Although we still have a few months to go before the ball drops and 2009 is upon us, the title of Worst Movie of 2008 is already locked up. Disaster Movie is a horrible, unfunny, cheap, stupid, brain numbing piece of garbage that makes me want to go back in time and murder Thomas Edison before he invented all that motion picture equipment. If you can find a bubble gum wrapper on the ground that makes you laugh at least twice, you will have double the entertainment value that you get from this awful spoof.
The title, Disaster Movie, might lead you to believe that this is a spoof of, you know, disaster movies. Of course, thinking that would be stupid; much like buying a ticket to this train wreck. Instead writer/directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer do what they’ve done in Date Movie, Epic Movie, and Meet the Spartans, spoof big movies and other miscellaneous popular culture from the last six to twelve months regardless of how it fits into the overall title concept. So the movie trots out imitators of Iron Man, Batman, Hellboy, The Hulk, Beowulf, the Superbad guys, the gals from Sex in the City, Juno, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Indy, the kids from High School Musical and many more movie characters, but mixes in Justin Timberlake, Amy Winehouse, American Gladiators, the Air Book, the “I’m F**king Matt Damon” song, and Hannah Montana. Sadly, none of this mixing results in anything remotely funny.
The plot does nod to Cloverfield as Will (Matt Lanter) tries to get back to his ex-girlfriend Amy (Vanessa Minnillo) while their city is being bombed by asteroids and maybe a monster. There is also a tornado that made me wonder if they were digging up Twister. Will is joined on his quest by his friend Calvin (G. Thang… seriously), Calvin’s girlfriend Lisa (Kimberly Kardashian), and, of all people, the Juno imitator (Crista Flanagan). Along the way they pick up the Enchanted Princess (Nicole Parker) and work at both finding Amy and getting a crystal skull back to the natural history museum where Amy works.
The plot doesn’t really matter in a spoof movie (look at Naked Gun!) but there needs to be something funny going on about every 15 to 20 seconds. Here there is, literally, one thing that made me laugh in the entire 90 minute movie. I did smile at a song by the High School Musical group that narrated Will and Amy’s breakup but other than that it was one outright laugh in 90 minutes. Most of the bits involved Will’s group standing there watching someone pretend to be a movie or pop culture character and do something colossally unfunny. The worst of these was the neverending, dreadful Alvin and the Chipmunks sequence. It could be the worst five minutes in movie history.
If Disaster Movie were even a little bit funny, I’d probably be able to ignore that it looks so cheap. They spent no money on special effects (or actors, or a script, apparently) and everything looks like it could have been shot on a camcorder by those two kids from Son of Rambow in and around L.A. If there were laughs, I’d also ignore that before the film is three minutes old a character has fallen face first into a big pile of elephant poop and been smacked in the nuts. Man, you’re probably laughing just thinking about that. Comic gold. If it even made me chuckle, I’d also probably ignore how they broke the cardinal rule of being funny in 2008… don’t mention Michael Jackson. Do you think it’s funny to see Michael Jackson in the trunk of the Mach 5 with that little kid and his monkey? Come on, pedophilia is funny and a Michael Jackson joke is never not timely, right? Wrong, it’s not timely or funny, and painting his face white isn’t funny either. It was maybe funny in 1998, but not now. It’s just tired, old, and stupid. Hey, like this movie!
Disaster Movie is not remotely funny. I’m trying to think of words to express how bad this movie is, but I don’t think they exist in the English language. I realize you want to blow off this stuffy fart of a critic and go laugh your head off. Believe me, you won’t. You will just wish you could have avoided this disaster… movie.
Note: That last joke really sucked, but was eleventy jillion times funnier than anything in Disaster Movie.
