Superhero Movie review

Superhero Movie
Rated PG-13(contains crude humor, language, and comic violence)
Directed by Craig Mazin
Starring Drake Bell, Sarah Paxton, Christopher McDonald, and Leslie Nielson
Score: ***1/2

Spoof movies almost always suck nowadays. We really haven't had a good Airplane style spoof since the last Naked Gun and Hot Shots sequels.

Instead, we get fucking Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, the assholes who brought you the worst movie of 2007 in Epic Movie, and probably the worst movie of 2008 in Meet the Spartans.

Well, then Superhero Movie came out. It had the same "Scary Movie" style poster, the Scary Movie alum(Regina Hall, Leslie Nielson, Simon Rex, etc...) , and one of the Scary Movie writers. Fortunately, this writer comes from the School of Zucker Comedy.

The movie is a straight parody of Spider-Man 1 and 2 for the most part. It follows the action and plot of those films, but takes every opportunity to make actual jokes rather than just put "hey, remember this part in that one movie?" lines. It actually made me laugh. It made me laugh out loud about four or five times. It made me chuckle or smile through 95% of the rest of the movie. It actually doesn't suck.

There is a difference between the Friedberg/Seltzer bullshit and Scary Movie 3, 4, and Superhero Movie. They are two totally different styles of comedy. One uses the exact plot, the exact same character names, and a whole bunch of lookalike actors while stringing together 90,000 pop culture references and 20 minute dance sequences.

Superhero Movie has one or two references to Youtube, and a brief reference to Perez Hilton. That is all the pop culture spoof you get. There is a dance sequence, but it is only about 15 seconds rather than 15 minutes. The jokes are the same kind of nonsensical but completely hilarious jokes you get in Airplane and Top Secret.

There is one bad scene, however, that almost reaches the Friedberg/Seltzer levels- the scene in the X-Men Academy. In fact, the references to X-Men and Fantastic Four should have been left out completely to make the film a straight Spider Man parody. They should have kept the film's original name, "Superhero!". It is obvious that this is a totally different kind of movie than Meet the Spartans.

It is a shame that the film has a 3.7/10 on IMDb. People are just voting badly because it looks like it would suck and they went into the movie hoping it would suck. Well, it doesn't suck.