Meet The Spartans

Meet The Spartans
Carmen Electra, Kevin Sorbo
Sean Maguire, Diedrich Baeder
Directed by Jason Frieberg, Aaron Seltzer
Fox Home Video 2008
84 minutes

Meet The Spartans is a decent spoof of 300 with jabs at everything less than six minutes old. This pretty much explains why this comedy is only 84 minutes long including the post-credits clips.

This DVD should come with a best before date as a lot of the jokes here are ephemeral.

If you have not seen 300 quite a few of the jokes and references are lost. Of course, Meet The Spartans contains a lot of gross-out and bodily function jokes: this is par for the genre and something the audience expects. It also features more than its fair share of homoerotic humor.

The real star of this movie is Nicole Parker. She does all of the female celebrities and many are dead on and steal the show. Everybody else is competent.

It is rather fun to see Kevin Sorbo of Hercules fame poking fun at the genre that made him rich and famous. Sorbo’s talent for comedy is somewhat better than his acting ability so directors Jason Frieberg and Aaron Seltzer know not to have him outreach his grasp.

There are some pretty dead on spoofs of epic movie elements like the fake Carl Orff music. The Pit is a rather good running gag though some of the best pit scenes are in the post credits add-ons.

My favorite scene is the Yo mama battle sequence. The dance-off runs long.

I do wish these things had more of a memory and managed to slip in references to things somewhat older than movie popcorn-a wink at Ben Hur would have been a good idea. The oldest reference in this comedy is Gloria Gaynor’s I will Survive but only because it is done in a musical number on American Idol in one of the scenes after the credits.

Extra features for Meet The Spartans the Unrated Pit of Death Edition include a neat trivia game, a gag reel, a tour of the set, and a rather messy commentary track where everyone is intent on talking over someone else.

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