Disaster Movie

Once upon a time the movie parody genre could be relied on to deliver laughs - Airplane!, The Naked Gun series and Mel Brooks's early movies always had a fair quotient of giggles. These days, though, the genre has been taken hostage by writer/directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, whose cinematic conveyor belt continues to crank out execrable dross like Date Movie and Meet the Spartans with alarming regularity. Disaster Movie follows the same tired formula by loosely apeing a major movie plot (in this case Cloverfield), then packing in references to other, entirely unconnected, recent movies (Indiana Jones, High School Musical, Juno) in the mistaken belief this constitutes humour. Depressingly, these magpie parodies are so cheap to produce they can't fail to make money - which probably means this interminable franchise is far from over.