Category: Film

Spoof films work in a similar way as pastiches do in other arts, with the exception that they try to mock other films rather than celebrating them. Ever since Chaplin created one of the most daring and influential satires in film history with The Great Dictator, these parodies have evolved and acquired an increasingly absurd tone – the goal is not so much producing a coherent plot as it is about helping our brains to switch off for a time and granting us good, unconcerned laughs in the process.

Mel Brooks found his voice as a comedian with celebrated spoof movies like The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. These films display a pretty clever absurdity, as they identify many of the typical tropes in western, horror, and other genres, and bring it to a territory where the audience is granted a new perspective on elements they are very familiar with.

Nobody defined the thin line between satire and parody as Vladimir Nabokov: “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” Most of the films often labeled as spoof make a habit of breaking the fourth wall, presenting the movie as an entity aware of itself and interacting with the audience in unexpected moments.

Many films in this genre have been accused of lacking focus and relying excessively on lowbrow humor, but still there are plenty examples of spoof scripts that have shown brilliant creativity and uniqueness in their humor, and have left quotes and gags whose hilarity has remained intact over the decades.

These are some of the best spoof/satire movie scripts:

(1940) The Great Dictator

(1948) Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

(1967) The Producers

(1969) Support Your Local Sheriff

(1974) Monty Python and the Holy Grail

(1974) Blazing Saddles

(1974) Young Frankenstein

(1979) Life of Brian

(1980) Airplane!

(1984) This is Spinal Tap

(1984) Top Secret!

(1987) Spaceballs

(1991) Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear

(1991) Hot Shots!

(1999) Galaxy Quest

(2004) Team America: World Police

(2004) Shaun of the Dead

Though he was born in London, he spent most of his teenage years travelling all around Europe and Asia, which served as inspiration for his first novel. The Beach became an instant phenomenon among young European readers, and was promptly adapted by popular British director Danny Boyle with Leonardo DiCaprio as the lead.

Garland, who was just 26 at the time he published his first novel, had plenty of artistic ambitions that didn’t confine themselves to literature. Shortly after his first collaboration with Boyle, he would start writing screenplays – the first of which, 28 Days Later, became a modern horror classic, and he would collaborate once again with Boyle for a notable incursion in science fiction with Sunshine.

Garland is one of the best examples of the influence of nerd culture in today’s art. His broad knowledge of fantasy, sci-fi, gaming, literature, and comic-books have paved the way for his very particular niche, working as a writer in both films and video games, and recently switching to the director’s chair with two acclaimed titles: Ex Machina and Annihilation. He is also an avid traveller, especially backpacking.

(2000) The Beach (based on a novel by)

(2002) 28 Days Later

(2003) Tesseract (based on a novel by)

(2007) Sunshine

(2010) Never Let Me Go

(2012) Dredd

(2014) Ex Machina

(2018) Annihilation

As it happens with all kinds of adaptations, changing the elements of a story is risky, but it can also lead to very interesting results.

Adapting a movie into another language, market and setting is a practice more common in screenwriting than some suspect – and sadly, there are occasions in which the general audience never even learns that they are watching an adaptation from a foreign work.

Even some of the most reputed filmmakers have occasionally transitioned from creators to adaptators in this sense, as did Martin Scorsese when he adapted the 2002 Hong Kong film Internal Affairs into a brilliant script written by William Monahan (The Departed, 2006). Others, like Quentin Tarantino, have defined their careers by paying constant tribute to cinematic universes whose uniqueness and exoticness captivated them.

True enough, these adaptations are often turned into mere attempts of exploiting a formula – again, this is what seems to happen with other kinds of adaptations as well.

But we also have plenty of examples of filmmakers adapting a fellow director’s creation with respect and creativity enough as to produce something equally unique and memorable:

(1959) Some Like It Hot
(from the French film Fanfare d’amour)

(1960) The Magnificent Seven
(from Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai)

(1965) The Sound of Music
(from the German film Die Trapp-Familie)

(1992) Scent of a Woman
(from the Italian film Profumo di donna)

(1993) The Vanishing
(from the Dutch film Spoorloos)

(1994) True Lies
(from the French film La Totale!)

(1995) Twelve Monkeys
(from the French short film La Jetée)

(2002) Insomnia
(from the Norwegian film of the same title)

(2006) The Departed
(from the Hong Kong film Internal Affairs)

(2007) Funny Games
(from the German film of the same title)

(2010) Let Me In
(from the Swedish film Låt den rätte komma in)

(2012) Contraband
(from the Icelandic film Reykjavík-Rotterdam)

Can a remake actually surpass the original? In the seventh art, the question has been debated forever; and though some people may associate terms like ‘remake’ or ‘reboot’ to a contemporary sign of lack of creativity, truth is directors and screenwriters have been consistently adapting other films for decades.

As a matter of fact, many have retold their own stories. Hitchcock thought that his first The Man Who Knew Too Much was an amateurish work, so he changed the setting and some plot elements in his 1956 remake. And directors such as Michael Haneke (Funny Games) and Michael Mann (Heat) returned to their old scripts with bigger budgets and A-list casts.

Sometimes, necessities of international markets are the seed of these remakes: Kurosawa saw his work adapted several times in the American industry (The Magnificent Seven, A Fistful of Dollars).

In other instances, filmmakers feel curious about bringing their own vision and methods into a popular classic story, as Herzog did with Nosferatu, Cronenberg with The Fly, and the Coen brothers with True Grit.

There are plenty of examples of film remakes that have proved to be more than just a commercial gimmick.

Here are some of them:

(1956) The Man Who Knew Too Much

(1960) The Magnificent Seven

(1978) Invasion of the Body Snatchers

(1982) The Thing

(1983) Scarface

(1986) The Fly

(2001) Ocean’s Eleven

(2002) The Quiet American

(2002) Insomnia

(2004) Dawn of the Dead

(2005) Pride and Prejudice

(2006) The Departed

(2006) Casino Royale

(2007) 3:10 to Yuma

(2010) True Grit

Sometimes, the one thing a great film needs in order to be generally accepted as such is… time. Reviewers are certainly not infallible, and more often than not they fail at fully grasping the quality of a story that perhaps was a bit too experimental, controversial or simply ahead of its time.

Few will doubt now that Vertigo is one of Hitchcock’s finest, but its reception was mixed back then, with one reviewer stating that the director had “never before indulged in such farfetched nonsense”. The legendary Roger Ebert was far from impressed after his first view of Once Upon a Time in the West, and John Carpenter admitted that his confidence never recovered after the release of The Thing, today universally regarded as a horror cult classic.

While the reasons on why some films are so widely misunderstood are difficult to ascertain, the lessons to be learned are more reassuring: though the critics hold a great degree of influence over the popular opinion, it’s the audience who truly determines the legacy of a movie, and as filmmakers we have a responsibility of staying true to the story, and not to a trend or a convention.

Here’s a selection of 10 great film scripts that were poorly received back in their day:

(1955) The Night of the Hunter

(1958) Vertigo

(1967) Bonnie and Clyde

(1978) Halloween

(1980) The Shining

(1982) The Thing

(1983) Scarface

(1987) Predator

(1998) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

(1999) Fight Club