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Disaster Movie
Lionsgate Home Entertainment // Unrated // January 6, 2009
List Price: $29.95 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
I could pretty much stop the review right there, and...oh, if you only knew how desperately I want to.
Disaster Movie is
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So, yeah. It's yet another Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg sarcastic-fingerquotes "comedy", and if you haven't mashed the 'Back' button on your web browser already, the smart money says you know how it goes by now: fast forward through a bunch of trailers of overpriced movies coming out over the next few months, doll up a couple of low-rent actors as those big-budget movie stars, and then whack 'em over the head with a frying pan or something. I mean, one of the very first gags in the movie has Flava Flav leaping out of our hero's bed. Oh, there isn't a punchline or anything: it's just "look! It's Flava Flav!" In case the viking hat and clock-on-a-chain aren't enough to clue you in who he's supposed to be, though, he helpfully shouts, "Flava Flav! Yeah, booooooooy! I'm Flava Flav! Flava of Love. I'm Flava Flav!" There's a joke about sucking his clock or something in there too, but...whatever. Disaster Movie chucks out those sorts of references to dozens and dozens of different TV shows and movies, and it helpfully overexplains every last one of 'em.
Hairy Girls Gone Wild! Get it? It's like Girls Gone Wild, only this girl's hairy! Hey, remember that part in Juno where she's talking on that hamburger phone? There's a part like that in Disaster Movie too, only there isn't a...y'know, joke or anything. It's nothing but a shot of Juno talking on a hamburger phone, just like in that other movie! Wait, wait, wait. That girl's white, but she just said "off the chiz-ain"! Now that girl from Mad TV said she has a yeast infection and just pulled a big roll of sourdough out of her dress! Oh no!!! Indiana Jones is kind of a tall white guy in those other DVDs or whatever, but in Disaster Movie, he's, like, three foot tall and black, and he keeps spouting off the names of a bunch of different V.D.s over and over again! What else do you have in here? Iron Man steps into frame and bellows "I am Iron Man!" before being smashed into a tin can by a flying cow. There's even a Michael Jackson joke in here. Why not dust off the Dancing Itos while you're at it?
Oh, and when Seltzer and Friedberg run out of movie trailers to quote, they'll throw in some really, really long and pointless scenes to pad the flick out to its contractually mandated minimum runtime. One particularly painful bit has pretty much every surviving character from Disaster Movie breakdancing one by one. A riff on Alvin and the Chipmunks is bloated with three songs before they go rabid and gnaw on our heroes' balls for what sure as hell feels like six minutes straight.
Drive-in totals!
- Poop jokes: Four
- Jokes where the only punchline is someone saying "shit", "fuck", or "bitch": If you count the "I'm Fucking Matt Damon" ripoff, fifty-eight. Otherwise...? Seven
- Jokes where the only punchline is a character from a movie trailer or whatever getting whacked over the head or crushed: Seven
- Ow, my balls!: Four
- Gags with actors being drenched in gallons of Juno's bodily fluids: Two
- That overused sound of a record skipping to punctuate a really stupid joke: One
- Look! It's a
midgetlittle person, therefore I should probably laugh even though they're not fucking doing anything: Two - Hey, that guy's naked!: Three
It kinda goes without saying there's not a single laugh buried anywhere in here. Disaster Movie's been standing strong for months now as the lowest rated of the more than half million flicks on the Internet Movie Database, and...yeah. I mean, I paid to see Ghost Dad theatrically, there's a Killer Tomatoes shrine about twenty feet from where I'm sitting right now, and...c'mon, you've seen what I usually review. When I say that Disaster Movie might be the single worst flick I've ever subjected myself to, I really do mean it. Skip It.
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| Yeah, it's unrated, but these are all the titties you're gonna get here. |
Disaster Movie looks okay, I guess, in high-def. Stacked next to a DVD, it's better defined, more detailed...that whole routine...but you probably shouldn't bank on much visual polish for a flick that was churned out from script to screen in five months flat. The photography is a bit softer than usual and has kind of a gritty, rough-hewn look to it. Colors tend to be pretty lifeless, leaning most of the time towards the sorts of dull pastels you'll see piled into the cut-out bin at T.J. Maxx. Meh.
Rambling technical specs...? 1.78:1. AVC encoded. Dual-layer Blu-ray disc.
