1 In 5 People Think This Is The Worst Spoof Movie Ever Made
It's hard to know exactly who to blame. Maybe it's the Zucker Brothers' fault for making it look so easy with Airplane! Maybe we're all to blame for liking Airplane! so much. Or maybe, just maybe, it all comes down to the way that Scary Movie made 1,500% of its budget back at the box office. The world may never know.
Whatever the case, spoof movies became a staple of the traditional late-January, early-February Hollywood trash day around the turn of the 21st century, eventually shifting from actual theatrical offerings to direct-to-Redbox and VOD exclusives. The jokes, as a rule, were buried between two inch-thick layers of quotation marks, seemingly the result of a drunken all-nighter spent shooting pop-culture references out of a T-shirt cannon at a copy of Celtx. Few were palatable. Fewer still were good. One was even Meet the Spartans, which boasts a gentleman's 2% on Rotten Tomatoes.
It's a competitive field at the bottom, but as The Highlander notes, there can be only one. In pursuit of answers, Looper put out a survey asking which spoof movie was the most unforgivable, and 650 respondents from across the U.S. spoke their truth. That truth, as it turns out, was a mouthful.
Shriek and the subtle art of poop jokes
Shriek if You Know What I Did Last Night Friday the 13th was an early entry in the 21st century spoof movie fad, and certainly not the best-known addition to the horror parody subgenre. Released the same year as Scary Movie, it took the direct-to-video path, and with good reason. It's a special kind of agonizing, the kind where one character is named "Screws Frombehind," illustrating a precise 50% comprehension of Austin Powers-level humor on the part of the writers. Also, Coolio gets top billing, a feat which not even Batman and Robin pulled off.
A full 20% of respondents listed Shriek if You Know What I Did Last Night Friday the 13th as the weakest spoof movie in recent memory. It was a tight race, though. The stinker was locked in a virtual tie with Vampires Suck and, in an unexpected twist, Scream 3. Meet the Spartans, the aforementioned cinematic betrayal of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, took a gentleman's fourth place with 12% of the vote, while 2008's Disaster Movie landed a fifth-place finish with a hair shy of 9%.
Meanwhile, in the write-in category, six people replied with some variation on the words "all of them are terrible," proving that there may be hope for humanity after all.