Complete Disaster

A while back I mentioned I was going to avoid watching any film trailers for a long while. Well, that plan didn’t exactly work out. Checking out the dreadful Watchmen trailer I came across this one for Lionsgate’s Disaster Movie and was intrigued. Intrigued is actually the wrong word.

I know I have to come to terms with the fact that most movies today don’t have the wit and intelligence of the ones I grew up watching. Instead they seem to be made for an audience of uneducated knuckle draggers who rock forward in their seats and applaud along to the bright, colourful images.

But Disaster Movie mines a whole new seam of stupidity. This is a film best enjoyed by someone in a vegetative state, twenty minutes or so after the plug was finally pulled. Pushing your face into an angle grinder would be more entertaining.

I have an uneasy relationship with spoofs and parodies at the best of times. Really, it all depends on whether the filmmakers show some love and respect for the source material and know exactly what it is they’re making fun of, or whether they’ve just slapped together a useless, lazy piss-take that is just jaw-dropping awful.


Good spoofs would be the great one-two Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder had in 1974 with the magnificent Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Even Brooks’ High Anxiety wasn’t half bad, spoofing Hitchcock, although of course nobody parodied Hitchcock better than Sir Alfred himself. Neil Simon playfully ripped the piss out of detective stories with Murder By Death, where comical versions of Sam Spade, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot and Charlie Chan found themselves in a cleverly skewed version of Ten Little Indians.

After that came Airplane!, piling on the gags and non sequiturs as it made fun of the Airport movies in which George Kennedy’s Joe Patroni came to the rescue of crippled airliners. Then The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, skewered the classic police shows, and Galaxy Quest, which did it for science fiction shows with laughs and obvious affection.

But since Scary Movie, which turned an occasional titter into a franchise of diminishing returns, studios have just cranked out more and more skanky garbage like Date Movie, Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans. The only real laughs to come from the latter was from reading the broadsheet’s no-star reviews, filled with the splenetic rage of critics who had been made to waste their time on such drivel.


The only good thing to come of them is the audience for this nonsense is, amazingly, finally beginning to wise up. Superhero Movie, which, judging from the gormless trailer, did little more than take the plot of 2002’s Spider Man and replace the spider with a dragonfly to elicit the funnies, absolutely tanked at the box-office. It’s never a good thing to celebrate other people’s misfortunes – at least not in public – but when that giant turd went straight down the crapper there should have been dancing in the streets.

When was it decided that well-crafted jokes could simply be replaced with brainless pop culture references that are instantly dated? What the fuck is that nonsense all about? If Disaster Movie is ostensibly about teens trying to survive catastrophic events and natural disasters, why is the trailer filled with nonsense like the appearance of Princess Giselle from Enchanted or horse face from Sex and the City getting smacked about by Juno? The point of this sort of shit is what exactly?

And anyway, we’ve already had the great disaster movie spoof. In the mid-1970s, after being entertained by Airport, and Irwin Allen’s The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, came The Big Bus. How can you not love the story of a nuclear-powered, double-deck bus making its inaugural non-stop journey from New York to Denver. Where else can you find a bar fight with torn milk cartons? Or a driver accused of cannibalism? Genius.