Why? Why do they keep doing this to us? Why must every successful, vaguely original movie these days so swiftly be followed by a more or less unfunny spoof packed with a D-list cast?

The blame can be laid squarely at the feet of the first in the Scary Movie franchise back in 2000. A moderately entertaining rip on teen horror movies in general – and the Scream series in particular – it did good business, with enough skits and laughs to keep most people happy. While certainly not in the league of the likes of 1970s sketch film heights of Airplane! or Kentucky Fried Movie, it still had plenty of fun movie references (even its title was a nod to the working title of Scream). The fact that the prime film it was spoofing was itself a far more intelligent spoof of the horror movie genre was, of course, beside the point – this ratcheted up the action to a frenetic MTV pace, ideal for the dawn of the low attention span iPod era.

Of course, movie spoofs were not a remotely original idea. They’ve been going on almost as long as movies have been getting made, fluctuating in cycles of popularity and inventiveness. Airplane! itself was, after all, a spoof of 1970s disaster movies, and acted as the model for most other spoof movies that followed. Some were quite entertaining, such as the Leslie Nielsen-starring Naked Gun series or the Charlie Sheen Hot Shots flicks. Others were less so, like pretty much every National Lampoon spoof film, and every other Leslie Nielsen-starring spoof of the 90s – the likes of Repossessed, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Spy Hard and Wrongfully Accused. In fact, so rapidly was Nielsen churning out substandard comedy, he nearly managed to kill off the subgenre.

But then, to everyone’s surprise, Scary Movie brought in a worldwide box office total of nearly $300 million. It has spawned four sequels to date, all following the law of diminishing returns both in terms of interest and box office, with a fifth sequel inexplicably due later this year. At the same time, it has been responsible for the revival of blockbuster spoofs, surely one of the most depressing phenomena in modern Hollywood.

First up, before even the Scary Movie sequels had a chance to begin to mine the depths, came the awfully unfunny Not Another Teen Movie, based on precisely the same teen horror premise. More recently, two of Scary Movie’s writers were involved in 2006’s dire spoof of romantic comedies, Date Movie, while last year saw the abysmal Lord of the Rings spoof, Epic Movie. This last, despite being a box office bomb, appears to have been the direct inspiration for Meet the Spartans, covering as it does such similar subject matter.

Last year’s glossy Greek epic 300 is an obvious choice for a spoof – so little wonder that there are plans in the works for another, from spoofsters extraordinaire National Lampoon. And being so obvious, you’d think the filmmakers would have made more of an effort to do a decent job to wipe out the competition. Instead, it stars former EastEnder Sean Maguire – an actor with no comedy track record, and so little known that most people have forgotten him even in his native Britain. We can but pray that this film soon becomes just as comprehensively wiped from our minds. A waste of everyone’s time and money – just like pretty much every other spoof movie made in the last couple of decades, if we’re honest.


• Above: Meet the Spartans stars (left to right) Carmen Electra, Sean Maguire and Kevin Sorbo.