Spandex Spoofery

Puck everlasting: Drake Bell and Sara Paxton kid a certain upside-down smooch in Superhero Movie.

The comic-book movie genre, with all its fanboy super-seriousness, has been so ripe for parody that it’s a wonder Superhero Movie (MGM/Dimension-Weinstein; 86 minutes; PG-13; 2008) didn’t come out much earlier. This feature-length kidding of the Spider-Man
flicks concerns the plight of nerdy Rick Riker (Nickelodeon tween star
and budding singer Drake Bell), who gets bitten by a mutated bug at a
pharmaceutical lab and ends up with strange powers that transform him
into the costumed crimestopper Dragonfly. 

Meanwhile, the super-villain spot gets
filled in by Lou Landers (veteran scene-chewer Christopher McDonald), a
terminally ill megalomaniac (“It’s just my healthy-cough blood!” he
chirps when Rick asks about his crimson-stained hanky) who subjects
himself to a potentially life-saving scientific experiment conducted by
the dotty Dr. Strom (Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Brent
Spiner). The experiment goes awry, naturally, yet gives Landers the
ability to suck out the life force of other humans in exchange for
extending his mortality by one day per body, as Landers takes on the
bad-guy alias Hourglass.

Without getting into the history lesson
about the movie-spoof genre, suffice it to say the comic clones were a
lot funnier when Mel Brooks or the ZAZ team (Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams
and David Zucker) were behind the camera. The humor DNA for such
rambunctious riffs has been diluted by lackluster efforts such as Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans, both churned out by the mostly witless writer-director tandem of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. Still, Superhero Movie has David Zucker listed as a co-producer, and it’s an encouraging sign that one of the creative minds behind Airplane! and The Naked Gun, as well as the director who saved the Scary Movie franchise after the Wayans brothers left the series, won’t let this parody degenerate to the Friedberg-Seltzer level. 

As expected, the usual hit-and-miss ratio applies to Superhero Movie, yet there’s also a go-for-the-gusto consistency to the gags. At least writer-director Craig Mazin (Scary Movie 4)
is always in there pitching, and he often connects. Zucker’s
involvement also cues in a more impressive cast of second bananas,
starting with 82-year-old ham Leslie Nielsen as Rick’s uncle. He
lectures the teen, still woozy from his bug bite, on the facts of life:
“You’ll bleed from your vagina. . . oops, wrong book!” Happy Days’
matriarch Marion Ross, a mere 79, offers a flatulence-ridden sendup of
Aunt May, while Jeffrey Tambor, Robert Hays, Dan Castellaneta (Homer
Simpson) and Charlene Tilton check in with brief appearances. Even the
name Lou Landers pays homage to prolific movie and TV director Lew
Landers, still best known for the Bela Lugosi-Boris Karloff fright
flick The Raven (1935).

Mazin instructs his cast to play it with tongue-in-cheek straightness, with Bell a sympathetic nimrod and Sara Paxton (Aquamarine)
as Jill Johnson, the appealingly clueless blonde bombshell/gal next
door who projects wholesome innocence even when wearing a dental-floss
thong. Superhero Movie also takes sideline potshots at other
movie adaptations of Marvel Comics heroes, with Tracy Morgan as the
X-Men’s wheelchair-bound psychic Professor Xavier and Pamela Anderson
stuffed into a too-tight costume for one scene as the Fantastic Four’s
Invisible Girl. And if you want to see actor Jordan Rubin as “the guy
who wipes Wolverine’s ass” (how’s that for a resume-building credit?),
stick around during the final credit crawl for a slew of outtakes and
extended scenes. 

Sure, there are timely sniggers aimed at
iPhones, Myspace and Craig’s List, yet Mazin is more adept at tweaking
comic-flick cliches such as Superhero’s opening credits
sequence in which the camera lovingly caresses Spandex muscles with a
homoerotic urgency (note that Dragonfly’s antennae are at attention),
and how caped crusaders must somehow be perched atop a skyscraper
gargoyle to overlook their metropolis. Mazin’s script also has its fair
share of non sequiturs (“Crazy is talking to cats. . . dating Paula Abdul. . . ”) and goofball groaners like this exchange when Landers visits the Riker house for Thanksgiving dinner:

Landers: “I never married.”

Jill (holding a fruitcake): “Fruitcake?”

Landers: “No, just didn’t meet the right girl?”

There are some shameless gut-busters,
too, depending on how much you enjoy tasteless, exploitive slapstick.
At one point Dr. Stephen Hawking (as impersonated by Robert Joy) gets
yanked from his wheelchair and hurtles into a beehive, as his voice-box
delivers his reaction in a HAL computer-type monotone: “Ow. Ow. Ow.”
And when poor Rick gets some pheromones dumped on him at the lab, which
arouses a gaggle of test animals primed for shagging, a snail remarks
via an on-screen subtitle, “Hold him down, boys. I’m on my way!” 

Superhero Movie will go to
extreme lengths to grab its guffaws, including Miles Fisher’s dead-on
replication of a grinning Tom Cruise, Freddie Pierce as a Tony
Bennett-ish crooner who belts out “Douche Bag” and even a climax at an
international peace conference in which the pope, the Dalai Lama and
Nelson Mandela engage in fisticuffs. Yet despite Superhero Movie’s
generic title, producer Zucker, actor Nielsen and the rest of the
company prove that it’s always best to stick with brand names.