Meet the Spartans (Unrated Pit-of-Death Edition) DVD Review

Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 06.03.2008

Or, "...what the HELL did I just watch?"

Directed by: Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer
Written by: Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer

Starring:
Sean Maguire - King Leonidas
Ken Davitian - Xerxes
Carmen Electra - Queen Margo
Kevin Sorbo - Captain
Jareb Dauplaise - Dilio
Travis Van Winkle - Sonio
Diedrich Bader - Traitoro
Hunter Clary - Leo Jr.
Dean Cochran - Rocky Balboa
Emily Wilson - Lindsay Lohan
Phil Morris - Messenger
Method Man - Persian Emissary
Nicole Parker - Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Ellen DeGeneres and Paula Abdul
Tiffany Claus - Angelina Jolie
Nick Steele - Kevin Federline
Ike Barinholtz - Bond Villain, Prophet
Zachary Dylan Smith - 10-year-old Leonidas
Tony Yalda - Sanjaya Malakar
Christopher Lett - Randy Jackson
Crista Flanagan - Oracle/Ugly Betty
Jesse Lewis IV - Ms. Jay Alexander
Jenny Costa - Tyra Banks
Belinda Waymouth - Twiggy

Domestic Gross: $38,233,676
Worldwide Gross: $84,021,565

DVD Release Date: 6/3/2008
Running Time: 84 minutes



Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content throughout, language and some comic violence

Parody movies have gotten out of control. The genre, popularized by Mel Brooks with such classics as Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs and Robin Hood: Men in Tights, found itself surged into the mainstream when Keenan Ivory Wayans brought us Scary Movie. The 2000 horror spoof, which took shots at such films as Scream, The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects, The Blair Witch Project, and slasher classics like Halloween, was an enormous success at the box office with over $278 million world-wide. Three sequels followed, each with the law of diminishing returns coming into play in terms of quality but still managing to be occasionally funny; a fourth one is currently in the works. Unfortunately, a side effect of the series is that it kick-started the careers of Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer. The two writers, who worked on the original Scary Movie, decided that there was money in the parody genre outside of horror, and much like our good friend Dr. Uwe Boll has left an indelible stain on the video game movie genre, Friedberg and Seltzer have drug the spoof film through the muck, with increasingly awful movies like Date Movie, Epic Movie, and the latest entry into their portfolio of utter dreck, Meet the Spartans.

The Movie

The film (and I use that term in the loosest meaning possible), a parody of the box office smash 300, follows the same basic story of that film. Leonidas (Maguire), faced with annihilation at the hands of the Persian Army, leads his army of thirteen Spartans against the enormous army of Xerxes (Davitian). In order to do so, he must deal with his slut of a wife Margo (Electra) coming onto every male in the film that isn’t blatantly gay, kick many people into the Pit of Death, contend with a traitorous senator named Traitoro (Bader) and a traitorous Paris Hilton (Parker), “stomp the yard” against Method Man and the Immortals, and decide if he will “Deal or No Deal” in regards to a proposed bribe from the overweight, repulsive Xerxes. Along the way, the movie tries to poke fun at Borat, Shrek the Third, Casino Royale, Happy Feet, Ghost Rider, Transformers, “American Idol,” “Dancing With the Stars,” “Ugly Betty,” Lindsay Lohan, Brangelina, Mister “Leave Britney Alone!” Chris Crocker, and many, many more.

Parody films are, by their nature in the last decade, films to be seen, enjoyed, and forgotten. Loaded with contemporary pop culture references that automatically give the films a limited lifespan, they should at their best be able to amuse for an hour or two and then be left alone. The problem with Meet the Spartans is that, much like with Date Movie and Epic Movie, Friedman and Seltzer simply aren’t funny. In fact, not only are they unfunny…they are painfully, disgustingly unfunny. Meet the Spartans amounts to an eighty four-minute long gay joke, with occasional breaks for either an already dated pop culture reference that was played out well before the movie hit theaters or bodily fluid humor. I’m really not sure who thinks it’s funny for a giant penguin suit to shove its balls into a man’s face and then crap into his open mouth, but I’m certainly not one of them. The writing/directing duo is completely incapable of soliciting even the tiniest smirk throughout this film…and the few times there’s something possibly funny, they drag it out to the point that it’s incredibly overplayed, such as the Pit of Death scene that has to last a good five minutes, or the dance-off that lasts nearly as long. Brief references would have worked…dragging them out just makes you beg for it to be over. Unfortunately, the begging is in vain, as the movie drags on and on…and on, and on. Somehow, even at the lean running time, the movie seems to last forever as one lame joke after another is rolled out in the form of a bad pop culture reference, a gross-out joke, or blatant and poorly-done sexuality.

