Avis Metacritic

The humor is coarse and occasionally funny. The archly bombastic score, by Edward Sheamur, is the only thing you might call witty. But happily, Jennifer Coolidge and Fred Willard show up, as the White Bitch and Aslo the Lion, to add some easy, demented class.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, big studio Hollywood hitmakers should consider themselves lauded to the max in Jason Friedberg and Aaron Selzer's Epic Movie, the latest (and epically unfunny) entry in the movie parody franchise.

The cinematic equivalent of a tapeworm, this delivers few laughs beyond the initial chuckles of recognition. Seltzer and Friedberg (who also directed) have another script in development called "Raunchy Movie"; apparently one idea they haven't yet considered is "Watchable Movie."

Epic Movie is a waste of time. It's like a bad issue of "Cracked Magazine" come to life. It's not so much painful as it is sleep inducing.

The sadists responsible for the painfully unfunny "Date Movie" (2006) are back, and this time they've outdone themselves: This theater-clearer is even less amusing than its terrible predecessor, a spoof so devoid of laughs it can longer be categorized as a comedy.

Still, if it gets little else right, at least Epic Movie is accurately titled: It may be only 86 minutes long, but it feels as if it lasts forever.

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer must be stopped. For the last two years, this filmmaking team has created a series of spoof movies so feeble, shoddy and unfunny that they may be part of a diabolical, "Manchurian Candidate"-like plot to stunt the intellectual development of American adolescents.

By the time this dud drops on NetFlix, it'll be as obsolete as a Chia pet jokebook.

This spoof of "The Da Vinci Code," "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Harry Potter," "The Chronicles of Narnia" and other recent blockbusters piles up sex gags, toilet gags and make-you-gag gags.

The willful sloppiness and retrograde gags make Epic Movie, which was not shown to critics, an inevitable byproduct of our Internet video era. It seems downloaded and projected onto the screen, a failing online-film-school project paid for and put out by a Hollywood movie studio. That said, very little on YouTube is this unentertaining.