A tremendous, muscular male stripper windmills his massive man wand around a bachelorette’s head, coming so close he almost pokes her eye out. Awkward and uncomfortable — she’s only doing this at the coaxing of her friends — she innocently swats his pride and joy out of her face after he makes contact. Suddenly, he stops.
“You’re in trouble now,” he says, calling over the bouncer, before telling the petite young woman, “You essentially raped me.”
And, scene. Laughing yet?
Of course not. As a gut-busting, scene-ending punchline, “You essentially raped me” is right up there with, “The doctor needs you to come in right away.”
But Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, writers and directors of the dross this line is taken from — a joyless piece of boredom misleadingly titled “Best Night Ever” — have the comedic sense of a pre-ghost Ebenezer Scrooge.
With their latest abomination, a take on Vegas-set bachelor and bachelorette party films that’s currently on VOD and hits theaters Friday, Seltzer and Friedberg have directed and/or written eight supposed “comedy” films; all together, their catalog has less collective laughs than “12 Years a Slave.”
The pair’s films, mostly parodies of specific genres that include “Epic Movie,” “Date Movie,” and “Disaster Movie” — the latter of which is in a six-way tie for worst movie of all-time on IMDB, based on scores submitted by fans — are filled with overly crude and thought-free “jokes” that are really just references mixed with farts, all meant to make audiences laugh at the notion of the base and the familiar without invoking any creativity.
There’s a scene in “Epic Movie” that is intended to parody “Snakes On A Plane.” As snakes descend on passengers, predictable visual jokes are inserted — one snake is seen biting a man’s crotch, of course, since it’s the most obvious, easy, brain-free visual snake joke one could possibly come up with — until, finally, a Samuel L. Jackson look-alike echoes Jackson’s infamous line from that movie, “I’ve had it with these m – – – – – f – – – – – – snakes on this m – – – – – f – – – – – – plane.” He then repeats the line, then repeats it again. When asked why, he replies that, “Internet bloggers love it when I say it,” and he repeats the line once more.
Most of us would consider this a comment or meta-statement. To Seltzer and Friedberg, this counts as a joke, and one so funny that they repeat it four times. They genuinely don’t seem to understand the difference between a premise and a punchline.
Exactly how bad are these guys? The Rotten Tomatoes review aggregation site scores films from 1 to 100 based on their reviews. Of the first six films the pair directed (reviews aren’t out yet for “Best Night Ever”), their highest score is a 7 — remember, that’s out of 100 — for their directorial debut, 2006’s “Date Movie.”
Their 2013 “Hunger Games” parody, “The Starving Games,” was honored with the rare Rotten Tomatoes score of zero, and since their debut, they’ve never had a film score higher than 5, which means they’ve actually gotten worse over time. Taken together, in fact, the collective score of these six films adds up to just 17 — an atrocious score for one film, much less six combined.
The critics’ hatred for Seltzer and Friedberg makes Tyler Perry’s reviews read like Lena Dunham’s.
The website Cracked once wrote that, “Their collective filmography says more about the existence of the Devil than Dante ever could.” For 2010’s “Vampires Suck,” Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers simply filed a four-word, zero-star review that read, in its entirety, “This movie sucks more.”
At Slate, Josh Levin has taken it further, detailing the pair’s stunning ineptitude by noting that not only do they “not practice the same craft” as noted filmmakers such as Paul Thomas Anderson or early parody masters the Zucker Brothers, but even a “dad who takes shaky home movies on a camping trip” has more of a right to adopt the “filmmaker” moniker than these two.
“They are not filmmakers,” he writes. “They are evildoers, charlatans, symbols of Western civilization’s decline under the weight of too many pop culture references.”
And herein lies the secret to the depth of their suckitude, which is that they are equally inept at both of the things they do for a living, writing and directing. Not only are their stories uninspired and nonsensical and their “jokes” laughter-free, but as directors, they have no understanding of any of filmmaking’s basics, or of that essential comedic ingredient, timing.
There’s a scene in “Best Night Ever,” where the four female leads escape the police by diving into a dumpster.
In the scene that follows — during which the camera never moves, and the characters are lit by that Paris-Hilton-sex-tape green light that was stylistically hip for about five minutes in 2004 — we watch the girls panic in silence, with one building to hyperventilation; hear the police finish their business right outside; and then see our heroes finally calm their nerves by whisper-singing a version of 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?”
While the whole scene is a big ball of nothing before one final joke at the end (turns out there was a homeless guy in the dumpster with them the whole time, ha ha!), what’s astounding is that this scene is almost five minutes long! That’s over five percent of the film’s entire 83-minute time, and it’s spent solely watching these characters breath and pseudo-sing, with nary a joke to be found.
All of which leads to the question: In a world with so much worthy, unrecognized comedic talent, how on earth do these incompetents keep getting films made?
The simple answer is that their movies somehow make money.
The website Celebrity Net Worth estimates Seltzer and Friedberg’s personal fortunes at about $20 million each.“Date Movie” built on its $20 million budget to bring in $48 million domestic and another $36 million foreign, and their films to date have followed almost similar patterns, except for the foreign numbers generally eclipsing the domestic. The bottom line is that their films make a profit, which in Hollywood speaks louder than any punchline.
But there’s a cure for that: Let’s all stop watching this crap.
Next up for the pair is “Superfast,” a parody of the “Fast and Furious” series that’s sure to tackle the conundrum of what happens when you fart while driving 130 m.p.h.