The acting is about what you’d expect for a film like this. Sean Maguire hams up the screen as high as he can, attempting to come off as overly masculine and yet forced to spout out lines like “I'm assembling an army to go to war with Persia. I'm going to take them in the rear... and then I'm gonna reach around, and I'm gonna take them again from the front!” To say he doesn’t succeed in injecting any humor into the movie is an understatement. Carmen Electra, for her part, needs to get out of these movies. It was funny when she played the Drew Barrymore Scream part in Scary Movie. But somehow, Friedman and Seltzer seem to have gotten some sort of blackmail on her, because she’s been playing the sexed-up horny girl role in every single parody to date. Yes, Carmen, you’re hot, we get it. Now go back to doing something a little higher caliber, and stretch your boundaries a bit. Her performance as Queen Margo in this film amounts to little more then her shaking her ass as a stripper and kicking Traitoro’s ass in a horribly unfunny Spider-Man 3 rip-off scene. Ken Davitian’s Xerxes, played in the manner of a modern day Dom DeLuise, is passably better, and Kevin Sorbo plays the straight man role to Maguire’s Leonidas moderately well. Think about that for a moment. When Kevin “Hercules” Sorbo does the best acting in your film, you need to think about a new career.

There is literally nothing about this movie that redeems it. Not only that, nothing even tries. What Friedberg and Seltzer seem to have forgotten is that what makes a parody film funny is when you take the flaws of the film you’re parodying, the things the audience laughed at, and make them intentionally funny. It’s not funny to write a script so lazy that you can’t even be bothered give the main characters original names, and to sink to the lowest denominator you can possibly imagine for a laugh. It’s not funny to just toss a random pop culture reference in and expect the audience to laugh. When the oracle—Ugly Betty, by the way—mutters some gibberish to the Prophet who translates as “Save the cheerleader, save the world,” it’s not funny, because there’s no point to it whatsoever. A drunken hyena banging its paws and head on a keyboard without rhyme or rhythm would have better odds of success being funny then these two. The only thing that saves this from being a flat-out zero out of ten is the attractiveness of Carmen Electra…and even that only scores it half a point.

Film Rating: 0.5

Technical Aspects

There’s nothing about the film’s technical aspects that is offensive as the movie itself. The Anamorphic Widescreen video isn’t great—the colors are a bit washed out, and the blacks aren’t amazing—but it’s not horrible, either. There’s no added grain to the video, at least, which is entirely tolerable. The Dolby 5.1 Audio track, available in English only, plays pretty nicely, particularly with the musical sequences in the movie (of which there are many). The subtitle options are English and Spanish. All in all, completely average here.

Technical Rating: 6.0

Special Features

Cast and Crew Commentary: A large group of the cast and crew, including Kevin Sorbo, is on tap for this, and they have a good time. I actually enjoyed the movie better when I didn’t watch it, but just turned on the audio commentary and didn’t pay attention to the screen. There’s nothing approaching substance here, and even the cast tears into the movie in a good-natured way, but it was at least a nice waste of time.

Know Your Spartans Pop Culture Trivia: An interactive game where you’re pressed to answer multiple-choice questions either relating to the movie, or pop culture about the actors. Each wrong answer gives you an annoying buzz; each right answer gives you someone being kicked into the Pit of Death. Boring and pointless.

Meet the Spartans: The Music: (11:48) A series of eight quick cuts to the musical numbers of the film; by “musical numbers,” I mean any point where pop music plays. Anything which makes me watch more of the movie, or any part of the movie again, gets a major thumbs down.

Preparing for Thrusting: (5:16): A very tongue-in-cheek (read: more gay jokes) short about preparing for the roles of the Spartans, this is another unfunny parody bit with nothing interesting. Unless, that is, that by “interesting,” you consider exercises where men push other men forward so they can have their asses smacked interesting.

Tour the set with Ike Barinholtz: (6:40) Yet another stupid and unfunny short where Ike Barinholtz, who played a prophet and the Bond Villain, tours the set. Nothing is funny here, there’s nothing interesting about the production values, and Ike is a jackass.

Gag Reel: (4:18) Somehow, a gag reel about a horribly bad parody film fails to be funny. I know, I’m shocked, too.

Trailers: We get two of the trailers for Meet the Spartans, neither of which are good but are at least short, and the trailer for the upcoming Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs DVD, which doesn’t look particularly good.

Special Features Rating: 1.0

The 411: There is nothing even remotely worth watching in Meet the Spartans, an incredibly stupid and unfunny 84-minute long assault on the brain. Packed with already-passé pop culture references, inane gross-out humor, and blatant stupidity throughout, it’s an utter waste of time that no one should have to endure. Ever. No, really, EVER. I’ll take a night of virulent food poisoning over this. I had more fun when I nearly snapped my ankle in half by stepping on it wrong a couple years ago. There are not enough bad things I can say about this movie. The special features are almost, though not quite, as bad. The sad thing is, there’s a market, because it did well enough that Disaster Movie is on the way. The gods help us all. Someone else is reviewing that piece of crap, ‘cause it’s not going to be me, I can promise you that.

Final Score:  0.5   [ Torture ]