Film of the Week: Hot Shots! and Hot Shots! Part Duex

Unfortunately, it has been well-documented that parody films have decreased in quality over the years. Whilst some were breaking through and becoming successes, there were some that weren’t getting anywhere near to the bar the greats had set many years before. Sometimes, even those that are successful, some were only seen as such at the time and have aged poorly over the years. Such films that weren’t getting anywhere close are what are known by some as the “movie movie”. Superhero Movie, Disaster Movie, Epic Movie. The odd one out is Scary Movie, which came out a while before the others, and did become a success at the box office, and did raise people’s hope back up about parody films becoming good once more. We were disappointed when the aforementioned films subsequently came out. I can write an entire article about each film individually and why I feel they are poor examples of parodies – I may accidentally get carried away and include some rather strong opinions.

From what I’ve observed over the recent years of parody films, there are two ways to make a good parody film. The first is to solely focus on the intended film to make fun of. A brilliant example of this formula is Young Frankenstein, a parody of the Frankenstein film. It exaggerated the necessities, but didn’t go over the top. The partially sighted assistant in the original film is completely blind in the parody, for one example. Almost warping the original’s reality for comedic purposes and it worked brilliantly. The second formula I’ve noticed people like is when it parodies an entire genre: Where they don’t focus on one film as a whole, but sprinkle a few comedic references over the top of its own original storyline, and there are plenty more examples that I can think of from the top of my head than the first, not because I’ve seen them more times than the others, but because they really did make that much more of an impact the first time. Airplane is a parody of disaster movies, Naked Gun trilogy is a parody of detective movies, Top Secret is a parody of WWII spy movies. Scary Movie is a parody of the horror genre. People enjoyed the genre based parodies more and so a new trend started and that was all that the studios were making.  Disaster Movie and Epic Movie are prime examples of how to mash together as many genres and references as possible in an attempt to make an original storyline that’s funny, and it doesn’t work in the slightest.

Again, Scary Movie is the odd one out because it intermingled both ways into one movie. It follows closely to the story of the first Scream, but it has many other references from other popular horror films in between. It was testing the waters with a third way, and yes, it was successful, but unfortunately, gradually started to fade into the shadows as the greats started to reclaim their podium. Scary Movie is a funny movie, but it just doesn’t compare to some of the others that came before it.

As I was observing the parody film genre over the years, I noticed that there were two films that fell under the radar slightly. Hot Shots! and its sequel, Hot Shots! Part Duex. Coming out in 1991 and 1993, I discovered that both films embraced the first way of parody filmmaking. Hot Shots is a parody of Top Gun, and its sequel is a parody of Rambo. The first film sees Topper Harley being recruited back into the squadron because he is the best of what’s left, and he reluctantly agrees. Whilst it doesn’t stick to the film it’s parodying as religiously as Young Frankenstein, you can blatantly see Top Gun weaved strategically throughout, and the final product is an extremely funny parody feature film that also does its own thing as well. Its sequel, which sees Topper being pulled out of retirement once more to go on a rescue mission to save the team that went to rescue the team that went to rescue the team. Once again, it stuck close to the source material, but did its own thing, and the finished product was superb.

Whilst you could argue that there are various reasons as to why this film fell under the radar, it is hard to ignore that it was at the time when people preferred genre parodies, not singular film parodies, and so whilst enjoyed at the time, its audience was almost instantly redirected to what the studios knew they enjoyed the most. But it was successful, which means it was still possible to make that sort of film, and it was attempted again with Scary Movie. Its sequels are debatable on whether they are good or not, so I’ll just leave them up to you to decide.

And studios are still trying to bring back that form of parody. Fifty Shades of Black, a parody of Fifty Shades of Grey; Vampires Suck, a parody of the Twilight film series; The Starving Games, a parody on The Hunger Games franchise. The odd one out is Fifty Shades of Black, but that’s only because I haven’t seen that one yet. You could tell that the other two put a lot of effort into making the best possible film they could, but it just wasn’t as good as people had hoped for. They both still had various unnecessary cameos from other franchises; there was no meaning behind them being there. At least Scary Movie didn’t do that.

Another thing that I noticed when observing parody films over the years, is what makes a joke within a parody film funny and why nowadays, they aren’t achieving that anymore, but to explain that requires an entire other article, and so there will be a sequel coming soon in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, enjoy your parody films.

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)