1:00PM, Aug 23, 2008
No film is safe from parody nowadays. Be it the blunderbuss approach of Superhero Movie to the gently mocking dissection of Christopher Guest's Best In Show. The truth is spoof movies are big business. We take a look back at the origins of the genre and run the rule over the golden age of the lampoon.
The dictionary definition of a spoof is a "mocking imitation of something or someone, usually light and good-humoured".
The 1999 movie parody Galaxy Quest certainly fits the bill, affectionately poking fun at the cult following of sci-fi series such as Star Trek.
However, LOTR micky-take The Lord of the G-Strings: The Femaleship of the String, starring Dildo Saggins, Aroporn and Smirnof the Wizard maybe less so.
Truth is, the movie spoof industry is now massive business and has mushroomed to colossal proportions in the last thirty-odd years with Scary Movie, Austin Powers. Airplane and even the nudge, nudge, wink, wink Carry On series all doing their bawdy bit.
There have been movie spoofs since the silent era, but early examples of these tended to be black and white animated shorts that gently teased popular songs of the time.
Notable full-length movie parodies of the period included director Leslie Henson's 1920 offering Broken Bottles, which subtly ridiculed the previous year's Broken Blossoms, a weepie following the misfortunes of Lillian Gish's abused East London waif.
In 1926, Bluebeard's Seven Wives took a swipe at the Hollywood movie-making machine eighty years before director Christopher Guest would have a pop of his own in For Your Consideration.
The Second World War offered up opportunities for parody - Chaplin's The Great Dictator lampooned Hitler while the 1941 Italian comedy Yellow Caesar poked fun at Mussolini - and John Huston's 1953 outing Beat The Devil, starring Humphrey Bogart, toyed with The Maltese Falcon.
However, it wasn't until the 1960s that the spoof genre really took off with, surprisingly enough, Britain's Carry On team leading the way with Carry on Cleo - a spoof of the Anthony and Cleopatra story starring Sid James as Marc Antony and Coronation Street's Amanda Barrie as Cleopatra.
Hot on its heels was the 1969 007 spoof Casino Royale, which starred David Niven, Peter Sellers and Woody Allen in various guises of James Bond, and even Orson Welles as the villainous Le Chiffre.
Bond would go on to become a parody staple with Sean Connery's brother Neil taking up the licence to kill in the the Italian spoof OK Connery, which also featured Bond regulars such as Bernard Lee (M), Lois Maxwell (Mon
eypenny) and even Thunderball villain Adolfo Celi.
Mike Myers' snaggle-toothed swinging sixties spy Austin Powers nailed the period while even Gareth Hunt of coffee-making fame turned up in 1979's Licensed to Love and Kill with his bed-hopping interest rejoicing under the name of Charlotta Muff Danderfield. Which leads us on to the feminist milestone The Spy Who Boned Us with Cassandra Cade playing Curvay Booty.
Inevitably, the Carry On crew boarded the Bond bandwagon in Carry on Spying which starred Kenneth Williams as a bungling agent and Barbara Windsor's Daphne Honeybutt facing up to STENCH - the Society for the Total Extinction of Non-Conforming Humans.
Across the pond, America soon caught the spoof bug with 1969's Support Your Local Sheriff featuring James Garner in a comedy that parodied the cliched scenario of an iconoclastic new arrival who tames a lawless frontier town.
However, it was writer-director Mel Brooks who really turned it into an art form with a series of acutely-observed pastiches kicked off by 1974's Blazing Saddles, a ribald wind-up of the America's venerated Western genre.
The same year he made Young Frankenstein, which parodied classic 1940s horror yarns, and he went on to make the spoof High Anxiety and the less impressive Robin Hood: Men in Tights and sci-fi micky-take Spaceballs.
Following
in Brooks' wake was the disaster movie Airplane! series, featuring accomplished comedy player Leslie Nielsen - the "Olivier of spoofs" - who would also star as bungling Sergeant Frank Drebin in the three Naked Gun outings, which themselves emerged from the Police Squad parodies.
(in fact, Airplane! was a direct lift of the 1957 disaster movie Zero Hour!. The makers bought the rights to the movie, purloined its major characters and even pinched some dialogue directly from the original)
Also emerging was mockumentary maestro Christopher Guest, who played Brit rocker Nigel Tufnel in the sublime cod rockumentary Spinal Tap and would go on to direct such acutely observed parodies as dog competition wind-up Best in Show and folk singing parody A Mighty Wind.
It was also a rich period for genuine one-offs such as Galaxy Quest, starring Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver, and Tim Burton's B-movie sci-fi parody Mars Attacks!.
However, sensing spoofs could be big business., the major studios encouraged a rash of cheaply-made, lazily conceived spoofs of genres ranging from horror to to generally anything that was coming out at the cinema.
Director Keenen Ivory Wayans' Scary Movie series - lampooning the bloodlust and mystery films of the 70s and 80s - kicked off with invention and wit but trailed off by the fourth sequel, a tired and lazy cash cow.
Similarly, the spin-off Date Movie, Scary Movie and Epic Movie collection offered no insights into the movies they were parodying and merely extracted cheap gags by namechecking a many films as they could cram into the running time.
Specific films fared no better: Meet The Spartans, featuring former EastEnder Sean Maguire, was that inconceivable thing - a parody of a movie that parodied itself quite happily without any outside help.
The Blair Witch Project was subjected to the numb-skulled comedy treatment of the straight-to-landfill Tony Blair Witch Project and 2000's Bare Wench Project featured "four sorority girls with big breasts hiking into the woods with their guide Lunk".
Parodists of shock-horror yarn Saw were so lacking in ideas their comedy offering was called Saw Spoofed while in 2005 the title said it all: Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Hellbound, Flesh-Eating Subhumanoid Zombified Living Dead, Part 3.
It seems the age of the spoof is dead.
