In Continuum.

In recent years, there seem to have been a sudden increase in the amount of outright satire films, the kind that does not try to remain subtle at all. Mars Attack was critically panned simply because the satirical elements went completely overboard. Even directors like Tim Burton can make a mistake or two when trying to poke fun at science fiction movies from the forties and the fifties, and the end result is probably going to turn out like the epic mess that Mars Attack is. It can come to a point when your humor borders on stupidity, when your exaggeration becomes just a tad bit too unbelievable. It is perfectly normal to ask for a little suspension in our beliefs when we watch movies in the theaters, and it is perfectly alright if we are going to believe that aliens are going to invade earth in little cheesy saucers that look more like cup coasters. But it is another story altogether when you expect us to believe that aliens can be defeated by playing James Brown over the speakers, or that a human head can be transplanted onto a dog's body. It doesn't work, when your joke goes over the edge. 

So, that's Mars Attack in a nutshell, an epic mess that is perhaps blacklisted in Tim Burton's own books. There are, however, success stories in the business that we shouldn't overlook. There's always This Is Spinal Tap, the cult favorite directed by Rob Reiner that not only created a devoted group of fans, but also an entire genre called "mockumentary" for itself. There's also Borat, the wildly hilarious satirical film that actually made it to the Oscars for Best Original Screenplay. There is a market for satire films, and it is a genre that certainly has a lot of potential. It is tricky, however, and not a lot of directors would like to attempt such a genre because it is just so difficult to handle. It is easy to go off course, easy to mess up, and very hard to please. To enjoy satirical films would require the audience to have a certain brand of humor that is in line with the director's, and we all know how radically different our sense of humor can be. The only way to make the mass audience enjoy the same brand of humor in a satire film, they figured, was to include all sorts of slapstick jokes that can possibly think of. This led to the birth of Scary Movie, the film that started the downward spiral in all satirical movies in the history of films. 

Scary Movie was actually a decent movie, taking out various aspects of horror films and then poking fun at them to no end. I don't remember much about the film, but I do remember a lot of gruesome scenes that turned out to be pretty funny in the end, not to mention the amount of nudity and sex throughout the film. That's what you usually get anyway, a random hot girl wanders into an empty house yelling "Is anybody there?" when she really should be putting on some clothes back home. And then she walks right into the trap of the psychotic killer that slashes her into a dozen pieces and then buries her in the walls of the house, like a trophy of sorts. That's the template of a lot of horror movies out there, and Scary Movie took those and gave it a comedic twist. It was fresh, and everybody loved Scary Movie. It was the movie that everybody wanted to watch at gatherings, simply because it was the film that drew the most laughs and had the most universal humor. So the producers and the directors thought to themselves one day: well, this formula obviously worked, why don't we make more movies like that! 

Scary Movie now has four movies in total, with a possible fifth in the making the last I heard. The thing about this franchise of movies is that as long as there are horror movies being made, there will be new ideas for subsequent sequels. The problem, however, is that these jokes are only funny after so many times of repetition. When you have a movie based almost completely on slapstick jokes, the audience is going to get tired after sometime because, well, it's really not that funny to see a man walk into a door a couple of times throughout the movie. With the same formula, the directors took it and filmed three more sequels that really didn't work out very well at all. The jokes became, not only stale, but crude and vulgar at some point in time. While the films did draw some laughter from me when I first saw them, I realized that it wasn't the kind of humor that I'd revisit over and over again. I wonder how many people still find it funny to see aliens pissing out of the tips of their fingers, or how the U.S. president actually shares the same genetic oddity? It's ridiculous even in the context of a comedy, and that is why the fifth film has been halted in production. 

But, it's not like it has stopped the filmmakers from creating more of these cinematic disasters in the theaters. We've seen our fair share of their work in the cinemas, and people have paid good money to watch them. Date Movie, Epic Movie, Superhero Movie, Meet the Spartans, all those are just sorry excuses to make satire films when they are really just money making schemes. These movies are banking on people falling down, people tripping over stuff, people with giant butts, and random movie characters thrown into a plot that doesn't make any sense at all. It is shameful to know that people in fifty years are going to be watching these movies and then associating them with moviegoers such as myself. I am sure our mentalities are going to be studied in the future, perhaps even a module in universities across the world in regards to why people like to watch films such as the above mentioned. People are buying tickets to watch these movies, and there are certainly a lot of people enjoying them. It is a mystery that I cannot solve no matter how many times I intend to question myself. More than those movies, there has been plans to make yet another one of these horrible addition to the world of cinema as of late - Disaster Movie.

They intend to take all the disaster movies ever filmed and make yet another Epic Movie-like film out of it. This madness needs to be stopped, because this is not cinema anymore. Some people might applaud them for their never-give-in spirit, but this seriously has to stop. I am sure there is a correlation between the decrease of IQ scores and the number of times somebody watches a film like that. Your film sucks when your viewers find it a waste of time even to download the film illegally. That is the common sentiment amongst my friends who had the unfortunate experience of watching Meet the Spartans. Films like that are insults to our intelligence, and they have the least amount of effort being placed into the production process. You don't see an ounce of heart, an ounce of mind, or an ounce of anything being put into the films at all. Studios should start to recognize that films are going to be around for a very long time in the future, no matter how bad they are. People in the future are going to study us, and look out for what we watched in the past. If it comes down to films like Meet the Spartans against anything by Uwe Boll, I'd rather go for the latter. Bad movies are certainly better than movies that does not respect the audience at all. 

So, as I said, Disaster Movie is in fact, going to be filmed and released. Like before, people are still going to watch the movie, still going to pay their money for the tickets, still going to buy them on DVDs. It's a shame, but that's how it works. Some people just have a very low threshold when it comes to comedy, anything works for them to be honest. The problem with these people, however, is that most of them do not have a high archway for comedies with quality either. Their narrow-mindedness puts these films on the pedestal and worship them, while they ignore other true comedic geniuses out there completely. I think it is OK if you enjoy films like that, just as long as you understand and recognize that there are better films out there and it is alright to watching brainless humor every once in a while. I personally enjoy online videos that involve people pulling pranks on one another too, it's a guilty pleasure of mine. But know what you are watching, and know what you aren't watching. That's really what we need to know as smart audiences, and not take everything in passively just because you are too lazy to filter what you watch. And as for Disaster Movie, at least it has got one thing going for it - it has a very fitting title, and I am sure it is going to turn out to be a disaster of a movie.