The 25 greatest spoof movies of all time

Jim Abrahams’s first solo spoof fires guided satirical missiles straight up the thrusters of Tony Scott’s “Top Gun”. As a parody of American jingoism, it’s pretty toothless (“Hot Shots, Part Deux!” is much more pointed), but as a highlight reel for Lloyd Bridges, it is unassailable. While Charlie Sheen, Valeria Golino, and Cary Elwes are all willing doofuses, Bridges’s portrait of an addled Navy Admiral with a stainless-steel ear canal and a paranoid hatred of crabs (they travel in pairs, don’t you know) is a brilliant companion piece to the glue-sniffing Steve McCroskey in “Airplane!”

After creating “WKRP in Cincinnati” and making scads of money for Warner Bros with “Police Academy”, Hugh Wilson had earned the opportunity to write his ticket. His passion project, “Rustler’s Rhapsody”, is the opposite of every movie on this list in that it almost never goes for a belly laugh. It is gentle, affectionate, and strangely decent; a childlike lark about what might happen if Gene Autrey got dumped into a John Ford western. That’s an awfully specific type of parody. The stronger pitch would’ve been Gene Autrey in “The Wild Bunch”, but Wilson plays this whimsically. Tom Berenger hadn’t played Barnes in “Platoon” yet, so he was perfect casting as the singing cowboy Rex O’Herlihan. How nice is this movie? Andy Griffith (decades removed from Lonesome Rhoades) is the bad guy!

The problem with Blaxploitation parodies is that most American moviegoers haven’t seen the classics they’re spoofing. This was especially true in 1988, which explains why Keenen Ivory Wayans’s feature filmmaking debut sputtered at the box office, but, in time, became a cult video sensation. The movie works on two levels: for those who don’t know the genre, it’s a raucous, raunchy good time; for those that do, it’s that and a knowing send-up of a cherished moment where black audiences could go see themselves and their neighborhoods on the big screen. The film essentially introduced viewers to the Wayans family, Chris Rock (“Lemme get one rib!”) and Robin Harris, while providing comeback roles for Bernie Casey, Isaac Hayes, Antonio Fargas, and Jim Brown. The scene where Keenen’s Jack Spade gets busted for lying to a hookup (Anne-Marie Johnson) about the size of his manhood is a screamingly funny indictment of male desperation.

No one was clamoring for a sketch comedy throwback to the “Kentucky Fried Movie”, but John Landis got together some of his talented filmmaker friends (Joe Dante, Carl Gottlieb, Robert K. Weiss, and Peter Horton), and delivered a pop culture spoof roughly constructed around the now outmoded American propensity to plop one’s butt on the couch and channel surf. It’s a mixed bag, but the highs are towering: David Allen Grier as Don “No Soul” Simmons (“a man who turned a personal affliction into a singing career”), the Harvey Pitnik Roast, a fear-mongering STD short starring Carrie Fisher, and Gottlieb’s masterful “Son of the Invisible Man”, in which mad scientist Ed Begley Jr. mistakenly believes he’s perfected his invisibility formula (spoiler: he hasn’t, and proceeds to harass a local tavern while bare naked). 

After the studied parody of “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid”, Carl Reiner and Steve Martin decided to let ‘er rip with this unhinged spoof of mad scientist movies. Martin stars as the innovative brain surgeon Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr (as challenging to pronounce as it is to spell), who, after marrying poorly to a husband killer (Kathleen Turner), falls in love with a brain in a jar (the voice of Sissy Spacek) that can communicate with him telepathically. The film might have the least irresistible hook of the Reiner-and-Martin’s four collaborations, but its unpredictability leaves the viewer vulnerable to some of the biggest laughs they’ve ever generated.

The novelty of a vintage sitcom getting cheekily transferred to the big screen had worn off somewhere around “Car 54, Where Are You” and “The Beverly Hillbillies”, so Betty Thomas’s “The Brady Bunch Movie” didn’t quite receive the critical hosannas it deserved in 1995. The level of mimicry is astonishing. Gary Cole was probably best known at the time for his portrayal of convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald in “Fatal Vision”, so his effortless evocation of the wise and kind Mike Brady was downright virtuosic. In retrospect, dropping the square-ȧss Brady family into mid-‘90s America wasn’t culture shock enough, and perhaps that’s why the movie didn’t leave a deeper imprint. The Clinton era was just too halcyon.

Universal had run its classic monsters into the ground via ceaseless sequels over a decade-plus, so the only way left to go was for the gut. “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” isn’t just a lovingly silly, belly-laugh-loaded send-off to Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, and the Wolf Man, it’s also the funniest movie in the comedy duo’s canon. The film gets a lot of mileage from Lou Costello gasping fear whenever left in a room by his lonesome with one of the monsters, but the film peaks in the third act at a masquerade ball that brings all of the nefarious creatures together.

