Is it possible to exhibit complete brilliance in one medium and utter ineptitude in another? This trailer for the four-years-in-the-delaying The Onion Movie vehemently argues in the affirmative.
Yikes. Conceptually, the Steven Seagal parody is funny, but the execution is tone deaf. The rest is desperation. This trailer is featured on the DVD for The Darjeeling Limited, which suggests that Fox Searchlight plans to get the film off the books sometime this year… if there’s enough movie for a proper release. A couple of years ago, a friend who’d seen a cut of the film told me it was unreleasable by any reasonable standards (there was apparently less than an hour of movie at this point). I don’t know if producer David Zucker has done anything in the interim to remedy this. This would be a good question for the Superhero Movie junket; unfortunately, he’s not attending.
This trailer did get me thinking about all of the sketch flicks that invaded theaters in the 70s. Though The Groove Tube was the pioneer, there’s just no surpassing The Kentucky Fried Movie (those who disagree can take it up with the sexual dynamo that is Big Jim Slade). The worst? It’s got to be Loose Shoes.