I added Epic Movie to my Netflix queue knowing full well that it was going to be bad, but I couldn’t resist. It’s from the same people who worked on the Scary Movie series, which was mostly pretty funny. However, the same two guys (Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer) who did this movie also did Date Movie, which is absolutely the worst parody ever made.

These type movie parodies have been around for many years. There was the Airplane, Naked Gun, and Hot Shots series from a while back, and most recently we had the Scary Movie series. These movies make fun of all the recent hits and usually tie multiple plotlines together in a variety of different ways. As the title of this one implies, it pokes fun at all the epic movies released over the past few years. Since I am a fan of such epic movies, I thought this might be a fun parody to watch.

I don’t know about you, but when I think of recent epics, the first thing to come to mind is the Lord of the Rings trilogy. You’d think this would be the main movie made fun of in Epic Movie, but it was not. In fact, LotR is not referenced at all. The main plot in this movie is derived from The Chronicles of Narnia, of which there has only been one movie so far. I had hoped this would be a much-needed LotR parody because there is so much possibility for one. The only LotR parody I’ve seen so far was the homemade low budget Troma movie called Quest for the Egg Salad.

As for what other movies tie into this one, hardly any of them are what you call epic. There are some references to Pirates of the Caribbean, but only in cameo type scenes. The only other movies that more directly inspired the plot were The Da Vinci Code and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There are other references to the X-Men series, Snakes on a Plane, and even the Adam Sandler movie Click. What the hell? Why even call this Epic Movie?

The plot of this movie involves four orphans, and a different movie is used to reference where they came from. At the beginning, each one finds a golden ticket that sends them to visit Willy Wonka. When Wonka starts trying to chase them around his huge chocolate factory, the four people find a wardrobe and enter the land of ‘Gnarnia’. From there, the plot basically follows The Chronicles of Narnia in that one orphan sides with the evil queen while the others want to get rid of her.

When it comes to comedy, dumb can be funny. Just look at almost everything Jim Carrey has done or consider Napoleon Dynamite. Sometimes, though, dumb can just be dumb, and that’s what this movie was – dumb. There are a few funny parts, but they were few and far between, and often the same joke gets used over and over again. Combine that with a lot of nudity and some profanity, and you get an R-rated movie that seems dumb enough only to appeal to the age group not old enough to see it in the first place. I still can’t believe this movie made almost $40 million at the box office.

Epic Movie is currently number 62 on the Bottom 100 list at IMdb.com. That means out of all the movies listed on the site, which is pretty much every movie ever made, this is the 62nd worst one. To put things in perspective, Battlefield Earth is number 64. It has overall rating of 2.3 out of 10, and that’s after more than 23,000 people rated it. If that’s not a majority opinion, I don’t know what is. To make matters worse, a sequel called Meet the Spartans is due out next year.


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age