“Dewey Cox has to think about his entire life before he plays.” The musician biopic was already a cliché-ridden parody of itself by the time Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow gave it a ZAZ-style spoofing with the rise-and-fall-and-rise-and-so-on tale of a country-western superstar (played to overwrought perfection by John C. Reilly) who’s a little bit Cash and a little bit Elvis. At times, it plays like a beat-for-beat send-up of “Walk the Line”, with Reilly’s Cox nursing guilt over having accidentally cut his brother in half with a machete. Every imaginable plot convention gets skewered, but the film’s biggest laughs come courtesy of the songs, which sports titles like “There’s a Change a-Happenin’”, “Let’s Duet”, and “Hole in My Pants”.

Of all the classic Hollywood genres, gangster films have the simplest formula: a smart poor kid sees an express lane to riches via a life of crime, becomes king of the hill, then topples all the way down to his death. Perhaps this tidiness scared our great film parodists from tackling the genre during their prime (Jim Abrahams was well off the top of his game when he made “Jane Austen’s Mafia!”). Or maybe they just respected Amy Heckerling’s perennially underrated “Johnny Dangerously” that much. Though the film arrived a year after Brian De Palma’s “Scarface”, it’s neck-deep in references to Cagney-era wiseguy business, to the quaint extent that it often feels like an extended “Carol Burnett Show” sketch. It does get dirty (inexplicably so with the “Enlarged Scrotum Syndrome” sequence), but it glides by on the daffy charm of Michael Keaton and Marilu Henner. Extra special praise to Richard Dimitri, whose Roman Moronie would’ve ensured the film an R-rating if his profanity-laced tirades weren’t as mangled as the rest of his English.

This is in the same tonal ballpark as “Rustlers’ Rhapsody” in that it’s an all-ages romp, but director John Landis gives his three comedy superstars (Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short) plenty of room to go for big laughs. Written by the unlikely trio of Martin, Randy Newman, and Lorne Michaels (one of only two screenplay credits for the SNL creator), it’s largely a showcase for the leads, but Alfonso Arau steals multiple scenes as the perpetually flummoxed bandito El Guapo, while Kai Wulff memorably portrays a German quick draw artist who seems partially inspired by Baron von Schulenberg from Sergio Sollima’s Spaghetti Western classic, “The Big Gundown”.

Chris Rock’s “CB4” was the bigger hit, but the definitive skewering of hip-hop culture and the ‘80s films it inspired can all be found in Rusty Cundieff’s uproarious “Fear of a Black Hat”. It goes harder than Rock’s movie, which is too enamored of its subject to land flush punches (mostly, it goes after white conservative panic). Cundieff lampoons the macho posturing and juvenile misogyny of a musical movement that was empowering in all the same conflicting ways rock-and-roll was in the 1950s. Best of all, he nails the intellectual concern trolling that portrayed hip-hop as an ideological menace hellbent on fomenting revolution. This winds up being painfully prescient. Maybe the music wasn’t powerful enough.

It’s treacherous business attempting a music mockumentary knowing you’ll inevitably get compared to “This Is Spinal Tap”, but the Lonely Island trio of Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone are essentially the modern-day equal of the Christopher Guest gang, and they nail the boy-band phenomenon with total precision in this cult classic. Samberg stars as Connor Friel, a Bieber-esque teen idol tearing up the charts with hits like “I’m So Humble” and “Turn Up the Beef”. As a spoof of the form, the film breaks no new ground, but its absurdist view of the music industry hits hard because almost all of it is completely plausible. 

A chaotic spoof of film and television that launched the careers of the ZAZ trio and director John Landis (he got “National Lampoon’s Animal House” off his work here). The hit-to-miss ratio here is extraordinarily high for a sketch comedy movie; it starts off incredibly strong with a morning news show goof (in which a sexually frustrated ape destroys the studio), and segues into more and more outrageous skits from there. The film loses a tad of momentum after its centerpiece, an “Enter the Dragon” parody called “A Fistful of Yen”, wraps up, but several shorter skits (most notably “Zinc Oxide and You”) evoke enough laughs to make the whole eighty-three-minute endeavor more than worth your while. There are two types of people in this world: those who worship Big Jim Slade, and those who’ve never seen “Kentucky Fried Movie”.

