For this month’s roundtable, we asked the team what they think of “spoof” movies — like Airplane! and Scary Movie — in 2025. Is this genre fully extinct at this point? Are those older movies too embarrassing to view? Or are they a delightful guilty pleasure?

Justin: Growing up, I loved spoofs and couldn’t get enough of them. Films like Airplane! and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes pulled me in a different direction than mainstream movies, and that helped to set me on the course toward cult flicks.

More than simply their oddity was the spoof’s tendency toward unrestrained silliness. Like Monty Python, these films reveled in absurd situations, puns galore, sight gags, and unapologetic overacting. And while proper upright citizens may poo-poo them, these films were mined for quotes that spread through pop culture.

Probably my two favorite series were the Naked Gun trilogy and the Hot Shots! duology. These five films were staples of my late teen and college years viewing, and while some of their jokes have dated due to pop culture connections, a lot of them are still hilarious today.

But at the turn of the century, spoof movies ended up going downhill, fast. The entire sub-genre got dominated by two groups: the Wayans family and the duo of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. Getting super gross and super crass and super lazy became the mandates of the day, and I had enough with all of them.

The last spoofs that I truly enjoyed seeing were Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th (2000) and Not Another Teen Movie (2001). Both of those capitalized on trends at the time and delivered a lot of solid laughs. Maybe there’s been a quiet resurgence — I’ve heard good things about 2013’s A Haunted House — but I haven’t spent much time investigating. Rather, I’ve enjoyed vacationing back in the ’80s and ’90s with the many spoofs that littered the landscape then.

Drake: Count me as a fan of the well-done spoof film, going all the way back to the Mel Brooks classics Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Brooks set the groundwork for the parody films that came after, and I have to imagine he was a huge influence on the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker trio when they were creating The Kentucky Fried Movie and, a few years later, Airplane! And of course it was ZAZ who really ran with the parody flick genre, churning out an impressive run of films over the next 15 years.

I have to admit that my interest in them capped off with Hot Shots! Part Deux, however. And it wasn’t because I disliked the move; on the contrary, I thought it was hilarious 30 years ago and still think so today. But the parody well seemed to run a bit dry after that, with a troika of Naked Guns and a seemingly endless series of Scary Movies. And although I haven’t seen most of those flicks I’m pretty OK with leaving them on the unwatched pile. Honestly, I’d rather watch Stone Cold for the thirtieth time rather than Scary Movie 5 for the first.

So, yeah, maybe I’m just telling you to get off my lawn, but for me the older spoof flicks are the fun ones, and they showed that it requires more than a simple one-note gag and constant pop culture references to make a movie. Now if you’ll excuse me, I just spotted some clouds I need to go yell at.

Sitting Duck: An issue I have with many spoof/parody movies is the tendency to have the narrative come to a screeching halt so a scene from some other work of fiction can be reenacted, usually with a few twists. Even if said reenactment does turn out funny (and more often than not it doesn’t), the resulting disruption can be quite jarring.

If that sort of tomfoolery is going to be pulled, it should be integrated within the storyline as seamlessly as possible. Something that does this right are Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music, the two Discworld miniseries produced by Cosgrove Hall. Though the fact that these are reasonably faithful novel adaptations may have something to do with this.