Genre: Comedy
Director: Jason Friedberg, Aaron Seltzer
Starring: Kal Penn, Adam Campbell, Jennifer Coolidge, Crispin Glover, Tony Cox, Héctor Jiménez, Carmen Electra
RunTime: 1 hr 25 mins
Released By: 20th Century Fox
Rating: PG (Some Sexual Humour)

Opening Day: 15 February 2007

Synopsis :

The twisted minds of two of the six writers of "Scary Movie" tackle the biggest mega-blockbusters of all time in "Epic Movie." The story centers on four not-so-young orphans: one raised by a curator at the Louvre (where an albino assassin lurks), another a refugee from Mexican "libre" wrestling, the third a recent victim of snakes on her plane, and the fourth a "normal" resident of a mutant "X"-community. The hapless quartet visits a chocolate factory, where they stumble into an enchanted wardrobe that transports them to the land of Gnarnia (with a "G"). There they meet a flamboyant pirate captain and earnest students of wizardry – and join forces with, among others, a wise-but-horny lion to defeat the evil White Bitch of Gnarnia.

Movie Review:

We’ll be damned if any self-respecting critic penned a glowing review of this awful movie (we shudder at the thought of even defining this mess as a movie).

One look at the promotional poster and you’d know what to expect: appaling performances, senseless storyline and jokes that try to hard to be funny. And any discerning viewer who has the common sense to predict all that is spot on – there is nothing epic about this movie, except for its dreadful attempts at tickling our funny bones.

There is really nothing much to say about the plot. It simply puts together scenes from several blockbuster movies (we shall leave you to identify them from the poster), and feebly tells the story of four orphans who gets transported to a land where they are prophesized to be rulers of the place.

It really pains us to even put in writing the above paragraph.

You may chuckle at the first few parodied scenes in the 85-minute picture. But when you realize that the entire movie is nothing but lame copies of what you’ve previously seen and enjoyed, everything becomes irritatingly unoriginal. In case the filmmakers haven’t realized, there is a difference between satirizing and copying.

You know this movie is in bad shape when the score composed by Ed Shearmur echoes other’s composer’s works of the original movies.

There are pictures like Spy Hard (1996) and Spaceballs (1987) which poke fun of other movies, but they were truly hilarious, and dare we say it, many times more intelligent than this Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer-directed movie.

While Seltzer has the terrible Date Movie (2006) under his filmography, Friedberg is a first-time director here. These writing partners have penned the Scary Movie series, if that gives you an idea of what their directorial effort is going to be like.

Since it looks like there is nothing else constructive to say about this movie, we are going to ease the tension and provide some fun facts, to make things a little more interesting around here. Read on if you are still having the slightest inclination to watch this witless movie.

1. One of the orphans is played by Kal Penn, whose memorable performance in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) made us roll in laughter. One in-joke in his latest work made us chuckle a little- that’s all. What a pity.

2. The creepy Crispin “Willard” Glover and the irksome Hector “Nacho LIbre” Jimenez play Willy Wonka and Mr Tumnus (from the Narnia series) in this movie. Although they do gyrate quite well to the music in a few dance sequences, they too got on our nerves half an hour into the movie. What a pity.

3. After being killed by Uma Thurman in Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), David Carradine dies again in this movie – within the first five minutes. Look out for his turn as the dead museum curator ala The Da Vinci Code (2006). It was all over too soon in our opinion. What a pity.

There is only one reason why the movie studio agreed to produce this movie: the box office potential. Judging from the US$29.6 million (and counting!) it has made in the States, it’d probably make bored audiences here fish out their wallets to pay for a ticket for this movie.

What a pity.

Movie Rating:

(The unoriginal jokes in this movie will draw a few chuckles from you, but that’s about it)

Review by John Li