Parodies found

It’s not easy to make a spoof film that’s better than the original

Back in 1999, I was browsing for laser discs in a Singapore flea market on a balmy Sunday, along with a fellow companion in crime when I came across a movie called Stiff Upper Lips (1998) that looked vaguely promising in the sense that it could have been a decent enough British period costume drama. Back home, pausing only to pour myself a wee dram, I popped the disc in. To my great delight, the film was indeed that, but not the way I imagined it to be. The film is a parody of several Merchant-Ivory films, including Maurice (1987) and A Room with a View (1985), and along the way lampoons several classics including Chariots of Fire (1981), Gandhi (1982) and A Passage to India (1984).

Set in 1908, Stiff Upper Lips is not only a send up of the British aristocracy, but also of their sexual mores. For example, while on a jaunt to Italy, Emily (Georgina Cates) enters Cedric’s (Robert Portal) bedroom and demands a sexual awakening, but he remains cold. In order to provoke him, she unfurls several potentially arousing words but the only one that gets him going is — Eton.

This is just one example of a parody movie. A clip, depicting a line of co-passengers lining up to hit a fellow passenger, from Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker’s

Airplane! (1980), went viral not so long ago during the United Airlines passenger dragging fiasco. It’s essentially a parody of

Zero Hour! (1957) and

Airport 1975 (1974). The Zucker-Abraham team had earlier written John Landis’

The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) that is essentially a series of sketches sending up the martial arts genre, the western, soft-porn, blaxploitation and everything in between. And who can forget Zucker-Abraham’s

Top Secret! (1984), a giddy mash-up of cold war spy films and Elvis Presley musicals and Abraham’s solo effort

Hot Shots! (1991) that spoofed

Top Gun (1986) and en route took down

Gone with the Wind (1939),

9 ½ Weeks (1986),

Dances with Wolves (1990),

Rocky (1976) and

Superman (1978), amongst others.

Any discussion on the parody genre would be incomplete without Mel Brooks. To name just three of his seminal works,

Blazing Saddles (1974) spoofed the western genre; High Anxiety (1977) the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly Vertigo (1958), The Birds (1963) and Spellbound (1945); and Spaceballs (1987) the Star Wars,Star Trek , Alien and Planet of the Apes films.

The genre used to be a thriving one, but has somewhat waned in recent years. Keenen Ivory Wayans’ Scary Movie (2000) was a passable spoof of teen horror films, but the four sequels progressively ran out of inspiration.

And the self-explanatory

Not Another Teen Movie (2001),

Meet the Spartans (2008),

Epic Movie (2007), and

Superhero Movie (2008) just did not have enough gas in the tank to begin with.

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that for me personally, Rob Reiner’s music documentary send up, This is Spinal Tap (1984), that follows the misadventures of the eponymous fictitious British rock band, is the greatest parody film of all time.