“The State” was, to some degree, the Gen X answer to “Your Show of Shows”. Broadcast ever so briefly on MTV, the sketch show could’ve done for comedy what Nirvana did for rock-and-roll. Alas, comedy nerds sick of SNL’s corporate complacency were in far shorter supply than music fans desperate to rebel against the Top 40 radio format. The culture finally, kinda got on their alt-humor wavelength when troupe member David Wain’s “Wet Hot American Summer” became a must-watch DVD in 2002. Ostensibly a parody of 1980s summer camp sex comedies, Wain and co-writer/ex-Stater Michael Showalter infuse their film with a hyper-specific recall of the decade’s strangest occurrences and obsessions (the movie’s climax involves a training montage and the collapse of Skylab). For kids who grew up constantly skipping between HBO and MTV in the channels’ early years (while devouring issues of Rolling Stone and Creem), “Wet Hot American Summer” is the warmest of movie blankets.

A chaotic stage sensation during its Broadway run in the late 1930s, the 1941 big-screen rendition of “Hellzapoppin’” stands out for completely transmogrifying its meta theatricality into an absurdist parody of the still quite young cinematic medium. The unifying element between the two shows is the long-forgotten vaudeville duo of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, who bumble their way through a fractured fourth-wall production that largely spoofs the conventions of stage musicals. The film introduces a Pirandellian device that finds the projectionist (Shemp Howard) becoming a character in the story (if you can call it that) by fouling up the presentation of the movie. It’s an anarchic delight that’s been ripe for rediscovery since Joe Dante coaxed Warner Bros into greenlighting a mega-budget remake under the guise of a “Gremlins” sequel.

In a “Star Trek”-like turnaround, the small-screen failure of “Police Squad!” begat a hugely successful big-screen franchise that’s quoted and cited incessantly today. All three entries in the series are loaded with laughs, but only the first installment offers the unmitigated joy of watching Leslie Nielsen, as Detective Frank Drebin, realize he could be so much more than a deadpan foil. Nielsen’s exquisite timing (physical and verbal) combined with his total lack of shame results in, no hyperbole, one of the greatest comedic performances of all time. Like Eddie Murphy, Jack Benny, or John Candy at their peak, you’re primed to laugh at any moment. The finale at Anaheim Stadium, where Drebin butchers the national anthem before ineptly umpiring an Angels-Mariners game, is zany anarchy worthy of the Marx Brothers. By the time the second movie rolled around, this was as much Nielsen’s franchise as ZAZ’s (indeed, this was the last time the trio would collaborate on a screenplay together).

There’s no more accurate definition of “chutzpah” than convincing a major studio to let you sequelize your first major blockbuster with a full-on spoof of what made it a hit in the first place. Joe Dante’s big-budget, funhouse follow-up to “Gremlins” is a deranged olio of monster movie tropes, media parody, and a sly takedown of Reagan-era corporate worship (represented by John Glover’s Daniel Clamp, a real-estate developer/cable TV mogul clearly modeled after Donald Trump and Ted Turner). Creature creator Rick Baker is given free rein with the Gremlins designs, riffing on Universal’s classic monsters and the Hammer reimaginings (with a very game Christopher Lee hamming it up as a mad scientist). For those who’ve seen at least fifty percent of the films Dante is referencing, it’s a multiple-viewing masterpiece.

“What if MacGuyver sucked at problem-solving” was a terrific premise for a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, but it seemed awfully thin for a feature-length movie. Fortunately, star Will Forte and his ace collaborators (Jorma Taccone and John Solomon) broadened the scope of the film’s satire, resulting in a wild, remarkably well-directed spoof of big-budget Hollywood action movies. The film’s relentless bad taste – exemplified by Forte offering to perform bizarre sexual favors for or on his commanding officer, played by Powers Boothe – turned off most mainstream critics, while moviegoers avoided it like a Miami Marlins game. Now, it’s widely regarded as one of the funniest movies of the 2010s. Forte and company will test their luck with a “MacGruber” series for Peacock.

The Monty Python lads take a blowtorch to the Arthurian legend with this hilarious absurd classic that is still turning precocious teenagers into fans of the British comedy troupe almost fifty years after its release. The sextet of lunatics aren’t terribly interested in spoofing the conventions of medieval yarns; mostly, they just want to profane the subgenre with as many bad taste gags as the movie’s ninety-minute runtime will hold. Pretty much every set piece is a classic: Arthur’s limb-by-limb defeat of the Black Knight, the vicious Rabbit of Caerbannog (felled by the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch), and the insult-hurling Frenchmen of Castle Aarrgh. The Pythons’ follow-up, “Life of Brian”, is every bit this film’s equal, but it’s more a spoof of religion than religious pictures.

