“Date Movie,” the latest in a line of increasingly desperate parody movies, is getting a lot of mileage out of billing itself as “from two of the six writers of Scary Movie.’” This will, undoubtedly, lead to a few reviewers (a very few, considering the movie wasn’t screened for the press) making the hilarious assertion that it’s about one-third as funny as “Scary Movie.” Leaving aside the inaccuracy of this statement (it’s really about 1/100 as funny, no mean feat considering what a laughless wonder “Scary Movie” itself was) and because I’d rather give myself a Prince Albert with a shrimp fork than spend more time than absolutely necessary thinking about the film itself, I thought I’d examine a few more numbers associated with “Date Movie:”
Gags stolen from (not inspired by) the far superior “Kingpin:” 2 (at least)
Number of cats humping corpses: 1
Number of times I “went to a happy place:” 17
Number of beers Judah Friedlander owes me for not telling anyone he was in this: 4…oops
Alyson Hannigan’s remaining artistic credibility: <20% Amount of your life you will never recover by watching this: 80 minutes Elapsed time before I walked out: 29 minutes Total laughs (in that period): 0 Amount of my higher brain function remaining: 78% And I feel absolutely no guilt over leaving. Frankly, if 20th Century Fox is going to pull the chickenshit (and increasingly common) move of hiding their films from reviewers, this is about as much effort as they deserve. Life is too short, frankly, to spend it enduring yet another half-assed film that thinks doing nothing but making fun of other movies qualifies as comedy. Everything about “Date Movie,” from the movie parodies to the horrible, horrible sight gags was done better 30 years ago, when the Zuckers were still at their peak. Then again, you people made “The Pink Panther” remake the number one movie in the country last week. That little nugget of information, combined with the inexplicable peals of laughter I heard during my short time in “Date Movie,” leads me to one of two conclusions. 1) – The world is in worse shape than I’d previously thought, if people are so starved for laughs they’ll yuck it up for a chick in a fatsuit dancing to “Milkshake” by Kelis. And not just a snippet; the whole freaking song. 2) – The American moviegoing audience is, by and large, made up of deranged howler monkeys. Between this, “Bloodrayne,” and “The Pink Panther,” we already have three contenders for Worst Movie of 2006, and it’s only February. Have a nice day.
