Lazy comedies are embarrassing, but it's nothing compared to one that seems like it's legitimately trying to be funny with somehow the most awful material imaginable. Picture Not Another Teen Movie if you stripped away all the laughs and replaced them with Chris Kattan. Actually, that's not entirely fair, Kattan is the only one who provides any laughs at all, and that's got to count for something, even if they're all "This is awful; why am I watching this?" kind of laughs. It's your basic spoof plot that hinges around several parodies, namely Dirty Dancing, Footloose, and The Karate Kid. All are decent 80s movies but certainly there's better spoofing material than this because whoever wrote this script does not understand what humor is.
The sad thing is that the actors are all desperately trying to be funny, with the notable exception of Tracy Morgan, who is desperately trying to be annoying. Morgan is the only one who succeeds in his goals. Besides Chris Kattan, the only one who comes close to getting a laugh is the bully character, and it's pretty sad when you're being out-acted by the douche from Cabin Fever. The gags are just too predictable, too played-out, and most importantly, too long. The editor certainly has a hand in ruining this because any comedy that does exist in the film is drained away by the jokes going on for forever.
Not Another Teen Movie isn't a great film, but this movie could have definitely taken some pointers from it. Not all the jokes work in it, but it's better to have a movie with some misses as opposed to a movie with all misses. I'm pretty hard on parody movies typically, so maybe this is just an example of my hatred for the genre. But hey, at least this is better than most of the "movie" movies.
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