The Five Most Forgotten (and secretly most awesome) Parody Films in Existence

Humor is a very, very subjective subject.    What’s funny to one person definitely won’t be funny to another, but some parody films (Young Frankenstein, Airplane!, Not Another Teen Movie, Blazing Saddles and Naked Gun, for example) have stood the test of time and become universally beloved.  That said, some movies that are pretty darn good in this genre that have either been critically derided or completely ignored.  These are the top five most obscure – and achingly funny – parody movies you might not have heard of.

5: Top Secret!:  A very minor hit back when it was released in 1984, Top Secret is generally seen as a disappointment in the Zucker-Abrahams stable, even released as it was on the heels of the difficult to enjoy (though not as bad as everyone insist) Airplane II.  Pulling in 20 million at the box office, it’s notable for being Val Kilmer’s first starring vehicle.

A parody of Elvis Presley’s music-driven cotton-candy flimsy string of film hits and of the Cold War spy paranoia running rife through America’s pop cultural landscape, the movie is achingly over-the-top fun, with surfing singer Nick Rivers being dropped behind enemy lines to save American’s Soviet interests.  Long forgotten in the wake of the Naked Gun series that followed it a few years later, frequent cable re-showings have caused latter generations to reevaluate the film as a cult classic.

4: Repossessed: This is going to be a controversial entry.  There’s a lot wrong with this 1989 entry; cliched sex and puke jokes, and a worked-only-in-the-80s plot (if you’re old enough to remember Tammy Faye Bakker and Jim Bakker and their empire you’re probably a little too old to laugh often at this).  But on that completely sophomoric level there also exists a lot to redeem it, including a great performance by Leslie Nielson as Father Mayi, and Linda Blair kicking a little sand in the face of all of the people who insinuated she didn’t deserve an Oscar nomination for her work in The Exorcist by providing her own demon voice and physical stuntwork as Nancy Aglet, who is totally not a grown-up Regan MacNeil suffering her way through suburban angst until the devil climbs into her body through the TV set.

Repossessed is a strange little movie; too bad to be good, too good to be unwatchable.  It’s an oddball parody movie, and that alone makes it worth seeing.

3: The Big Bus:  Predating Airplane!  By four years, The Big Bus is a surprisingly good skewering of disaster films in which very big vehicles go off the rails in very big ways.  A notorious bomb in its day,  it too was helped out by frequent cable showings and elevated to cult status.

TBB gives Stockard Channing one of her better comedic showcases; as Kitty, the woman tasked with designing the highly impractical Behemoth, she holds the entire film together.   By the time the bus is literally falling apart as it lurches through the desert to its final destination  you’re guaranteed to have laughed aloud thanks to her performance.

2: Wrongfully Accused:  In the wake of the success of the Naked Gun Trilogy a flood of parody films entered the market.  Some were successful (The Hot Shots series), some were uneven (Spy Hard; Mafia!);  some, however, were relegated to the dustbins by the glut, forever destined to languish until they were retrieved for further analysis .  But for every Robin Hood: Men in Tights that’s been reevaluated by the public there’s a movie like Wrongfully Accused that’s a tiny gem that rips about the Fugitive remake with hilarious aplomb.

Leslie Nielsen made his post-Naked Gun stock in trade portraying versions of Frank Drebin, but his Ryan Harrison actually stands out as a character that exists in proper mien that’s not rehashed or recontextualized.  The movie reels from one delirious set piece after another, but at the center is one of Nielsen’s best and most underrated performances.

1: National Lampoon’s Movie Madness and National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1: The National Lampoon is far more famous for its straight comedy films like Animal House and the Vacation series, but they’ve been producing parody films since the late 70s, and Loaded Weapon and At the Movies are the best two examples in their current canon.

At the Movies boasts one particularly strong segment, “Growing Yourself”, an absolutely vicious deconstruction of boomer “divorce chic” films that were prevalent back in the late 70s in which a man sheds his entire family in the pursuit of personal growth.    His selfishness is so extreme and ridiculous that he ultimately ends up confusing orgasmic sex with emotional development.   The second and third segments are a bit weaker, the former being a parody of revenge flicks combined with a poke at the glossy soap opera miniseries that were prevalent in the era and focuses in on a butter vs margarine battle driven by a woman with an understandable grudge (There's a big trigger warning on that particular segment, but it's generally skipable)  and the third a send-up of gritty pathology-heavy cop pictures that descends into a keystone cops parody.  But the first segment is quite worth watching, especially if you’re old enough to remember that glut of Kramer vs Kramer wannabes who overtook the box office back then.

Loaded Weapon, meanwhile, takes Emilio Estevez and a just-pre-fame Samuel L. Jackson and plunks them into a straight-on parody of the Lethal Weapon series.  Tim Curry adds some able assistance as the hammy villain, and plenty of ridiculous cameos.  The movie was actually a #1 hit but has since gone on to be forgotten by the public – which is a shame, because it’s cheesy 90s atmosphere is still a wonderful time capsule of the era.