Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer

Jason Freidberg:

Aaron Seltzer:

Soundtracks? We didn't realize! Still, "Raw Dawg" sounds hilarious.

• Disaster Movie - Is a synopsis really necessary? If you feel like subjecting yourself to Manchurian Candidate levels of torture, see this movie. This movie is a poorly strung together collection of sketches where the premise of each one is that you have probably seen something like this on MTV during the last year.

The Girl on the left is a reference to Juno, the well known disaster flick

• Meet the Spartans - This film plays up on the idea that the film 300 had homoerotic overtones. It was awarded Best Original Screenplay for this astonishingly groundbreaking idea.

This is a joke that was done better in Men In Tights. Read that again.

• Epic Movie - The film makers noticed that there had been a lot of films that were quite long prior to making this. They decided to make a movie whereby scenes from these blockbusting films were re-enacted using down-on-their-luck actors. Parody was implied, though never delivered.

It's funny because she's naked.

• Scary Movie 4 - We'll give this movie the opening scene and that's it. The rest is boring.

The Man is the audience. The machine is the film.

• Date Movie - The basic premise behind this movie is that fat people are inherently funny. They obviously hadn't seen The Klumps. It is unfortunate (though not suprising) then that the one joke this film had going for it is obliterated when the protagonist loses her all her hilarous fat.

Ha ha ha. Hahaha! Hahahahahahahahahah! HA HA HA HA HA. THIS IS FUNNY. THIS IS FUNNY.

• Scary Movie 1, 2 & 3 - First one was OK. Second one was funnyish if you were drunk. The third one was just sad.
• Spy Hard - This film is actually not too bad for the most part, Leslie Neilsen managing to get the most out of an ugly script. Still, Blood Simple was the Coen brother's debut, so as a breakout film, Spy Hard sucks drain.

Yep, they started way back with Spy Hard when they resurrected the sleeping corpse of Leslie Neilsen and began smearing his good name with their god-awful writing.

Not content with this, they have also sullied the good name of Jim Abrahams and John Zucker by roping them in on their Scary Movie projects. Clearly, they want to follow in their footsteps, but we ask you reader, is the film Epic Movie really a worthy successor to Hot Shots? Airplane? Even the Kentucky Fried Movie is better than Date Movie. Yes, even The Kentucky Fried Movie, and that film has dated so bad it's got several restraining orders against it.

There is a certain danger here that the anger and pain that Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer has caused the world will spill over into the fine literature and editorial content that we pride ourselves on here at Cracked. In order to prevent yet another comedic staple becoming infected with this angry virus therefore, selected reviews from ImDb will be more than sufficient in order to express our anguish.

They have been told, but couldn't be heard above the noise of blubbing and honking

We sort of know what you mean

What he's describing actually is what the film makers are trying to achieve. They won't stop

The film has gotta be bad when you... wait, what does his headline mean?

Because Cracked prides itself on making objective, fact based humour however, in the interests of fairness here is a 5 star review of Date Movie found on Amazon. It says everything that needs to be said.

One of the main criticisms of Friedberg & Seltzer's 'comedies' is the misuse of the concept of parody. Wikipedia, a trustworhty source in this case gives a liberally broad definition of parody thus:

"...work created to mock, comment on, or poke fun at an original work, its subject, or author, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation."

What is truly incredible about the Friedberg Seltzer films is that they manage to avoid doing any of the activities described above. This wouldn't be so bad if their films also included regular jokes, consisting of set ups, misdirection and punch lines. But they don't.

No, what these two douchebags do, as a replacement for the massive gaping hole that is their collective creative faculties is simply copy films that they may or may not have seen.

This in itself is an attempt at imitating the great parodies of the past, films like Hot Shots, Airplane, High Anxiety and Naked Gun. These films famously all mimicked the films they were sending up, while managing to "mock, comment on, or poke fun" at them, using "humerous, satiric or ironic imitation". As if intentionally missing a joke, Friedberg & Seltzer will simply offer a sequence of routines that will either merely reference a film or aspect of pop culture or, at best do their own version of it. It is their sincere belief that simply reminding an audience of something they already know, is in itself sufficient to be called comedy. Imagine Dane Cook's stand-up routine read by a computerised voice simulator. That would nearly be as bad as these guy's movies.