Airplane! ushered in a golden age of movie spoofs, but formulaic modern examples threaten to destroy the genre, says Alex Godfrey Vampires Suck, a parody of the Twilight saga, opened in America this summer to predictably diabolical reviews. Predictably to a) anyone who saw the trailer, seemingly a two-minute exercise in whatever the opposite of comedy is, and to b), anyone who's seen any prior work by the co-writers/directors Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg. These two are the poster boys for a recent spate of spoof movies which, in a very short space of time, are being held responsible for the perceived downfall of the entire genre (despite, to critics' dismay, their astonishingly healthy profits).
It's something of a surprise that this latest one has a title that might have taken more than half a second to come up with - usually these things have titles generic enough to let the culturally lobotomised teenagers who watch them know immediately what they'll be watching. If you've seen Disaster Movie, Date Movie or Superhero Movie, you know what you're in for. Although parodies are almost as old as cinema, taking in Buster Keaton, Abbott and Costello and Mel Brooks, the spoof genre as we know it came into its own with the release of Airplane! in 1980. Written and directed by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker (aka ZAZ), Airplane!, now 30 years old, kick-started the whole movement. The ZAZ team came up with the idea after stumbling across the airplane disaster movie Zero Hour (1957), used it as a jumping-off point to parody the entire genre, and struck gold by stealing non-comedic actors (Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Peter Graves) from that genre and getting them to deadpan lines such as "I am serious... and don't call me Shirley." Police Squad, a classic but short-lived TV series in the same vein, followed, in turn leading to the Naked Gun trilogy, making a comedy superstar of Nielsen, who never looked back.
Maybe he should have done. Despite some inventive spoofs in the late 1990s such as Galaxy Quest and Austin Powers, which brought fresh air to the genre, the turn of the millennium gave birth to an ugly new breed. Scary Movie was produced by the Weinstein brothers, directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans, and written by a whole host of people, including two more Wayans brothers... and Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg. Scary Movie and its first sequel, parodies of Wes Craven's Scream (somewhat redundant, as Scream was, in some ways, a sideways parody of Craven's own slasher films), lacked the wit, invention and charm of Airplane! and TheNaked Gun, and took cheap pot-shots at the big films of the day, including The Blair Witch Project, The Matrix, and The Usual Suspects. They also made very healthy profits - the first one cost $19m (Dh70m) and grossed $277m. Naturally, Hollywood went nuts.
What happened next was less predictable, and a little disheartening to Airplane! fans. The Wayans brothers jumped ship, and the Weinsteins drafted in none other than Airplane!'s David Zucker to spearhead Scary Movie 3. Despite claiming that he wasn't interested at first, Zucker says Bob Weinstein's idea to spoof The Ring and Signs appealed to him, and by the time the film was finished it contained references to anything and everything that was going on in American pop culture, from 8 Mile to American Idol.
Zucker brought along Nielsen, whose mere presence provides a connection to the golden era, and almost gives the film some weight. But the material gets the better of him. Scary Movie 4 followed suit, taking on The Grudge, War of the Worlds, TheVillage, and even Tom Cruise's sofa-jumping Oprah appearance. What Zucker didn't know was that this new approach would pave the way for the oncoming slew of films that would threaten to destroy the whole genre. Friedberg and Seltzer's directorial debut was 2006's Date Movie, a cretinous romcom parody that set their formula in stone, and Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Meet the Spartans and Vampires Suck quickly followed - five releases in as many years. Their films feature little in the way of plot, and are more a compendium of loosely stitched together pop-culture references - even Meet the Spartans, a period film that spoofs 300, manages to shoehorn in Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and The Apprentice. Whereas Airplane!'s comedy was timeless, these new spoofs are made for the moment, the risk of being outdated within months of little concern. Critics have called Friedberg and Seltzer signifiers of the decline of western civilisation, but it makes little difference, with each film recouping almost its entire budget on opening weekend alone.
Explaining the success of his own spoofs a few years ago, Mel Brooks cited "the hatred that the rednecks have for the black sheriff" as the "engine" that ran Blazing Saddles. "That's the explosion behind it," he said. "You can't just do spoofs, you've got to have a point of view." Superhero Movie, out in 2008, was another poor addition to the genre, and although it might not have had much of a point of view, it at least attempted to stand on its own feet. Produced by David Zucker, it was written and directed by Scary Movie 3 and 4's co-writer Craig Mazin. Lighter on the pop-culture references (although not substantially so), it was originally planned to be more of a conventional comedy than an out-and-out spoof, with its own plot and characters.
Mazin says he and Zucker "got about halfway there" before the studio process got the better of them. "Over time there was some pressure," he said, "and I understand this because spoof has evolved somewhat from the days of Airplane! and not evolved like it's gotten better." The powers that be insist "on loading these movies with pop-culture references," he said. "That was something we always struggled with."
Still, all hope is not lost. There are people working independently of the new guard and producing good work. Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan's fantastic Walk Hard lampooned the whole rock biopic genre - not just Walk the Line - and, echoing Brooks's school of thought, Apatow said what he was really getting at was "movies that feel like they want Oscars". This month sees the US release of Black Dynamite, a lovingly crafted take on blaxploitation films, as much a homage as it is a parody. While not nearly as funny as the likes of Airplane! and The Naked Gun, it displays a real affection for the films it spoofs, as well as impressive attention to detail.
The filmmakers have said they want viewers to almost think they're watching a real blaxploitation movie, the only difference being, according to the co-creator/lead actor Michael Jai White, is that it's "10 per cent a little too extreme". Compared with most of the spoofs being churned out today, Black Dynamite's craftsmanship is a revolution.