You Got Spoofed

Even as someone who thought Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2 were two of the most loathsome filmgoing experiences of my life, I have to give the Wayans family credit: making a spoof of dance movies is a pretty good idea. And with Dance Flick, they’ve chosen the perfect film to form the spine of their screenplay: Save the Last Dance, starring Julia Stiles as the sheltered ballerina and Sean Patrick Thomas as the black classmate she falls for (and who teaches her some fresh new hip-hop moves along the way).

But what are all these other movies director Damien Dante Wayans — he’s Keenen Ivory Wayans’ nephew — decided to pile on top of it? Take Dance Flick’s recreation of one of Save the Last Dance’s campiest scenes, in which Stiles’ mother dies in a car crash on the way to watch her Juilliard tryout. In Dance Flick’s version, the mother has a bouquet of flowers on the seat next to her, with a tag reading “Megan’s Mom: 1965-2009.” (She’s delivering flowers to her own funeral?) Just as we see the Grim Reaper sitting in the backseat growling, “Die, bitch!” she plows into a Chevron gas truck — except the logo here reads “Cheney.” A few eyewitnesses to the crash appear, apparently to help her, but actually to steal some free gas. Finally, the mother gets free of the wreckage before it explodes, only to be run over by a car with a license plate that says “LINDSAY.” Then she’s run over by another car; the license plate of this one says “BRANDY.” Then a third one rams into her and sends her flying into an open grave. The third car’s license plate, we now see, says “HALLE” — and a black woman in Halle Berry’s Catwoman costume bursts out of it, shouting, “Oh no! Not again!”

Amidst all of this action, Wayans keeps cutting back to the daughter (played by Shoshana Bush) at her audition — she starts out dressed in a leotard, but then switches to Abigail Breslin’s Little Miss Sunshine getup and dances around to “Super Freak.” When her routine is over, she yells, “I’m Rick James, bitch!” and gets a pie in the face. Then she’s told her mom is dead.

The incoherence of this whole sequence is kind of breathtaking. And it doesn’t stop there: Dance Flick doesn’t just jump randomly from Save the Last Dance to You Got Served to Fame (all of which at least belong to roughly the same genre); for some reason, it even finds it necessary to throw in spoofs of Twilight and Black Snake Moan. One character is a lookalike for Hairspray’s Nikki Blonsky, but she never gets to dance a step. There’s a gay character, and Wayans apparently considers his sexual orientation so inherently hilarious that he doesn’t see the need to assign him any jokes beyond that. There’s a blind kid in the movie — he’s supposed to be the young Jamie Foxx from Ray — and even with five Wayanses working on the script, the only gag he gets to do is spill hot coffee into someone’s lap and then walk into an open manhole.

An open manhole! The creative poverty of that joke staggers the imagination. Someone should lose their WGA license over this movie. Isn't this a clear-cut case of comedy malpractice?