Bratty Girl

Just like "Scary Movie," "Epic Movie" and "Meet the Spartans," "Superhero Movie" is a lampoon flick that spoof past films about superheroes.

It’s made by some of the makers of the team that parodied the "Airport" movies before in "Airplane," and in all fairness, they have more laughs to offer than the Wayans Brothers who also indulge in this kind of genre. The superhero flicks they spoof here include "Spiderman," "X Men" and "Batman Begins."

The hero is a high school dork, Rick Riker (Drake Bell), who pines for the most popular girl in their campus, Jill Johnson (Sara Paxton.) Jill actually has feelings for him also but they can’t seem to connect with each other. During a field trip to a science laboratory, a genetically altered dragonfly bites Rick, and this gives him super powers. Like Peter Parker/Spidey, he can now climbs walls, scale skyscrapers, and becomes known as the Dragonfly.

A wealthy owner of a research company, Lou Landers (Christopher McDonald), is terminally ill and he’s hoping an experiment that can treat DNA will heal him. But something goes wrong in the treatment and he instead becomes a demon who is a menace to humans. He becomes this evil entity called the Hourglass who wears a preposterous costume and he must kill thousands of people to sustain his own life force. It becomes the Dragonfly’s task to save the people in their city.

This kind of spoof is aimed primarily at teen viewers and also older ones whose intelligence never developed. Just like other flicks of this genre, we are given a buffet offering of crude jokes and sexual sight gags (one implied bestiality and there are scenes of breasts and crouches being fondled.) Slapstick humor abounds, marked with violence like beatings, pratfalls, impalings, hitting with objects and even gunshots.

Some of them are not really funny but have a mean streak, like an old woman being fed into a machine. Toilet humor is likewise rampant, like Rick’s senile aunt (Marion Ross) having frequent farting attacks while sleeping on a sofa.

Leslie Nielsen did a lot of James Bond spoof in "The Naked Gun" series, but as Rick’s uncle, he’s now just too old to be doing physical jokes and even sexual ones like when he goes on top of a dead woman and simulates sexual movements. Pamela Anderson as Invisible Woman once again gets to show her scientifically augmented tops while Regina Bell goes over the top as a screeching angry woman called Mrs. Xavier. Brent Spiner and Robert Hayes also do cameo roles that manage to be quite funny.

As usual, real life public figures are played by look-alikes and made fun of, like Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and the wheelchair-bound scientist, Stephen Hawking (author of "A Brief History of Time"), who complains about his lesbian nurse and endorses suicide and the use of drugs in high school. He’s later shown being attacked by bees and falling from the roof of a building. Also parodied are Catholic priests.

Just like "Meet the Spartans," the movie’s running time is quite short, so they pad the end credits with additional scenes of lowbrow outtakes, bloopers and silliness. The movie lacks genuinely hilarious punch lines. Some of the gags will also not be recognizable to most local viewers, like the joke on Tom Cruise and Scientology.