Alyson Hannigan

2 movies so bad, so close? What are the odds?

Unbelievable! It happened again!

Already, 2006 can be crowned as the Worst Movie Year ever - and it’s still February!

The Movie Man felt liked he had survived a plane crash when he staggered from the last 1 just two weeks ago, Big Momma’s House 2. Surely something like that wouldn’t ever happen again.

But it did! Another cinematic plane has crashed, Date Movie.

About the film

Reviewers are always ready to disembowel a movie that isn’t previewed. (However, the Movie Man never goes to critic previews; he sees movies just like you do, amongst the masses.)

Date Movie was not previewed. Usually that’s a horrible sign and, boy, was that the case here.

Still, the film somehow managed to take in over $22 million which is surely a sign of the apocalypse. And, even more astonishing, Big Momma’s House 2 continues to find paying customers; it’s tally now is now at over $62 million. Are those trumpets sounding heavenward?

Like most misfires, Date Movie could’ve been funny. Parodying films has been done successfully before, of course.

Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein (both 1974!), and High Anxiety (1977) were witty take-offs on westerns, old Universal horror movies, and Hitchcock films, respectively.

(But he ran out of gas about Spaceballs [1987] and certainly by Dracula: Dead and Loving It [1995].)

The most the Movie Man ever laughed at a first run movie was Airplane! in 1980. That film seemed to come out of nowhere and was absolutely hilarious. (It was one of those movies that you’d go see again just to see/hear the reactions of first-time filmgoers. Barbara Billingsley’s line “I speak jive” to a couple of soul brothers on the plane and their ensuing conversation unfailingly brought the house down. )

Airplane! spoofed scads of films, but mainly the Airport disaster movies so popular in the Seventies.

The same guys who made this classic turned out some more killers as a spoof genre geared up. First, the trio of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker took something called Police Squad! to TV in 1982.

That series lasted only six episodes - including one with a brief John Belushi appearance that was cut when he died and hasn’t been relocated since - and is bemoaned as one of the great series that was never given a chance.

(Much like The Ben Stiller Show, a skit comedy series from 1992 on Fox. Despite a cast that included Andy Dick, Janeane Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk and an Emmy for writing, the show lasted just 13 episodes.)

In 1984, ZAZ returned with an underrated classic, Top Secret! (They loved those exclamation points!) This one, a spy spoof, starred Val Kilmer and a cow suit.

Inept Lt. Frank Drebin, played perfectly by Leslie Nielson, was resurrected in 1988 in The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! The scenes with the Queen and the concluding baseball sequence are comedic classics. Two more Naked Gun movies are just as funny - the sequel, 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991) and No. 3, 33 1/3: The Final Insult in ‘94.

Around the same time, Hot Shots! (1991) and Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993) skewed the Rambo/action genre. Charlie Sheen shines in both.

The parodies kind of petered out after that Golden Era. Jane Austen’s Mafia!, a 1998 Godfather take-off, is certainly a step down.

(Other studios strove to jump on the spoof bandwagon, of course. Some were really bad, like 1990’s Repossessed, an Exorcist parody.)

Like werewolf movies or action films, specific cinema ebbs and flows. The parody genre flowed again in 2000 when Scary Movie became a colossal success. (Its incredible $157 million take shocked everyone.)

The Scary Movie sequels are horrible - No. 4 arrives this April - but the success of the first one meant others would coattail.

And, sadly, Date Movie is stinking up theaters nationwide. Romantic comedies are prime for satire - but nothing of the sort occurs here.

The plot

Julia Jones (Alyson Hannigan, best known as the “One time at band camp...” girl from the American Pie movies), who keeps a diary, a la Bridget Jones, is a big, fat Greek waitress longing for love.

She meets her true love, Grant (Adam Campbell, trying unsuccessfully to channel Hugh Grant), but they are separated.

Hannigan seeks out Hitch (Tony Cox, the African-American little person from Bad Santa) for romantic advice. He has her get a compete Pimp My Ride make-over.

Now lovely, Hannigan seeks out Campbell. They agree to marry but first must visit his parents, parodying Meet the Fockers.

They finally get married; it took only about 80 minutes - and that was way too long.

What works

Nothing.

Best scene

None. (You’d think that some kind of visual gag would hit but even making a long-waiting [now bearded] Campbell resemble Tom Hanks from Cast Away is only good for a minor chuckle.)

What doesn’t work

Plenty of films are lined up for hammering and all escape thanks to the ineptness of directors/writers Jason Friedberg/Adam Seltzer.

Among the misfires: Dodgeball, Kill Bill, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Say Anything..., When Harry Met Sally, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, What Women Want, even Lord of the Rings and King Kong and Napoleon Dynamite. Not a single one is funny.

Friedberg and Seltzer wrote a few other earlier spoofs - Spy Hard and the latter Scary Movies - and they stink, too.

Even eight year olds will groan and weary of the attempt at gross-out humor like giant zits, beating up the homeless, a human coughing up a hairball, and, most disgusting of all, a cat on a toilet in a scene that seemingly never ends.

The degree of badness is astonishing in Date Movie. Even the teens in the audience with the Movie Man never laughed. Not once.

The rating

Date Movie dances around the far edge of the PG-13 rating. It’s gross, stupid, gross, imbecilic, gross, and gross. The Movie Man could’ve understood had this picture come out as a moderate R.

Summing up: a 1

Under no circumstance should anyone of any age go see Date Movie. It fails as a comedy, a satire, and a spoof. It is a colossal failure of exponential depth.

Trailers

Even the previews shown during Date Movie were bad. After seeing the coming attraction for Lindsey Lohan’s Just My Luck (a 3) maybe it’s understandable why she has some substance problems. It looks horrible.

Saving 2006

The year is off to a horrible start so far: Hostel (5); Glory Road (6); Underworld: Evolution (3); Big Momma’s House 2 (1); When a Stranger Calls (4); The Pink Panther (6); and now Date Movie (1) - that’s an average of just 3.7, yikes.

But there’s hope on the horizon. Still due this year:

March 10 - The Hills Have Eyes (remakes are always iffy but this one has some buzz)

May 5 - Mission: Impossible III (the other two were great)

May 19 - The Da Vinci Code (will be big and Hanks doesn’t hurt)

May 26 - X-Men: The Last Stand (the other two were great, too)

June 9 - Cars (the Movie Man is ready to declare this the summer’s biggest movie)

June 30 - Superman Returns

July 7 - Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

July 21 - Monster House (motion capture like Polar Express)

Nothing exciting is looming this week. Maybe a call back film?...