If there’s one movie genre that’s gone missing and which should be picked up again, it’s affectionate genre parodies. Movies written by people who genuinely love some one specific type of goofy movies, pick up all the tropes and clichés of it, and then take all of the unintentionally comical elements of the genre and then do them on purpose. Both the big overarching big defining traits, and the subtle little details that can only be noticed by someone who’s seen 1000 movies of this genre.
Like yeah yeah the hero always has one of these two or three occupations and the sidekick is always someone like that, but did you notice the background actress with that exact specific shade of bad hair dye that was the cheapest when these movies were being made back in the day? One specific glass bottle prop that was nicknamed “the bomb bottle” because you knew the movie was going to bomb if they couldn’t afford anything better than that, except this time it’s a lore gag because they make a makeshift bomb out of it. They use the bomb bottle as a bottle bomb! A pun as a plot point! And nobody but the film fans would even know that!
I know that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” doesn’t mean what people think it means, but I miss that time when movie parodies were made by people who love what they’re mocking. I can’t sit through one of those mean-spirited “we hate everything about the source material so hard that we didn’t even read/watch it” movies. If the creators got nothing out of creating it, I’m not going to get anything out of watching it.