Alyson Hannigan

Billing Date Movie as “from two of the six writers of Scary Movie,” complete with a mock-scrawled caret, is on the surface ridiculous, but actually a piece of deft marketing, wisely pointing up the flick’s satirical street cred to the same audience that drove that latter spoof series to the top of the box-office charts.

Directed by Aaron Seltzer, a co-writer on the film with Jason Friedberg, Date Movie name-checks all manner of comedy hits (Bridget Jones’ Diary, Shallow Hal, Wedding Crashers), both romantic and not, but takes as main tentpoles for its spoof My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Meet the Parents and Hitch. The story centers around Julia Jones (Alyson Hannigan), an obese, lovelorn waitress in a “Greek-Indian-Japanese-Jewish” family run by her well-meaning but overbearing father (Eddie Griffin, apparently having stolen Dan Hedaya’s eyebrows). After getting a truly extreme makeover, she finds love with Grant Fockyerdoder (Adam Campbell), an amalgamation of every foppish, generic, B-list leading man in these types of movies. There’s trouble in the gathering of Julia’s parents and Grant’s mom and dad (Jennifer Coolidge and Fred Willard), but the real romantic obstacle is Grant’s randy bombshell ex, Andy (Sophie Monk), who makes it her slutty mission to win back her fiancé of only a week before.

The similarly pitched Not Another Teen Movie is probably the better and more consistent satire of the two, but Date Movie does have some inspired bits, including a send-up of Paris Hilton’s slithery Carl’s Jr. carwash commercial, and a terse send-up of Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s therapy sequence. There’s also a few lines of brilliantly winking dialogue, such as when we first meet a bikini-clad Andy in the aforementioned carwash bit and Julia asks, “Why is she in slow motion?” to which Grant blithely responds, “She likes to make an entrance.”

The film’s blind eye with regards to race in its casting is nice - Griffin and Hannigan share some amusing scenes together simply by virtue of their offbeat pairing - and it also has fun with some obviously fake body doubles for Willard and Hannigan. Far too many bits, however, seem forced and/or stale - I could have done without the nonsensical Lord of the Rings parody, another Michael Jackson joke and an abundance of feline gross-out humor meant to be a send-up of Meet the Parents’ Jinx. Many other bits, meanwhile, seem awkwardly shoehorned in only because they share Date Movie’s distributor, 20th Century Fox. If the filmmakers had gone further back into the canon of popular rom-coms (as they do with one bit in a nod to When Harry Met Sally...), the movie would perhaps have felt a little more grounded. As such, it’s a hit-and-miss collection of sketches, with an emphasis on the latter.

Where this unrated version of Date Movie really grades out, though, is in its vast slate of extras. The film is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a dozen excised, extended or otherwise alternate scenes. A production featurette, audition tapes, screensavers, forthrightly billed extra footage of Monk cavorting about poolside and a set-top game are also included, as are three audio commentary tracks. The first is from writers Seltzer and Friedberg; the second features stars Hannigan, Campbell and Monk; and the third, a real hoot, is from critics Scott Foundas and Bob Strauss. While Strauss defends the movie on its own to-scale terms, Foundas quotes from his review in which he confesses jealousy at the random bit player who takes a nail gun to his head in the movie’s first two minutes. C- (Movie) A- (Disc)