While Mel Brooks’s “Blazing Saddles” takes a scattergun to the western, his “Young Frankenstein” – shot in black-and-white and presented in boxy ol’ academy ratio – is scalpel-like in its formal parody of James Whale’s classic monster yarns. This restraint is, however, limited to the technical end. You can’t bring together the likes of Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Teri Garr, Madeline Kahn, and Peter Boyle, and anything less than comedic bedlam. Though nowhere near as ribald as “Blazing Saddles”, the film is still loaded with enough filthy double entendres and belly laughs to necessitate multiple viewings to catch the jokes you laughed over your first, second, and third viewings. Wilder and Boyle’s rendition of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” is the consensus highlight, but it gets stiff competition from Gene Hackman’s cameo as the lonely blind man strangely taken with the monster’s size (“You must’ve been the tallest one in your class.”).

Whereas Mel Brooks’s big-screen spoofery grew out of madcap musical revues and the televised variety shows for which he wrote, the ZAZ team’s disaster movie goof prized verisimilitude. Practically a remake of the 1957 scare-in-the-air non-classic “Zero Hour!”, “Airplane!” gets some of its biggest laughs from the deadpan delivery of lines taken straight from its inspiration; it looks and sounds like a really bad studio programmer, which allows its zaniest detours – most notably a WWII movie parody that veers into a wildly anachronistic riff on Saturday Night Fever (thanks to a pair of brawling Girl Scouts) – to hit like megaton comedy bombs. “Airplane!” turned fading character actor Leslie Nielsen into one of Hollywood’s top comedic draws, and inspired a generation of jokesters to emulate its laugh-a-second formula. It’s one of the funniest and most influential films in the history of the medium.

Carl Reiner and Steve Martin’s finest collaboration is an aesthetically spot-on spoof of 1940s films noir. Martin stars as a hardboiled private eye hired to investigate the suspicious death of a famous scientist and cheesemaker. This would be more than enough lunacy on its own, but the movie’s ingenious hook has the star interacting with clips from some of the genre’s classic works. Martin banters with golden-era greats like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and, best of all, Humphrey Bogart as his sartorially challenged colleague Marlowe. Reiner cleverly sought out the expertise of several legends who worked during the era (e.g. composer Miklos Rosza, production designer John DeCuir, and, in her final big-screen credit, costumer Edith Head), and hired “Raging Bull” cinematographer Michael Chapman to give the film an authentic noir look. This adherence to detail heightens the sense of parody, which allows Reiner the luxury of understatement as he skillfully builds to his nutty finish.

Comedies, westerns, and the cinema, in general, were never the same after Mel Brooks unleashed “Blazing Saddles” on an unsuspecting public. The gag-packed tale of a black sheriff sent to fail in a very white village uses the quintessential American movie genre to send up the utter stupidity of racism. Collaborating with genius-level writers like Andrew Bergman and Richard Pryor (whom the studio bounced from the lead role for iffy reasons), Brooks puts the viewer in cahoots with Clevon Little’s lawman right from the start; we’re all in on the joke, which, for ninety-three minutes, unites the audience in unabashed laughter at all manner of bad taste. As Brooks told an offended moviegoer, “Blazing Saddles” rises below vulgarity. It is also one of very few comedies that is every bit as hilarious as the day it was released.

There’s never been a broader target for satire than rock-and-roll musicians or the rockumentaries they stumble through under the influence of god-knows-what, and the killer comedy quartet of Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Rob Reiner hit one bullseye after another in this one-time cult favorite that is now one of the most quoted films of all time. That the three stars are talented musicians in their own right lends the movie a rare authenticity; Guest, McKean, and Shearer pour their souls into the intentionally silly songs they wrote (e.g. “Big Bottom”, “Stonehenge”), and they never break character or the fourth wall to let the audience in on the joke. It’s squirm-inducing at times (getting lost in the bowels of the arena, or the limousine window divider getting rolled up on a too-chatty Bruno Kirby), and that’s because, for all its zaniness, it speaks the truth of life in the music industry. The mockumentary is now a thriving subgenre, but no one will ever do it better than the Tap.

After the failure of their cop-drama parody “Police Squad!”, the ZAZ boys played it safe and made a hybrid spoof of ‘60s spy flicks, Elvis movies, and the kind of teenybopper beach extravaganzas that went out of style around the time Lee Harvey Oswald proved to not be such a lousy marksman after all. “Top Secret!” bombed in the busy summer of 1984 (it hit the same month as “Gremlins”, “Ghostbusters” and “The Karate Kid”), but it’s acquired a devoted cult following over the last four decades. It’s the ZAZ team’s “Vertigo”: an impassioned summation of base obsessions that builds to a delirious climax (in this case, an Old West bar brawl in an underwater saloon). Val Kilmer is an eminently charming clown, and Omar Sharif delivers a heartbreaking portrayal of a double agent consigned to a living hell in the body of a smashed automobile. Shop at Macy’s, and love me tonight!