Meet The Spartans (2008)
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There are many different subcategories of cinematic badness. There are films that are just poorly put together, badly scripted, and/or generally boring. They’re bad, but it’s sort of a passive badness. Your only real response is “Meh”. With that as a foundation, you move through the ranks toward those films that you couldn’t call passive but are still essentially benign. So much has gone awry that you either grumble about it or get a chuckle at its expense, but then you move on with your life and don’t think about it anymore.
Now we’re getting into the fun stuff. You got your bad movies that are aggressively (and often intentionally) bad. Here’s where you find Evil Dead, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, and Killer Klowns From Outer Space. I won’t lie, they’re gonna eat some brain cells, but it’ll feel SO good! This place, however, is not nearly so visitor-friendly as it first appears. See, somebody put the choice cuts on the top shelf and left the offal all over the floor. To get to 2001 Maniacs you have to wade through the entrails, snouts, and rectums that make up Return of the Living Dead 5: Rave to the Grave. It’s real easy to get mired down in all the feces, and this is what ultimately makes all but the most stout of heart turn back to travel more sane routes.
The next circle of Hell is reserved for those movies that aren’t necessarily intentionally bad, but wallow so gleefully in their own rottenness that they’re joy incarnate. Needless to say, this is where you’ll usually find me hanging out. First shelf: Roger Corman. Second shelf: Hammer. Third Shelf: Half of Italy. A whole room full of Joe D’Amato and Jesus Franco! Every giant snake movie ever made! Zombies as far as the eye can see! Nunspoitation! Nazi atrocities! Women in prison! Killer rats! God, I love this place! You have to watch your step a little – such things as Men Behind the Sun and I Spit on Your Grave dwell here ready to snap at the synapses of the unwary – but for the courageous man, this is a king’s ransom begging to be looted.
But don’t be fooled because in actuality this is a trap. It exists to lull you into a false sense of security, leaving you open and vulnerable to attack by things that lurk in the darkness beyond. Uncomfortably close to us lies that which man was truly not meant to know; cinematic nightmares so unrelentingly bad they threaten your very psyche. You must tread lightly here, for at every turn a film like The Attic prowls, ready to pounce at the first sign of weakness. None but the most battle-hardened dare venture here.
But we’re still nowhere near the end of our tour. Tremble, ye mortals, for now we have reached the Forbidden Vaults. Under lock and key lie movies that will pull your soul out your mouth and wipe their butt with it. Sob for your mother bad. Burn your DVD player in effigy bad. Undergo frontal lobotomy just to erase the GODAWFUL THING FROM YOUR FUCKING MEMORY bad.
In short, dear friends, here there be monsters.
MEET THE SPARTANS
For a minute or two there, I thought I was going to have to wimp on this one. Not because I couldn’t get hold of it, it’s just my DVD player spit it out in protest. It took some cajoling, a couple hits, and a promise to reward it with Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter before it finally relented and agreed to play the fucking thing. I should have listened to my DVD player. It’s smarter than I am.
It is now anyway, since my IQ dropped at least twenty points from watching this slithering abortion of a movie.
This piece isn’t the easiest I’ve ever done. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, my usual genre choices hang out in the sci-fi/horror/exploitation part of town. The reason for that is a failed movie generally evokes the opposite reaction of what the filmmakers were going for. Hence Bloody Pit of Horror is a laugh riot and Reefer Madness is the second-best movie in the world to get messed up for. Blood Freak is THE best movie in the world to get messed up for, but that’s another review.
Which brings me to my problem. I have no idea what the fuck I can say that would be amusing about a movie that avoids humor like it’s a case of the crotch rot. I guess I can sort of liken it to spending a few hours with your cousin Bubba who keeps asking you to pull his finger and laughing like a jackass.
At first, Meet the Spartans seems fairly innocuous, basically following the plot of 300 with a bunch of unfunny sight gags as the core humor. Now I love good sight gag movies. I think Airplane! is only one step down from Young Frankenstein in the hierarchy of the funniest shit you ever saw. Here, all I can say about the sight gags is that they aren’t funny. Without exception they all fall squarely into the “Meh” category. But before you start thinking I’m letting this piece of dross off easy, there’s much MUCH more to be considered here. This is purest evil we're dealing with.
