So-called spoof movies – that is, movie parodies that copy the salient features of their famous role models and ridicule them in usually rather silly ways – were on the rise in the 2000s. After “Scary Movie” (the first part of which focused mainly on the series “Scream” by Wes Craven, which strictly speaking even passed as a genre parody) developed into a worldwide phenomenon, the imitators just popped up – with varying degrees of success…
The first two Scary Movie sequels were also blockbusters, and the comedy spoof Not Another Teen Movie! in high school also raised more than four times the budget. But many of the subsequent spoof films (often from the Friedberg/Seltzer forge) rank among the worst films of all time.
This applies to both the “300” parody “My wife, the Spartans and I” and the disaster movie satire “Disaster Movie”. And after “Beilight – Bis(s) zum Abendbrot” was not funny at the beginning of the 2010s, but was at least moderately successful, eventually nobody wanted to see “Die Turkey von Panem”. But a 1997 film that secretly anticipated the trend overshadows them all – the Tarantino parody”clumsy fiction“!
As the title suggests, the movie is largely based on Quentin Tarantino 90s Cult Film”pulp fiction“ – although he is quite free with his source material. For example, Bruce Willis’ episode from the original movie has no equivalent in Plump Fiction. However, the scene where Butch (Willis) and Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) end up in a torture chamber is included in the movie – only that here Mia Wallace (originally Uma Thurman) and Vincent Vega (originally John Travolta) are bound to be tied up and gagged .
In fact, Plump Fiction features two storylines from the famous original (and the restaurant intro with Pumpkin and Honey Bunny), the rest of the movie the creators filled with parodies of other Tarantino productions: So “Natural Born Killers” (of which Tarantino is the scenario for) to “Natural Blonde Killers” (for whatever reason), and the gangsters of “Reservoir Dogs” (here: “Reservoir Nuns”) don’t wear suits but – you guessed it – nun costumes.
Then there’s a kind of meta level that deals with making Plump Fiction itself. Here, it’s emphatically self-ironic that there’s actually no real, cohesive screenplay for the movie. If you see the final result, that would actually be a possible explanation – But that doesn’t make the movie any funnier…
Movies don’t get funnier than Plump Fiction.
To date, “Plump Fiction” is director Bob Koherr’s only feature film, who also only shot separate episodes for “Anger Management” and other TV series – certainly for good reasons. It’s not just that the movie, produced with extremely little effort, wouldn’t deliver a single (!) joke – for much of its running time, you’re not even sure it’s even trying.
Dialogue that got going in the original is just repeated lazily and listlessly: In the legendary car dialogue between Vincent Vega (here: Jimmy Nova) and Jules Winnfield (who simply becomes Julius), hamburgers are simply replaced by Disney characters – that’s it, that’s the joke. In the Hollywood themed restaurant (just a normal diner here) we don’t meet Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley, but characters from 90’s independent movies like “Clerks”. Mia Wallace here is called Mimi and is not cool and elegant like Uma Thurman in the original, but rather a bit clumsy and clumsy. And the worst: None of the contestants have even a spark of comedic talent – sometimes it seems that the actors themselves have long since given up on the film, so that sometimes no one really bothers anymore.
At least 80 minutes feels longer than Tarantino’s original, making it nearly twice as long as the barrel. Watching the film with a friend at around 2am at the end of a seven-movie marathon gave us a bit of a shock – only to let the film languidly endure this brief adaptation phase. We didn’t laugh once, by the way. In case anyone still feels compelled to imitate, the full movie is available on YouTube…