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| Amy Winehouse is gross!!!!!!!!!!!!! |
It's a Lionsgate flick, so yeah: another 24-bit, 7.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track. If you're just staring slackjawed at bitrate meters or whatever, Disaster Movie might sound pretty impressive, but if you're actually listening to it...? Not so much. The sound design's actually pretty solid: the surrounds are hypercaffeinated, there are lotsa smooth pans from channel to channel, and the...well, disasters keep the subwoofer rattling. There's a hell of a low-end, yeah, but everything else in the mix sounds unusually flat and dull. That sense of distinctness and clarity I'm used to hear in lossless soundtracks is chucked out the driver's side window, and although you could kinda point to this as a plus, Disaster Movie's dialogue is dialed down pretty low. 'Smediocre.
Subtitles are the only other audio options this time around, piling on streams in English (traditional and SDH) and Spanish.
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The good news, I guess...? All the extras are in high definition. The bad...? They're -- astonishingly! -- kind of a waste of time straight across the board.
- BonusView: This
picture-in-picture commentary crams together writers/directors/harbingers-of-the-end-of-days Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, associate producer Kenny Yates, and actors Matt Lanter, Vanessa Minnillo, G-Thang, and -- for, like, a minute and a half -- Kim Kardashian. It's a pretty low-rent video commentary, stuck with a really tiny PiP window and cameras that skip straight past half the folks on the track. There's really not that much to it. Friedberg, Seltzer, and Yates clam up, tossing out a quick quip about Disaster Movie tanking at the office but not bothering with a whole hell of a lot more than that. The rest is really just the wide-eyed cast gushing about how unrelentingly funny and wonderful Disaster Movie is. G-Thang keeps milking the "hey, where the white women at?" thing for pretty much an hour and a half straight, there's a jab at Kim Kardashian who didn't get around to reading the entire script until well into shooting, Minnillo mentions that you can go frame-by-frame and see fake-Beowulf's naked ass start to bleed, and there's a thing about Matt Lanter refusing to eat Chik-Fil-A chicken biscuits so he'd be all chiseled for the 10,000 B.C. riff. I mean, they seem to be having a good time with it, but then again, they're drinking, so maybe that's the trick...
Sigh.
- A Big Stack of Shitty Featurettes (37 min.; HD): Okay, that's not how they're labeled on the menu, but...whatever. "Straight from the Ladies" (4 min.) has a couple of the actresses giddy about what an amazing time they're having, and they do it pretty much in character. "This Is How We Do It" is, um, nine more minutes of the cast gabbing about how much fun they had shooting this fist-sized nugget of shit, only this time you get pop-up facts. "G-Thang's Tour" (10 min.) is a guided tour of the set and intros to the rest of the cast, but there ain't no tour like a G-Thang tour, baby! Get ready for a really hysterical bit where schlubs from the crew keep swiping bags of chips from G-Thang's mini-wicker basket at craft services. He keeps saying they're his chips, but these guys keep coming by and taking them anyway!!!!!!!!!! Go ahead and take a sec to catch your breath 'cause someone accidentally left G-Thang's mic pack lit up for "Sitting Down with a Standup" (8 min.). Thrill to timely Tae-Bo jokes (maybe Seltzer and Friedberg could hire him on as a co-writer if someone ponies up for another Movie movie), fake machine gun sounds, doesn't-technically-qualify-as-jokes about gas being $700 a gallon, and leching over the jiggly broads in the cast. What's left? "Girl Fight" just spends a couple more minutes leering at Carmen Electra and Kim Kardashian as they rassle, and "Who's Spoofing Who?" (4 min.) touches on how celebs (including the not-really flavor like Kimmy K.) react to being skewered on Mad TV and SNL.
- Singalongs (8 min.; HD): Follow the bouncing ball! You can sing along with the High School Musical number (inventively titled "High School Musical") and the "I'm Fucking Matt Damon" knockoff (which, um, is also called "I'm Fucking Matt Damon")...or, y'know, you can choose life. Vanessa Minnillo and Matt Lanter introduce both of 'em.
- Molog (probably HD): The idea's that you can carve apart chunks of Disaster Movie, mark 'em up, and share them online. The app takes forever to download, though, and you can't even look at what other people have banged out without registering.
- Trailers (11 min.; HD): Lotsa plugs for other Lionsgate stuff.
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I mean...I feel like I need to put this in perspective or something. Click here and skim through that list of some of my other reviews for a sec. If it's been up for eight Razzies, I've probably seen it. Ditto if it's on the IMDb's bottom 100 or if it's tunneling under the 10% mark on Rotten Tomatoes. I've subjected myself over and over again to the most unwatchable shit ever dumped onto a film canister, and I really do mean it when I say that Disaster Movie might get the nod as the single worst flick I've ever suffered through. No. Just...no. Skip It.
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