Craig Mazin
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And now – in whatever we’re calling this decade – we come to the Scary Movie series, plus the abominable trio of spoofs from Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg: Date Movie, Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans.
Then came Scary Movie and the cinematic plague of Epic/Date Movies.
THE ARCTIC CIRCLE—In an unprecedented move, the Justice League of America and the Legion of Doom joined forces today to denounce the new film Superhero Movie, a feature-length spoof of comic-book movies written and directed by Craig Mazin and produced by Dimension Films, the studio behind the Scary Movie franchise.
Mazin, who also had a hand in writing the last two “Scary Movie” pictures, is man with a plan, but absent the slightest molecule of cleverness.
(And for good reason: The "Scary Movie" franchise, for example, has grossed close to a billion dollars worldwide.) "Superhero Movie," which opened yesterday without being screened for critics (how shocking!), may not have Peter Graves, but it does have his erstwhile "Airplane!"
Big question: Can this send-up of “Spider-Man” and other comic book adaptations, delivered by guys who worked on the “Naked Gun” and “Scary Movie” films, rise above the astonishing worthlessness of “Meet the Spartans” and “Date Movie”?
When the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker filmmaking team made Airplane!
It's actually a welcome throwback to the Airplane!
Writer-director Craig Mazin’s spoof of the Spider-Man and X-Men movies is marginally less wretched than those hopeless compost heaps cranked out by his erstwhile colleagues Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg (Date Movie, Epic Movie, etc.)—thanks mainly to a stronger cast peppered with seasoned pros (Christopher McDonald, Brent Spiner, Leslie Nielsen, Marion Ross, Keith David, Jeffrey Tambor)—and maybe also thanks to the presence of David Zucker (of the original Airplane!)
It's sure as hell no Airplane!
Mazin gets help from old pals Leslie Nielsen , who plays Rick's kindly uncle Albert, and David Zucker, who directed the last two Scary Movies, along with Airplane!
The model here could be Craig Mazin's The Specials, in which we got to see a superhero team on the days they weren't saving the world, but rather arguing amongst each other.
They discover that only Captain Lucien (Vincent Cassel, “The Specials”) has remained with the pods.
The good news is that the same career that saw him entrusted with the “Guardians” films and the screenplays to the first two “Scooby-Doo” movies also saw him cutting his teeth working for the cheerfully sleazy Troma Films and then going on to work on such dark superhero satires as “The Specials” (2000) and “Super” (2010), in which the hero’s “superpower” was the ability to beat the heads of the bad guys in with a hammer.
The Specials, Super, and Guardians of the Galaxy broke new ground; while The Suicide Squad plays like a greatest hits of all three.
It seems like most of his thoughts on the foibles and limitations of the superhero genre were expended before it went supernova with the MCU, back when he was making satirical comedies like The Specials and Super (provocative, if not especially good).
Inspiring minimal confidence is the director of "Big Momma's House" and "Home Alone 3", Raja Gosnell, and James Gunn, the writer behind a couple of Troma films and "The Specials".
As written by screenwriter James Gunn ("The Specials") and directed by Raja Gosnell ("Big Momma's House," "Never Been Kissed"), the film does succeed - much like "The Flintstones" - in capturing the series look as well as in creating the kid-friendly funhouse aura.