Meet the Spartans (imdb)
I can’t believe I’m admitting to seeing this. And, Ryan will probably hurt me for putting up anything to do with this movie on the blog. I was curious, though. While Friedberg and Seltzer’s spoof movies haven’t been great, I will admit that I found Epic Movie and one of the Scary Movies (forget which one) at least mildly entertaining. I’m a sucker for pop culture references and slap stick comedy (like Shrek). Unfortunately, pop culture references and slapstick do not an entertaining movie experience make, especially when the result is just distasteful, filmatic diarrhea.
This movie plays like a horrible episode of MadTV. It attempts to zing with references to other movies and one-liners harking back to media references from 2006 and 2007. Unfortunately, it just can’t find a way to do so tastefully and all too often falls back to bathroom humor or crude sexual references - a penguin defecates on Leonidas’ face, testicles are bitten, and Carmen Electra flaunts her aging wares. The choice of pop culture references is equally uninspired with the vagina’s of Paris, Britney, and Lindsay often in focus and one particularly offensive reference to Anna Nicole Smith.
The sad thing is, the most perplexing part of this movie is not how badly the jokes are executed or that they believe they can charge $12 a pop to see it. It’s how bad 35 year old Carmen Electra (born 1972) looks. Clearly, her Baywatch (1997-1998) days are a thing of the past. Just for comparisons sake, Catherine Zeta-Jones is pushing 40 (born 1969) and is still every bit the bombshell she was when she played Virginia Baker in Entrapment (1999). So basically, in addition to missing any real humor, the movie also can’t deliver on the sex appeal front. Thumbs down all around.
1 out of 6 painted on abs
February 12th, 2008 at 10:20 am
Dear god no someone make them stop it hurts my brain….this is a truly bad idea. Why do Americans insist on making such dire rubbish, surely they must know what they are doing to us with such atrocities. You would had thought that someone in the crew would have turned around and said “look guys we just can’t make this sought of crap and force it on the unexpected viewer it just not fare in fact it’s positively criminal” a new standard or law needs to be brought in to prevent this form of abuse from happening again.
February 13th, 2008 at 9:03 am
What’s wrong with Carmen Electra? I think she looks as good as ever, and possibly better than Zeta-Jones all around. She’s a little irritating, sure, but not as irritating as Dave Navarro.