1018. Date Movie (2006)

Starring: Alyson Hannigan, Fred Willard, Jennifer Coolidge

Director: Aaron Seltzer, Jason Friedburg

Running Time: 83 mins

Date Movie is an American film about a fat woman whose depressing, loveless life is turned around when she meets her ‘knight in shining armour’. Meanwhile, many film parodies occur in her life.

Well, this is as horribly unfunny and disgusting as you could expect. The original parody from these writers, Scary Movie, was at least moderately entertaining, had a story of some degree, and didn’t make you physically sick, whereas this monstrosity of a film does exactly the opposite.

Firstly, one of the best things about Scary Movie, and Scary Movie 2, was that they were satirising the horror genre as well as making random parody jokes throughout, and even though it wasn’t hilarious, at least there was a more intelligent idea behind it all.

However, this film doesn’t even bother to satirise the romantic comedy genre (even though it says it does in the trailer). What this film is is a bad rom-com plot disguised as a satire by not being so schmultzy and serious, when all it is is a lack of originality, and a collection of terrible jokes.

Now, it’s likely that you will laugh a few times in this film, because some of the random movie parodies are quite good if you get them, but that doesn’t meant that the movie as a whole is enjoyable at all.

The characters are painfully irritating and unfunny, and despite all the efforts of the writers to make them as weird and zany as possible, nothing works, and you end up with a group of boring people that you have to sit throughout and watch for what feels like the longest 83 minutes you’ve ever lived through.

What’s more is that the majority of the humour here is pretty disgusting. Again, some of the jokes in Scary Movie were pretty disgusting, but at least they weren’t the main part of the movie, whereas here, most of the gags make you feel genuinely ill, and that’s not something that you should have to feel when wanting a simple parody comedy.

And the final straw of this film is the fact that, like many other idiotic parodies, the credits go on for over 10 minutes, in a film as short as this. In similar fashion to Jurassic Shark, it shows that the writers had so little ideas that the only way to lengthen this to a normal-ish running time was by extending the credits to an unnecessarily long extent.

Overall, this gets a 1.8, because it’s quite simply horrible to watch.