and further the movies spawned by the success of Scary Movie go from humorous parody to a patchwork of drunken movie karaoke where actors stumble about plots from some of our favorite movies of the decade; missing the beats and never finding the rhythm.
Date Movie was thought to be the nadir of this genre. Sadly, two of the producers of Scary Movie managed to lower the depths and make a movie parody even worse. Epic Movie is an example of how you can dig to the bottom of the barrel and still go lower, if you just lift up the barrel and keep digging, straight to the sewer.
Epic Movie charts an unusual course. Four characters are each initially trapped in their own parody. Edward (Kal Penn) is trapped in a dull facsimile of the orphanage from Nacho Libre, a good movie that really stretches the definition of an 'epic movie'. Peter (Adam Campbell) is locked in the school for mutants from the X-Men movies. Lucy (Jayma Mayes) is escaping a knockoff of The Da Vinci Code and Susan (Faune A. Chambers) is stuck with a parody of Snakes On A Plane.
I say parody only because there is nothing else to call these scenes. Parody, unfortunately, implies that these scenes have a humorous sense about them. They do not. The "parody" of Epic Movie simply calls for the re-enactment of scenes from popular films augmented by bathroom humor, crotch kicking and dull slapstick.
Eventually, these four characters find each other in a Willy Wonka knock-off that leads to a Chronicles of Narnia knock-off and bad copies of Pirates of the Carribean, Borat and the MTV shows Punk'd and Cribs which were timely in, say; 2005. That is one of a myriad of problems with movies like Epic Movie. Our culture moves so quickly that often by the time they are able to finish these cheap reprises, the culture has already moved on to other things. The cribs satire is especially forgetting and tortured.
The comedy of Epic Movie is non-existent, unless you take pleasure in watching likable actors pissing their careers away. Kal Penn, so likable in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, is Epic Movie's biggest victim. With his role on TV's 24 and what I'm sure he hopes is his breakthrough as a dramatic actor in Mira Nair's upcoming The Namesake coming later this year, Penn looked set for stardom. However, after watching him piss down his leg in Epic Movie, how can I possibly take him seriously.
Fred Willard, Jennifer Coolidge and David Carradine all get caught up in the slime of picking up a paycheck for this awful mess of a movie. These terrific actors don't embarrass themselves to degrees that will matter but they should not highlight this one on their resume. Crispin Glover and Darrell Hammond are lucky that they are buried under pounds of makeup for their roles, leaving them almost unrecognizable. For their sake I will leave their parody identities out of this review.
It's difficult to describe just how bad Epic Movie is. I could easily claim that the film is an early candidate for worst movie of the year but, god help me, I hope I don't remember this movie that long. What is worse is that I know the film will do well enough at the box office that yet another should follow this time next year like some kind of annual curse.
At least by then maybe the stench of Epic Movie will have waned.
