Shallow Parody / Live-Action Films

• Airplane! includes a parody of a famous scene from From Here to Eternity despite none of the writers having watched that film. According to the commentary, because the writers had never seen the film, they didn't even know they were parodying it.
• Bikini Beach: Frankie Avalon plays a British invasion rocker/race car driver called "The Potato Bug" — but rather than any sort of direct parody of The Beatles, the character is basically just Terry-Thomas in a blond shag wig.
• Films that intend to be Genre Deconstruction sometimes get accused of actually just being watered-down genre pieces made by people who don't really like the genre in question. The generally well-received Booksmart got a few negative reviews accusing it of being a standard teen comedy with a few novel elements added to make it seem edgier.
• The scenes of Kazakhstan in Borat were all fairly generic developing nation stereotypes given a vaguely Eastern European tone and taken to the extreme, meaning they barely managed to represent what Kazakhstan was actually like in the first place. ^note Kazakhstan is only barely in Eastern Europe. The country is almost entirely in Central Asia and ethnic Kazakhs are clearly Asian, not European. Consequently, most of Europe was offended, Romania (where the scenes were filmed) was outraged, and the Kazakhs thought it was funny as hell. The driving reason for this was that Sacha Baron Cohen, a British-born Jewish man of Palestinian and Belarusian descent who can speak Hebrew, can convincingly pass for an Eastern European man but would have no chance in hell of passing for a Central Asian man, and Romania was as close to Central Asia as they could get without him sticking out like a sore thumb.
• The Italian movie Box Office 3D features a lot of badly written parodies of popular films from when it was released, failing at it in multiple directions. Some of the things that can be found in this film include a Twilight parody that assumes the franchise is about a bunch of classic movie monsters and horror movie characters fighting to get the same girl and a Harry Potter parody where the punchline is that the characters are Not Allowed to Grow Up and the movies will constantly come out with the same, blatantly overaged actors, neither of which are actually true (by the end of the latter series, the characters are in their final year of school).
• The parodies of Craig Moss are as reviled as Seltzer and Friedberg, if lesser-known (many didn't even hit theaters). Some even go the route of cramming in as many references as possible, thinking that's a joke by itself.
  • The 41-Year-Old Virgin who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It mostly consists of shot-by-shot recreations of scenes of the movies it parodies extended into Overly Long Gags alternated with randomic references to whatever was popular at the time.
  • 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with The Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Breaking Wind largely consist of pop culture references combined with out-and-out plagiarism of dialogue from these movies to pad out the run time.
• Darling Lili was an attempt by director Blake Edwards to deconstruct the typecasting surrounding Julie Andrews - who of course was famous for playing the Magical Nanny in both Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. She plays Lili Smith - an entertainer in World War I with a reputation as a sweet English Rose...who's actually a Femme Fatale Spy. Despite touching on interesting issues, such as Lili's possible frustration at having to preserve the image of something she's not, it only mocks superficial aspects of the Julie Andrews persona - such as cloying songs and a good girl reputation. Both Better With Bob? and The Parallel Julieverse point out that both Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp were strong, active characters who inspired Character Development in others and contributed to their plots - and for all their supposed corniness, both had a Bittersweet Ending (Mary leaving the Banks children sadly, and the Von Trapp's having to escape the Nazis). Lili meanwhile ends up a passive Damsel in Distress who needs to be saved by all the men around her, and the deconstruction offers up no alternative, in favor of a straight happy ending. As one reviewer put it:
  "At no point are we invited to pass judgment on this brazen English hussy who is betraying the man she purports to love, because after all, she's still Julie Andrews. Even when she's sinning, she's not sinning for real."
• Maven of the Eventide felt Dracula: Dead and Loving It was a shallow parody of the Dracula mythos - since it makes fun of Lucy's status as the 'slutty best friend', and that detail was from the more recent Bram Stoker's Dracula (which, despite the title, was hardly a faithful adaptation). It also goes for the obvious parody of British Stuffiness, which is pretty ironic in light of how the Hollywood adaptations of the book were far more sanitized.
  "It doesn't make much sense for Americans to be making fun of British repression when Hollywood's Dracula movies were so sterile compared to Hammer's..."
• Doug Walker felt Enchanted fell into shallow parody a lot of times, especially in its attempt to deconstruct Disney's habit of Love at First Sight - since such a thing only happened in the Disney films of the 30s and 50s, and the Renaissance films featured characters having proper romance arcs where they got to know each other (the closest to Love at First Sight, Ariel and Eric, still had a Time Skip to their wedding). Likewise Queen Nerissa expresses surprise at Giselle being the one to save Robert, when the likes of Ariel, Belle, Jasmine and Pocahontas were active characters who saved their love interests at various points of the movie.
• The Joy Luck Club has an incredibly out of place Take That! to The World of Suzie Wong, calling it a "horrible racist film". Suzie Wong actually has a fairly progressive anti-racism message for the time. One journalist HY Nahm noted that this is a common attitude among Gen-X Asian Americans who grew up hearing about the movie but never actually saw it (and Nahm watched the film after interviewing its lead actress Nancy Kwan and was surprised that it was nothing like its reputation). In fact, Nancy Kwan turned down a role in the film specifically because they refused to remove the Take That! and she found it too mean-spirited.