Good sight gag movies are manic by necessity. The jokes are cheesy at best, so the tactic is to pile them on with a backhoe, shooting from one to the next without stopping to take a breath. Do NOT let the audience get ahead of the movie. A good sight gag is like a sucker punch – it’s aggressive, you don’t see it coming, and it doesn’t hang around after nailing you. Most important, however, is a strict poker face must be maintained. The single mightiest fuck-up any comedian can make is to laugh at his own jokes.
If you screen capture that last paragraph and Photoshop a negative image, the result will be pretty close to the game plan of Meet the Spartans. We’ve got the endless deluge of stupid jokes, but the movie obviously thinks it’s about a thousand times funnier than it is. So every pointless, stupid, UNfunny gag is dwelt on a thousand times longer than it should be. Your reaction to the first ‘joke’ may be a simple “Meh”, but by the ten-minute mark the relentless assault of NOT FUNNY starts to bore through your skull to get at the tasty headmeats inside. And it's only going to get worse.
That’s just the generic element of the movie, we still need our hilarious set-pieces to make it complete. The defining moments. There’s no way in hell I’m going into all of these, except to say they’re the definition of pig shit. I will tackle one key scene, however.
I went so far as to conduct a little experiment. As a rule, potty humor just isn’t my thing. I watch South Park, but tend to become distracted whenever Mr. Hanky puts in an appearance. But here I got to thinking – much of what makes my life worth living is composed of acquired tastes. It took a long time and much effort to learn to appreciate some of the films that are now in my “world’s greatest” list. So maybe that’s my problem here, maybe I just haven’t given potty humor enough of a chance. I laughed when “the shit hit the fan” in Airplane!, right? So let’s check this scene out and see if I’ve just been being a curmudgeon all along.
Big fake penguin fighting our hero. Okay. Penguin makes hero lick his huge penguin testicles. Hmm. Penguin turns around and squirts about six gallons of penguin diarrhoea into our hero’s open mouth. Ahah.
Wait, what?
Okay, whatever it was, I missed it. So just to show you how dedicated I really am I’m going to actually REWIND THIS THING and watch it again! Relax, breathe, open mind.
Sorry, I’m still just seeing a guy licking penguin balls and gobbling runny penguin shit. Okay. Breathe. Breathe. Think of something happy. Okay, one more time, you can do it.
Okay, that’s it. Three is as far as I’m willing to take this, and I’m only five minutes into the fucking movie. Experiment over. Result: Somewhere along the way the lowest common denominator went into the negative numbers.
So we’ve got the aggressive unfunnyness of the ‘big’ scenes added to the passive unfunnyness of the film as a whole. My spell checker hates me. Normally, this wouldn’t make for anything that noteworthy, just another crap film. But the most horrible thing this oozing pile of fecal matter passing for a movie does to you is so... insidious that it borders on the satanic.
An example and a smile alert. Yes folks, for one brief and shocking moment this cinematic toxic spill actually made me smile! The film’s main line of offense is the constant gay jokes, and I do number among those who think that 300 had more homoeroticism than you could shake a baby-oiled gladiator at. My smile died a quick and painful death however, as the horror of what I had unleashed upon myself showed its true face.
Picture: A bunch of oiled-up homoerotic Spartans marching off to battle via a musical number set to “I Will Survive”. By all rights, this should be funny as hell. All the pieces are in place for a nice bit of satire. It’s got the perfect level of tastelessness and it makes a mockery of something many of us find humorous already. This should be great.
Why isn’t it?
Dear God, why isn’t this funny?
Oh somebody help me help me why isn’t this funny WHY ISN’T THIS FUNNY?
And NOW it reveals itself. This isn’t just a bad comedy, oh no. This isn't just a collection of stupid jokes that don’t work. What we have on our hands here is ANTI-humor! It’s not satisfied with just not being funny itself, it wants to nullify all levity that crosses its path. There is now a great big humor void in the middle of my living room that I can’t get rid of! I’ve run half my Mel Brooks collection through, and all the funny just got sucked right up! I don’t know what to do! Does anybody know an exorcist?
When Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer’s next set burns down in mid production, I was with you guys all night, okay?
Final Rating: Oh holy hell…