So-called spoof films – i.e. film parodies that copy the salient features of their famous models and play them in a usually rather silly way – were on the rise in the 2000s. After “Scary Movie” (the first part of which focused mainly on Wes Craven’s “Scream” series, which was strictly speaking itself a genre parody) developed into a global phenomenon, imitators were just beginning to emerge – with varying degrees of success. …
The first two Scary Movie sequels were also box office successes, and the comedy parody Not Another Teen Movie! at the high school also raised more than four times the budget. But many of the subsequent parody films (often from the Friedberg/Seltzer factory) are among the worst films of all time.
This applies to both the “300” parody “My Wife, the Spartans and Me” and the disaster movie satire “Disaster Movie.” And after “Beilight – Bis(s) zum Abendbrot” was not funny but at least moderately successful in the early 2010s, no one finally wanted to see “The Turkey of the Hunger Games” anymore. But one 1997 film that secretly anticipated the trend puts them all to shame: the Tarantino parody”Clumsy fiction“!
As the title suggests, the film is largely based on Quentin Tarantino’s Cult film from the 90s”pulp fiction“ – although he uses his source material quite freely. For example, the Bruce Willis episode from the original film has no equivalent in “Plump Fiction.” However, the scene where Butch (Willis) and Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) end up in a torture cell is included in the film – except that Mia Wallace (originally: Uma Thurman) and Vincent Vega (originally John Travolta) are tied up and gagged.
Essentially, ‘Plump Fiction’ (and the restaurant intro with Pumpkin and Honey Bunny) play a role in two storylines from the famous original; the creators filled the rest of the film with parodies of other Tarantino productions: This is what “Natural Born” is “as Killers” (for which Tarantino wrote the screenplay) to “Natural Blonde Killers” (for whatever reason), and the gangsters of “Reservoir Dogs” (here: “Reservoir Nuns”) don’t wear suits, but – you guessed it – non-suits.
Then there’s a kind of meta-level that deals with the creation of ‘Plump Fiction’ itself. There’s a particularly self-deprecating tone here about the fact that there’s actually no real, coherent script for the film. When you see the end 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 the only feature film from director Bob Koherr, who has also exclusively shot individual episodes for “Anger Management” and other TV series – certainly for good reasons. It’s not just that the film, produced with extremely little effort, doesn’t pull off a single (!) joke – for much of its running time, you’re not even sure it’s trying.
Dialogues that originated in the original are simply repeated lazily and listlessly: For example, 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 (here it’s a regular diner) we don’t meet Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley, but rather characters from 90s independent films such as ‘Clerks’. Mia Wallace is called Mimi here and is not cool and elegant like Uma Thurman in the original, but rather a bit chubby and clumsy. And the worst: None of the people involved have an ounce of comedic talent – sometimes it seems as if the actors themselves have given up on the film a long time ago, so sometimes no one really makes an effort anymore.
At just under 80 minutes it certainly feels longer than Tarantino’s original, which brings it to almost twice the running length. When I saw the film around 2am at the end of a seven-film marathon with a friend, we were momentarily stunned – only to let the film sit listlessly through us after this brief adjustment period. By the way, we didn’t laugh once. If anyone feels called to imitate it: the entire film can be seen on YouTube…