I guess this is the third in this line ([Genre] Movie) that I’ve seen; I saw Date Movie last December and Not Another Teen Movie in the last couple of years (but before movie reports on the blog were a thing). I picked this DVD up this spring and clearly could not wait to get into it. Or, actually, wanted something very, very light to watch one evening.
So: Like the others of its ilk, it piles together elements from other films to parody them. In this film, four orphans (whether or not their parents are still alive) win golden tickets to go to a candy maker’s palace. The candy maker proves to be very creepy, so one of them (and then another, and then all of them eventually) try to hide in a wardrobe which leads them to the land of Gnarnia. The first, a girl, meets a satyr who takes him to his crib (cue the MTV or whatever style intro to where he lives), but he turns her out as the ruler of the land (the White Bitch, played by Jennifer Coolidge) knows that she will be deposed by four humans, so humans are to be turned over to her at once. The second, played by Kal Penn, is found by the White Bitch, whom he calls Stifler’s Mom (from the American Pie movies, get it?), and she offers him sexual favors or the promise therein to betray his friends. But they team up along with Captain Jack Swallow, the Brotherhood of Mutants (from the X-Men movies), and a bunch of other misfits to aid Aslo, a randy lion-man, to free Gnarnia.
So it throws a lot of things in there, mostly to say, did you see what we did here? and so you can feel a little smart when you recognize what they’ve jammed in there, but that’s about the depth of the humor. It’s not particularly raunchy, although there is a little sexual innuendo (the film is PG-13, not R).
Still, I don’t know. I mean, when I was writing parody in high school, I had this series of short stories where a character encountered all sorts of characters from other source material, and I thought it was a hoot. But my sense of humor has changed, I suppose, to something more sophisticated than see what I crammed in here?. Well, maybe it’s not necessarily more sophisticated, but different all the same.
Which is not to say that I won’t buy others in this line when I can get them for a buck or fifty cents. But I’m unlikely to watch them repeatedly like Airplane!, Hot Shots!, or National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I. Are those movies that substantially different, or is it that I watched them for the first time at different stages of my life? I dunno.
