This poster is funnier than the entire movie.

Disaster Movie currently holds the coveted #1 spot on IMDb.com’s list of the ‘100 Worst Movies of All Time,’ based at the time of this writing on almost 10,000 user votes. Normally, I don’t place a huge amount of stock in things like a user rating, but when 85% of regular people rate a movie 1/10, I tend to think that it represents something real.

Interestingly, at this moment there are 468 people who have rated the movie 10/10. I’m willing to bet that if you were to count the people in the movie’s credits, it would come out to something like that. More than likely, they are scrambling wildly at this very moment to call all of their friends and family and get them to log on in an attempt to drive the movie further down that ‘Worst Ever’ list. Good luck. The badness in this movie is blinding.

I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve seen Scary Movie 1, 2, and 3, Date Movie, Epic Movie, and Meet the Spartans because the only thing I’ve gained from all of that lost time is that the formula used over and over by “writers” and “directors” (in the loosest sense of the terms) Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer is painfully obvious to me by now. Each time these guys come out with another movie, I always find myself wondering what their parents say to their friends at office parties when asked how their kids are doing and what they’re up to.

This random scene from Disaster Movie was meant to be funny. I can't remember why.

Personally, I think my own parents would be happier if I was making porn than making movies like these.

The formula is basically the most uninteresting and witless form of the spoof, which is a major comedy sub-genre. They take the most famous scenes from the most famous movies of the year, reenact them with talentless actors and throw in a lot of sex jokes.

Here, I’ll explain the difference between a good spoof and whatever it is you would call this tripe that these guys come up with. The entire point of these kinds of movies, like The Naked Gun, Mafia!, Wrongfully Accused, and (my personal favorite) Spaceballs, is to squeeze in as many hilarious homages as possible so that the audience can entertain themselves trying to recognize them all, even if the humor is just a little too childish for them.

I can't imagine needing more reason than this never to watch this movie...

Though originality is largely sacrificed, people enjoy seeing characters they know return in other movies (or books). It’s almost like seeing family.

In Disaster Movie, however, the “homages” (again, the loosest sense of the term) and pop culture references are so obvious and so inept that it is difficult to find a proper term for them. “Jokes” just doesn’t seem to fit.

Like so many other “Movies” from this bizarre team, the plot is as unimportant as the plot ever gets in a movie. It is nothing more than a flimsy line along which to string a lot of tasteless skits, but if you’re really interested, it’s about a guy who dodges asteroids while trying to reunite with his girlfriend. Fascinating!

You know, as much as Epic Movie made me want to throw myself out of a moving vehicle, I was actually impressed with some of the straightforward production values. The movie looked good from a purely aesthetic point of view most of the time, and the make-up and the re-created characters from the spoofed movies was actually pretty impressive.

Sorry about the rant, but if I don't let my emotions out about Disaster Movie, this could be me any day now.

Not this time. I may be being too hard on the movie (note: I’m not.), but I think by this point I am just so sick and tired of the trash coming from these guys that I have nothing nice to say. They say if you don’t have anything nice to say you shouldn’t say anything at all, but on the other hand, if I bottled up all of my suffering from watching this movie into a little ball in the back of my head, there’s no telling when I might just snap and fly into a violent rage sometime in the near future, and I just can’t afford any more trouble with the police, you know?

So my advice is to avoid this movie like some kind of infectious disease. It is, however, a great way to be voluntarily tortured through your eyes for an hour and a half, if you’re into that kind of thing…

F

I know what you're thinking, - the Hulk, right? Nope, this is actually just some guy I snapped a picture of on the way out of the theater yesterday. Evidently he was unimpressed as well.