STAN HELSING: A PARODY

 2009/18/87m

“The most feared monsters in cinematic history have met their match…”

Director/Writer: Bo Zenga / Cast: Steve Howey, Diora Baird, Kenan Thompson, Desi Lydic, Ben Cotton, Ken Kirzinger, Leslie Nielsen.

Body Count: 1

Dire-logue: “I’d give my right arm to be ambidextrous.”

When it came out in 2000, Total Film magazine gave Scary Movie four stars! AND they said a sequel would be great. Thanks, TF, look whatcha did!

Stan Helsing is ‘from the brother-in-law’s former roommate’s dog’s previous owner of the executive producer’ of Scary Movie; that alone should be enough to secure an indictment. It stars Howey as your standard issue movie slacker-cum-stoner, Stan, who works in the videostore Schlockbuster. Are you laughing yet? On Halloween, Stan is charged with delivering some “videos” (which are, in fact, DVDs) to his boss’s mother’s house before he can party with his bud Teddy, ex-girlfriend Nadine and Teddy’s dim-witted date Mia (see Dire-logue). After they get lost, get shot at by gas station hippies and pick up a psychotic hitcher, the gang end up at Stormy Night Estates, where a fire raged ten years back, as explained by Leslie Nielsen’s waitress. Waitress. Yes, he’s in drag.

Stormy Night Estates is tormented by ‘monsters’, who are in fact crap parody renderings of famous movie villains, such as Needlehead, Fweddy, Lucky the doll, Pleatherface, Mason, and Michael Crier. Fuck. Off. Several onlookers think Stan is a descendant of Van Helsing and he and his friends spend 80 minutes running from shit joke to shit joke until they’re forced into a karaoke contest against the monsters, who perform a stupid version of YMCA.

OK, questions: why is Michael Jewish? Why is Fweddy done up like some late-80s rapper? Why is there but one murder of a non-important extra? Who green-lit this movie? It really is a train wreck of a film, made only worse when I learned that ‘Mason’ (Jesus wept…) was played by Ken Kirzinger, who played Jason – yes, Jason – in Freddy vs. Jason. Nothing in this film even flirts with being funny. Hell, it doesn’t enter the club where funny is out having a good time. It’s refused entry, kicked in the ass by security and told never to darken their doors again!

Enough with these shitty parodies, Airplane! was 30 years ago.

Blurbs-of-shame: Diora Baird was in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning; Ben Cotton was in Harper’s Island and Scar 3D, and The Tooth Fairy; Leslie Nielsen was, of course, Principal Hammond in Prom Night; Kirzinger was also in Wrong Turn 2. As well as being part to blame for Scary Movie, Zenga was also an exec producer on Turistas.