The Fascinating World of Fake Movies

The Art of Fake Movies

Movies and TV shows often create fake movies to satirize their own industry, but some of these phony films would actually be amazing if they were genuine. These fake movies are most often used as a way to comment on the film industry, or the ways audiences react to certain kinds of movies. In some cases, fake movies can be self-parodying works of art, used as a meta-commentary to closely examine the relationship between a movie and its audience.

Terrance and Phillip in South Park

Not all fake movies have such specific goals, however. Some are simply a fun distraction for the characters, and this could explain why action movies seem to be parodied more than most other genres. Plenty of fake movies are deliberately terrible. They're meant to represent extreme cases of lazy writing and absurd plots, but this doesn't apply to all fake movies. A select few have the potential to be genuinely brilliant, due to their impressive casts or unique ideas. Fake movies don't need to be as detailed as real ones, so they have boundless potential. They rarely contain deep themes, since they're often the punchline of a joke, but this allows them to explore zany ideas that would be deemed too absurd for most real movies.

A packed out movie theatre for Stab in Scream 2

Fake movies are peculiar works of art, adding extra layers of meaning to real movies and TV shows.

The Art of Fake Movies

Noteworthy Fake Movies

Terrance & Phillip: Asses Of Fire

George Clooney dressed in Roman armor in Hail, Caesar

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut references its own hype with the characters excited about seeing the Terrance and Phillip movie, Asses of Fire. While Asses of Fire doesn’t act as a direct meta-commentary about the South Park movie, the public’s reaction to Terrance and Phillip’s crass humor reflects how some people see South Park. Asses of Fire is idiotic and deliberately offensive. It is everything that South Park’s detractors think the show is. Almost everyone walks out of the movie theater, but Cartman, Kyle, Stan and Kenny can’t get enough. Asses of Fire is a clever way to comment on people’s overblown reactions to South Park.

Jim Carrey in Leap Dave Williams, the fictional movie from 30 Rock

Stab

The gang sit in a movie theatre alone in It’s Always Sunny In Philidelphia

The Scream franchise has been satirizing the bloodthirsty slasher genre since the very beginning, but Scream 2 took this commentary one step further with the creation of the fictional Stab movies. The self-parodying Stab franchise allows Scream to examine the merits of the horror genre and the reactions of its audience. The cast of the Stab movies in Scream includes Tori Spelling, Vince Vaughan, and Rutger Hauer. The timeline of the Stab franchise is complicated by the fact that almost the entire cast is murdered in Scream 3. A real-life Stab movie would need another real-life tragedy to depict. It would almost certainly be incredibly insensitive at the very least.

McBain Rainier Wolfcastle in The Simpsons

Rochelle, Rochelle

McBain is holding up a gun in The Simpsons.

Seinfeld has tons of great fake movies, from political thriller Chunnel to family comedy Sack Lunch. Rochelle, Rochelle is the most famous Seinfeld movie, and it appears several times throughout the series. Described as “a young girl’s strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk,” Rochelle, Rochelle captures everyone’s attention, even if it turns out to be terrible. Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer would have preferred to see Checkmate instead, and they all walk out of Rochelle, Rochelle. Still, the movie is popular enough to get a Broadway adaptation starring Bette Midler, and George is caught renting a copy by Susan much later, so it must have stuck in his mind.

McBain and McBabe are standing in a doorway.

Unrealized Potential

Tropic Thunder

The Simpsons McBain movie part 3

The movie within a movie in Tropic Thunder never ends up being made, partly because the director explodes, and partly because key members of the cast are kidnapped by terrorists. This is a shame, because the movie did show some potential before the production went south. It’s a war movie, and although it seems derivative of Platoon and Apocalypse Now in particular, it boasts an all-star cast and some impressive practical effects. Kirk Lazarus and Tugg Speedman provide a blend of Oscar-winning prestige and action blockbuster pedigree. If they had the chance to complete the adaptation of Four Leaf Tayback’s phony memoir, it could have been a huge success.

The Simpsons McBain movie part 4

Hail, Caesar!

Leonardo DiCaprio wielding a flamethrower in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

The Coen brothers show snippets of a few fake movies in Hail, Caesar, and each one embodies a popular genre from Hollywood in the 1950s. Channing Tatum appears in a lavish tap-dancing musical, Scarlett Johansson performs a synchronized swimming dance number, and Alden Ehrenreich is woefully miscast as a John Wayne-type in a British period drama. The most interesting movie is the biblical epic Hail, Caesar, starring Baird Whitlock (George Clooney). Hail, Caesar echoes classics like Ben-Hur and Lawrence of Arabia with its grand scale. The finished product remains a mystery, but it has all the hallmarks of an extravagant Old Hollywood event.

Home Alone Angels With Filthy Souls

Leap Dave Williams

30 Rock is packed full of ludicrous fake movies and TV shows. Almost all of them would be basically unwatchable. Some of the worst ideas include the wildly misogynistic Bitch Hunter and the similarly problematic MILF Island. These terrible projects are universally beloved in the 30 Rock universe, but the show also has one or two fake movies that actually show some potential. Leap Dave Williams stars Jim Carrey in a strange mash-up of Bruce Almighty and The Santa Clause. Carrey plays a man who finds himself morphing into Leap Dave Williams, the half-man, half-fish who embodies the holiday spirit of February 29.