Review of Meet the Spartans (2008) by Observation 9 — 19 May 2011

The rule of thumb with Friedberg and Seltzer is that they get worse as they go. However, I'm not so sure that's the case here. The horrendous Willy Wonka scene in Epic Movie (a film of theirs that I decided against watching from start to finish) offended me more than all of this movie combined. And I actually laughed/smiled at a few jokes. The guy yelling "stop kicking people into the pit death!" at the king after he goes over the top with that was kinda funny. And the scene with the king trying to toughen up his son by pro wrestling him was almost flawless satire.

And now that I've listed just about every positive thing that can be said about this movie, I can get into how pathetic it is. Apparently when they helped make Scary Movie, Friedberg and Seltzer missed all the jokes and just assumed the sight of scenes from other movies and things you'd see in the bathroom were what was funny. I'm not even sure how to review it. At least in most bad movies, someone is trying to accomplish something with a moving plot. Apart from the scenes I mentioned above, all they're really doing is imitating scenes from other movies and making them senseless. (Many of them are from 300 so they can claim it has a plot at all.) Each one is like something thought up by drinking buddies who decided to watch a Family Guy marathon! ("Oh yeah, that part where Cookie Monster went crazy! Hey, what if the penguin from Happy Feet danced in and suddenly went nuts and attacked everyone?" "Yeah, what if Paris Hilton suddenly had this ugly hunchback?" "What if...") I could probably go more in depth, but it's so mindless, I don't even want to try. It's not too offensive to sit through. And as the first of their movies I saw, it didn't drive home what pathetic filmmakers Friedberbg and Seltzer are. (I'm almost positive that I would have given both Epic and Disaster Movie lower scores if I had seen them through and through.) But it's still a weak, unfunny, mindless movie.