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Meet the Spartans: Unrated Pit of Death Edition prompts one to scream, “This…is…TERRIBLE

By now, we’ve all seen 300 and for most of us, it was a great movie.  The parodomedy (parody-comedy…yeah, I may a new word, so what) Meet the Spartans uses 300 as a backdrop to its satires (of which there are many).  I’m all for the funny send-up of well made films, but Spartans falls into the trap of trying to cram as much pop culture references as it can into itself until it explodes like an over-inflated balloon.

The Bad Parts: Lowest denominator gross-out sprays of viscous liquids and testicle gags dominate the beginning of the film.  The Pit of Death scene where Leonidis keeps kicking people into the Pit is way too loooooooong.  There are more gay jokes and pixilated crotches in this movie than any other kind of gag – at first they were funny, then they got lame, went back to funny again, but finally ended with monotony.  The slow-mo fight scene takes to long to get to the funny bits, doesn’t have funny enough bits, and technically looks terrible.  We get spoon-fed an appearance by a satired Rocky, an iconic film character who the filmmakers felt the need to explain away like the audience is full of idiots.  There are musical numbers that are so not special, I almost forgot to mention them.

And O.K., I get it.  America (for some reason) still finds Carmen Electra attractive.  Well in Spartans, the cougar-in-training shows a lackluster performance and the beginning of wrinkles around her face.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not agist or anything.  I still think Susan Sarandon is hot as hell.  But even in a ridiculous comedy like Spartans, seeing Electra as a teenager towards the beginning totally took me out of the film.

The Good Parts: Kevin Sorbo (Hercules: the Legendary Journeys) and Sean Maguire (BBC’s East Enders) as the main Spartans were good with the drecky material they were given – Sorbo’s line of “I’m going to go Hercules on your ass!” being the best part of the film.  Seriously.  I laughed hard and had to rewind to watch it again.  Diedrich Bader (The Drew Cary Show) was funny but underused.  Ken Davitian (of Borat fame) was decent at best.  Mad TV alums Ike Barinholtz and Nicole Parker were very funny with their small roles (each had several, mostly cultural wasteland star impersonations) and could have used more screen time.

In the middle of the credits, we are given some deleted scenes that are average to good.  Some should have been left in or replaced other dumb shticks.  Parker’s Ellen and Barinholtz’s Dane Cook should have replaced most of the Pit of Death sequence as their impersonations were dead on and amusing.

The main menu on the disc shows footage of the movie, and having not seen Spartans before I found this annoying.  I always hate this on DVDs.  Do you hear me DVD makers?  This is a dumb, annoying feature.  Stop doing it.  I’ll give you a puppy if you’ll just stop ruining the movie I’m about to watch.

And now I’m off my soapbox and talking about the special features.  The cast and crew commentary is decent, even funny sometimes.  They certainly make it sound like the set was a fun place to work.  The gag reel is funny.  The trivia game sucks.  The “Pick a Musical Number” section would have been great with better musical numbers.  The behind-the-scenes bit with Kevin Sorbo is very funny.  The behind-the-scenes with Barinholtz is disappointingly mediocre.

Then we get to the trailer menu.  It took me a few seconds of looking at it before I realized that there was a Trailer A for Meet the Spartans and a Trailer C but no Trailer B.  Why designate them like that if the middle one is missing?  Why not just call C the Trailer B?  What was wrong with Trailer B in the first place that it was excluded?  Why am I wasting my time trying to figure this out?

All in all, the writer/director team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (who are hand-me-downs form the Scary Movie franchise) seem to be trying to inherit the mantle of “Spoof King” from the great Mel Brooks or the amazing trio of Jim Abrahams and Jerry & David Zucker.  They fall from reaching the throne with Meet the Spartans, and the DVD extras do nothing to pick them back up.

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