Dwayne Johnson as Driver
Oliver Jackson-Cohen as Killer
Tom Berenger as Warden
Carla Gugino as Cicero
Mike Epps as Roy Grone
Maggie Grace as Lily
Sidney S. Liufau as Kenny
Billy Bob Thornton as Cop

When did this sort of movie stop being funny? Parodies with so-called "saturation humor" used to be reliable - rarely memorable but typically good for 90 minutes of enjoyable, disposable cinema. At some point, however, the jokes lost their zing, and the writing team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer were right in the middle. These two scripted Scary Movie (along with Shawn and Marlon Wayans), which was amusing, and Date Movie, which was anything but that. Epic Movie (with which these two make their directorial debut) is the third entry in the "trilogy" and it fails to reverse the downward spiral. If you thought it was impossible for a film to contain less effective comedy than Date Movie, here's evidence to the contrary.

The Bank Dick (1940) is an all-time classic comedy starring the great W. C. Fields. Directed by Edward F. Cline, the film is only a little over an hour long. It is one of his very best and funniest films (tied with Paramount's It's A Gift (1934)), his next-to-last major film role (he last appeared in Cline's Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941)), and his first solo starring role in a Universal Pictures film. Fields wrote the original screenplay, but credits himself with the nom de plume of Mahatma Kane Jeeves (a play on the phrase often heard in English drawing-room comedies: 'My hat, my cane, Jeeves'). He was given considerable creative control over this film's script, direction and editing by Universal Pictures, unlike what would happen to him a year later.

The ramshackle film, originally titled The Great Man, is filled with Fields' brand of silliness and buffoonery. It satirizes and skewers film-making, family life and marriage, banking practices, and small-town behavior, in a series of short sketches. W. C. Fields plays the lead comic role, a penultimate characterization of a bullied, unemployed drunk who despises the members of his aggravating family and is talented only at telling (and believing) tall tales and imbibing alcohol at the Black Pussy Cat Cafe. [The name of the cafe, originally the Black Pussy Cafe and Snack Bar, offended Hollywood's censorship agency - the Breen Office. Even the film's title can be interpreted with two meanings, although 'dick' means detective. The film was released as The Bank Detective in the UK.] Inadvertently, the elbow-bending, gin-soaked lush trundles into 'directing' a film for a brief time, and is credited with capturing a bank robber and being a hero.

Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) is producer/director Stanley Kubrick's brilliant, satirical, provocative black comedy/fantasy regarding doomsday and Cold War politics that features an accidental, inadvertent, pre-emptive nuclear attack. The undated, landmark film - the first commercially-successful political satire about nuclear war, has been inevitably compared to another similar suspense film released at the same time - the much-more-serious and melodramatic Fail-Safe (1964). However, this was a cynically objective, Monty Python-esque, humorous, biting response to the apocalyptic fears of the 1950s.

The witty screenplay, co-authored by the director (with Terry Southern), was based on Peter George's novel Red Alert (the U.S. title). [George's work, under his pseudonym Peter Bryant, was first published in England with the title Two Hours to Doom. Early drafts of the script were titled Edge of Doom and The Delicate Balance of Terror.] The novel's primary concern was the threat of an accidental nuclear war. Dr. Strangelove himself did not appear in the novel, however - he was added by Kubrick and co-screenwriter Southern.

Film Plot Summary

The film opened in downtown Sydney, Australia, in the Biocyte Pharmaceuticals building, where in the laboratory, Russian molecular biologist Dr. Vladimir Nekhorovich (Rade Serbedzija) had DNA-engineered sample cultures. In a voice-over confession, he described the existence of a "hero" -- a curative green-colored drug known as 'Bellerophon,' and the creation of its opposite, a monstrous villain -- a red-colored super-virus known as 'Chimera.'