The best thing I can say about Disaster Movie is that it does my work for me: the review is right there in the title.

In theory, the movie has that title because it supposedly lampoons “one of the biggest and most bloated movie genres of all time—the disaster film,” as the publicity sheet would have me believe.  But really, aside from an earthquake here, a meteor there, and a tornado yonder, there is no resemblance to a Hollywood disaster movie.  Few, if any, of the film’s horribly embarrassing jokes are comments on the genre.

But are you familiar with those YouTube videos that come out after every blockbuster movie, the ones in which normal folks with too much time on their hands make cheesy parodies of said blockbusters?  That is what Disaster Movie is. It’s 90 minutes of cheesy YouTube parodies.  Unfortunately, the parodies you find on YouTube done by so-called amateurs are a hundred times funnier than the parodies in Disaster Movie done by so-called professionals.

These parodies are strung along in what is the plot of Cloverfield taken to its very most basic level: a sudden quake interrupts a loft party and a small group must head for safety, while one of them searches for his trapped ex-girlfriend whom he still loves.  But the film only progresses its plot once every five minutes or so, after we have suffered through yet another pointless, humorous attempt to poke fun at anything and everything that’s currently appearing in the scandal sheets or at a theater near you.

What filmmakers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (who also made this year’s just-as-awful Meet the Spartans) don’t seem to understand is that even spoof films, for the most part, put the jokes secondary to the plot.  For example, in the greatest spoof of all-time, Airplane!, it is the result of a flight attendant’s inability to calm a panicking passenger that we get June Cleaver speaking jive.  Or when the passengers “assume crash positions,” the lead-in is played seriously—a stewardess advises the passengers that the plane is going down and to assume crash positions—but the payoff is when the passengers do completely the opposite of what the audience expects.

Movies like Airplane! and Monty Python and the Holy Grail also know when it is time to move on to the next joke.  What’s even worse than the pure lack of humor in Disaster Movie’s gags is that they drag on for an incredibly painful amount of time.  For example, when a meteor kills Hannah Montana early in the film, we get about three full minutes of a very bad impersonation as she dies, comes back to life, dies, comes back to life, etc.  Later, we get a very similar scene featuring this summer’s primary superhero getting trounced repetitively by a tornado.

Speaking of the impersonations, can we at least get actors that can decently parody the persons they are spoofing?  And did we really need to reunite the entire cast for a horrible musical number at the end?  I would have preferred they cut the film just short of that, so I could make my escape from this unnatural disaster.

I counted only once through this entire movie that I actually laughed (a great jab at Star Wars); and only very, very few times did the movie make me smile—and then only briefly, before my expression returned to the disgusted scowl this movie inspired.

Disaster Movie is rated PG-13 for “crude and sexual content throughout, language, drug references and comic violence.”  I’m sure a PG-13 rating is accurate as there is nothing too gory or too crude to make in an R; but I felt like I was watching an R-rated movie—maybe based on just how awful the gore and crudity is.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Jeff attended a promotional screening of Disaster Movie.