Meet the Spartans (2008)
Directed by Jason Friedberg
The heroic Leonidas, armed with nothing but leather underwear and a cape, leads a ragtag group of thirteen Spartans to defend their homeland against the invading Persians (whose ranks include Ghost Rider, Rocky Balboa, the Transformers, and a hunchbacked Paris Hilton). No one is safe when the Spartans take on the biggest icons in pop culture!
10 connections found
View:
10 films that influenced Meet the Spartans
What critics say influenced Meet the Spartans
The Basics: It's 300.
This spoof of 300 takes aim at the homoerotic vibe exuded by the ancient-Greece epic while anachronistically lampooning Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and a raft of other pop culture notables.
Now, less than a month into 2008, we have Meet the Spartans -- a spoof of a movie, 300, that only opened last March.
Enter Meet the Spartans, a parody of the popular film 300, taking the entire plot and adding into pop culture references worthy of a Saturday Night Live skit.
Meet the Spartans (20th Century Fox), the latest spoof from Scary Movie/Date Movie/Epic Movie auteurs Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, begins with King Leonidas from 300 getting crapped on by a dancing penguin who exclaims, "I'm about to make you my bitch!"
…and The Naked Gun—are characterized by their facility with the tone and detail work of genre films and their genius combination of straight-faced B-movie actors with lowbrow punch lines and sight gags.
While movies like Airplane!, Hot Shots and Naked Gun were hugely popular in their days, their type was not seen as frequently on the big screen.
As Bryan Curtis has pointed out in Slate , the spoofs of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker—the team behind Airplane!
It’s not enough, for example, to have a Sylvester Stallone impersonator show up as Rocky Balboa, they cut to an insert of the name “Rocky” stitched into his boxing shorts to make sure we understand.
Advertisement
As much as Walk Hard owed a lot to Walk the Line, it never lifted scenes and shots directly the way that Spartans does to 300.
In Meet the Spartans, the mere act of referring to Transformers, Happy Feet, Spider-Man 3, Ghost Rider, Rocky Balboa, Stomp the Yard, Shrek, Lindsay Lohan, Kevin Federline, or Deal or No Deal is presumed to be hilarious.
With the success of Scary Movie and Austin Powers, the genre has seen a resurgence that has resulted in an influx of new spoofs this decade.
Besides 300, there are plenty of scenes satirizing other big Hollywood films, such as Casino Royale, Stomp the Yard, and Spider-Man 3. Reality shows and game shows are also parodied.
In Meet the Spartans, the mere act of referring to Transformers, Happy Feet, Spider-Man 3, Ghost Rider, Rocky Balboa, Stomp the Yard, Shrek, Lindsay Lohan, Kevin Federline, or Deal or No Deal is presumed to be hilarious.
When Carmen Electra transforms into evil Spider-Man from Spider-Man 3, the narrator has to tell us, “just like Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 3.” An “Ugly Betty” clone is dutifully identified as such for the pop-culture challenged—as are Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, a tap-dancing penguin from Happy Feet, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan etc.
Advertisement
In Meet the Spartans, the mere act of referring to Transformers, Happy Feet, Spider-Man 3, Ghost Rider, Rocky Balboa, Stomp the Yard, Shrek, Lindsay Lohan, Kevin Federline, or Deal or No Deal is presumed to be hilarious.
For those who care to pay attention to limp comedy fodder that will hold little to no meaning in about a year's time, I'll inform you that Meet the Spartans aims to steal some pennies by referencing films like 300, Shrek, Borat, Ghost Rider and Transformers.
Meet the Spartans (20th Century Fox), the latest spoof from Scary Movie/Date Movie/Epic Movie auteurs Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, begins with King Leonidas from 300 getting crapped on by a dancing penguin who exclaims, "I'm about to make you my bitch!"
Turning the task over to Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer—the auteur team who gave us Date Movie (2006) and Epic Movie (2007)—guaranteed that wouldn’t actually happen.
Or maybe it's because, after sitting through the rancid garbage that are Date Movie and Epic Movie, I simply don't have any more patience for the worthless cinematic exploits of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer .
These guys, who previously authored Date Movie and Epic Movie, are not really filmmakers.