• Maleficent - a live action retelling of Disney's Sleeping Beauty - deconstructs the True Love's Kiss from the original, by having Philip say he can't kiss the unconscious Aurora. This is clearly responding to uncomfortable parallels people drew between the original and date rape. Except, as a writer of The Mary Sue pointed out, comparing the climax of Sleeping Beauty to sexual assault is taking it out of context. Aurora is not just merely asleep or unconscious - she's been cursed with an enchanted sleep that she'll never wake from on her own, and the kiss is the only thing that can save her. The kiss is not being done with malicious intent, as it's the only thing that will wake her from the enchanted sleep. Philip is also not some stranger who sees an unconscious girl and decides to kiss her; he's her fiancé who she was in love with, and he was told he had to kiss her to break the curse. And that once Aurora wakes up, she very clearly doesn't have a problem with Philip kissing her.
  "This is not a drunken accidental hook up, or an older male authority figure taking advantage of a younger co-worker. He is literally saving her from an eternity of sleep... Non-verbal consent is a thing, and Aurora gives Phillip plenty of it in her body language once she is comfortable around him and her reaction to Phillip during her awakening. She is not upset about being kissed, she got kissed by someone she liked, she would have kissed him if she was awake..."
• Murder by Death features many parodies of famous fictional detectives, some of which are rather shallow:
  • The way Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot are parodied has completely nothing to do with these characters. Miss Marple is prone to long-winding stories about her home village and is a mild-mannered sweet old lady. Poirot is very composed and precise and, most of all, very polite to everyone he meets; he wouldn't dream of screaming at people. The characters in the film are their opposites, which would work, but none of the others are portrayed that way.
  • The film also misses the point of Nick Charles. Dick Charleston is portrayed as "enormously well-bred" and sophisticated. Nick's wife is classy, but Nick himself is a streetwise New York flatfoot, and one of the series' Running Gags is how little he tries to fit in as a socialite.
• The fictional world of Pleasantville was obviously conceived by someone who detested the squeaky-clean, idealized version of American society depicted in 1950's-era sitcoms and was eager to deconstruct them with prejudice, but had also never actually watched any of them.
• One of many flaws in the Seltzer and Friedberg "parody" films, such as Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, and the aptly named Disaster Movie. In fact, Disaster Movie parodies films which were not released at the time the script was written (which would go on to become a theme in their next several movies). As a result, it includes parodies of films which flopped and were already forgotten by the time Disaster Movie made it to theaters.
  • Vampires Suck mostly averts this, except for a couple of throwaway gags.
  • The Starving Games continues their "trend" of focusing all the comedy on sight gags and random pop culture references based on the trailers of contemporary movies, to the point where calling it a "parody" is a bit of a stretch.
  • Superfast!, which was even released direct-to-video in North America, didn't help. Reviewers noted that the movie is kind of redundant, given the Fast and Furious franchise had long since entered Self-Parody territory.
• The script of The Slumber Party Massacre was written by an angry feminist activist as a Deconstructive Parody / Take That! directed at slasher horror movies... but the parody was so shallow and clueless that the (female) director thought it was a straight example of the genre and filmed it as such. The script itself is functionally identical to all the slasher movies that it was ostensibly meant to mock, with most of the humor being based on subversions of tropes and conventions that were never a thing to begin with. For instance, having the female leads be horny party girls instead of impossibly pure virgins, or the male characters being helpless and expendable instead of macho action heroes; anybody who's ever seen a single horror movie could tell you that's how it usually is.
• Spaceballs was accused of being a shallow parody by critics when first released in 1987, although most fans today say otherwise. For example, Princess Vespa initially seems more like a parody of fictional princesses in general than of Leia in particular, at least until her Character Development after the hairdryer scene. Mel Brooks himself commented on this trope via this film, saying that it's too easy to make fun of bad things and you should "only mock what you love."
• Starship Troopers: The film is an In Name Only adaptation of the book to begin with, so this was inevitable. By his own admission, Paul Verhoeven only read part of the book and decided that it was endorsing Fascism (which it doesn't; as with all things concerting Robert A. Heinlein, the views expressed in the book are much more complicated), causing the film to satirize political aspects of the book that it doesn't have. Consequently, while the film works overall as a satire of fascism and militarism, its attempts to take on the book are... questionable. The Mobile Infantry are portrayed as a bunch of clueless Cannon Fodder in an effort to portray them realistically, but the book's Mobile Infantry are a highly-trained group of Elite Mooks who get badass Powered Armor, shoulder-mounted nukes and are deployed in Drop Pods very unlike the film's dropships, and the book goes out of its way to describe how each and every one of them is a One-Man Army. The movie also makes it ambiguous to how sentient the Bugs are and implies that Humans Are the Real Monsters in order to contrast the book's supposed jingoism, even though the killing of nonhumans is something that Johnnie Rico grapples with in the book. Finally, the Federation is portrayed as a hyper-miltaristic nation in which citizenship can only be obtained through military service as a satire of the book's Federation, where citizenship can be obtained by doing multiple different kinds of public service, not just military-based.
• Thumb Wars, a parody of Star Wars, ends with the Obi-Wan analogue giving the Luke analogue advice as he prepares to destroy the Death Star - not to use the Force or "reach out with his feelings", but to use his targeting computer, because that's what it was designed to do. In the original film, Obi-Wan didn't instruct Luke to use the Force out of some sense of Jedi dogma, as the parody seems to think; the movie took pains to show that Red Leader, a veteran pilot, had tried to make the shot and failed, even with the aid of his targeting computer. The shot was impossible to make with technology and skill alone; a major theme of the Original Trilogy is Luke learning to trust that the Force can achieve things that are otherwise impossible.

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