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For some reason, people keep paying to see movies like Meet the Spartans and Epic Movie and Date Movie—which means that people keep letting Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer make more of them.
The latest in a painfully long and increasingly un-funny line of Friedberg/Seltzer movies is Disaster Movie, a movie that doesn’t actually spoof disaster movies. Mostly, it spoofs any movie that came out in the last year, along with a couple of TV shows, various celebrities, and, when the writer/directors ran out of other ideas, TV commercials.
The movie also features approximately five minutes of actual story, involving a guy named Will (Matt Lanter), who has a dream in which a Saber-Tooth Amy Winehouse tells him that the world will end on August 29, 2008. On the night of the 29th, Will is having a party when something very bad happens (in addition to the bad Dr. Phil impersonation and the wrestling match between Kim Kardashian and Carmen Electra). That something might be an earthquake, but it also involves some sort of a funnel cloud that hurls cows—and, occasionally, falling meteors (one of which lands on Hannah Montana, who then refuses to die). But Will is determined to rush to the Natural History Museum to make sure his ex-girlfriend, Amy (Vanessa Minnillo), is okay.
Along they way, he and his friends meet up with a surly Juno, a ditzy enchanted princess, a transvestite Carrie Bradshaw, a gay Beowulf, and three rabid singing chipmunks.
Really, words cannot begin to describe just how bad Disaster Movie is. But since that’s my job, I guess I’m going to have to try anyway.
Though my husband has dubbed Disaster Movie the worst movie he’s ever seen, I wouldn’t go quite that far. In fact, I’ll even admit that I actually laughed once. Maybe even twice. The rest of the time, however, I spent cringing at the horror of it all.
Perhaps if it had some kind of an actual story—or if some of it was actually cleverly written—Disaster Movie might have been funny. Or at least funnier. But I think that’s asking too much from Friedberg and Seltzer. Instead, Disaster Movie is just a bunch of bad impersonations and juvenile gags, which are then drawn out until there’s no longer anything remotely funny about them and then strung together for about 70 minutes (followed by an excruciatingly painful five-minute musical number).
The result is about as smart as—and perhaps even less entertaining than—a home video that’s been improvised by a bunch of giddy, over-caffeinated 12-year-old boys. And it made me really jealous of the 19 people who were smart enough to walk out of the screening.
I know it’s a cheap line, but a cheap line is all this movie deserves, so here it comes: this movie is truly a disaster.
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