Superhero Movie

I had a small moment this weekend where I was able to toss in a movie. So I rummaged through the multitude of movies I have yet to watch and selected one out.

Sunday I tossed in Superhero Movie another spoof movie - there seems to be about three per year nowadays.

The recipe is pretty familiar, find a typical type of movie franchise - in this film it was obviously the superhero franchise - mix in your typical pop culture references, throw in random celebrities, and try to get the audience to laugh at the slap-stick humor.

In most cases, the film follows one film pretty closely. In this case, it was Spiderman. Teenager Rick Riker (Drake Bell) is your Peter Parker-type character. He longs for the girl he should never get, Jill Johnson (Sara Paxton), is a bit of a geek and totally gets picked on by the bullies, one of which is his crush's actual boyfriend.

Well, Riker happens to get bitten by a genetically altered dragonfly on a class trip - and, yup you guess it - starts to develop super powers - and becomes Dragonfly.

Riker lives with his aunt and uncle (Marion Ross and Leslie Nielson), who try to be infuential in his life after the loss of his parents - all very Spiderman-y.

The villain is known as Hourglass (Christopher McDonald), who has a disease where he needs to suck the life out of a human each day to survive. He develops a plan to suck in enough life at a single time to become immortal. And it's up to Dragonfly to save the day.

The movie wasn't horrible - a lot of different parts could have absolutely been removed from the film, like the X-Men parts, but then the movie would have been under an hour.

I am a fan of Drake Bell from his Drak & Josh days, and he did pretty well in the starring role. I also think Sara Paxton is a knockout - so she wasn't hard to look at as well.

Like all spoof movies, everything and anything was well over the top to try and make a laugh. And, I laughed a few times during the film.

I think that the Scary Movie franchise has done the world a diservice by continually marching out these films. The first one was done rather well, but they have to know where to draw the line.

But, for a quick 100 minutes or whatever, it wasn't a total waste of time.

Grade: