![]() The second Hot Shots! is not the last movie any of them made, nor is it even technically the last funny one – BASEketball is fine, Rat Race is old-fashioned but probably underrated – but it is the last genuinely funny spoof any of them had a hand in, which basically makes it their Guernica.īased specifically on Rambo III while generally poking at 1980s-excess action flicks and Vietnam War movies throughout, Hot Shots! Part Deux is the story of Topper Harley (Charlie Sheen), an ex-military man sent into the jungles of Iraq to rescue a group of American hostages, dealing with stone-faced ex-lovers and a lisping Saddam Hussein along the way. Starting with Kentucky Fried Movie in 1977, and reaching the heights of Airplane! and Police Squad!, David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker bestrode the earth as veritable gods, albeit ones whose powers topped out at jokes where the punchline is taking a phrase too literally. You can trace this downward slide to irrelevance and oblivion back to Hot Shots! Part Deux, which besides celebrating its quarter-century anniversary this month is also the last exit sign of what would seem to be the golden age of spoof: the ZAZ era. (You might now recognize this as the dominant humour model of the internet, which at least has the excuse of not paying most of its writers.) Since then, few others have even bothered to try. ![]() Since at least the turn of the millennium, almost the only spoofs to get green-lit were dirt-cheap, bargain-bin affairs, comedies so beholden to assembly-line efficiency they could not even really muster jokes so much as parade the most fleeting, knee-jerk pop-cultural references across the screen, hoping that seeing these things within the context of a (genre) movie would be incongruous enough to get a stimulus-response laugh. If anything, Hollywood has done all it could to kill the genre outright. Hollywood has spent the intervening 25 years putting the Fordian factory production model to shame, but the pure movie parody – with essentially no redeeming virtue beyond being stupidly funny and, I guess, pointing out how generally ridiculous film and film-culture convention is – is nowhere to be found. “As long as the Hollywood assembly lines keep groaning,” he answers himself, “there will probably be a function for these corrective measures.”īeing a film critic involves a lot corrective re-evaluation, but it still feels safe to say that America’s reviewer was never more bitterly, horribly, unquestionably wrong than he was when casually speculating on the future of deadpan kitchen-sink spoof movies. “Will this genre ever run out of steam?” Roger Ebert asks in what is pretty close to a glowing review of Hot Shots! Part Deux, Jim Abrahams’s 1993 parody of, most approximately, Rambo III. ![]() Lloyd Bridges stars in Hot Shots! Part Deux, a film built out of the classic Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker format, which is essentially to make sure every shot has a joke somewhere, on the assumption that some of them have to be funny to someone. ![]()
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