Seeing all of the ads for Epic Movie, I realized that Scary Movie, and going back a bit, Scream, have ruined the movie parody. Time was that movie parodies like Naked Gun would send up whole genres, while also being generally funny in a "hey, those buildings look like boobs!" way. Naked Gun wasn't parodying any movie specifically, it was a parody of detective/action movie and their conventions in general. Airplane was obviously specific to Airport, and Mel Brooks has always made fairly specific parodies (Space Balls, Young Frankenstein) but even then I felt the humor was riffing on those specific movies to dig around at the broader cliches of the genres - disaster films, black and white horror, big sci-fi.

Then along comes Scream, which is an actual horror film, not a parody, which makes it its business to play with all the cliches. Man, Scream is such a good movie. So when they want to parody Scream with Scary Movie, they had already been beaten to the punch on pointing out cliches for the audience to laugh at - that had been the whole point of the Randy character throughout two films already. So instead they send up very specific scenes, making jokes out of seeing exact scenes recreated in humorous, rather than scary, ways. My favorite example of this (it does reference at least two movies) is when they finally have sex and we get a replica of the blood-ceiling shot from Nightmare on Elm Street, but with cum. It's worth noting that the original title for Scream was, in fact, Scary Movie. Curious.

Now we get to Epic Movie, which doesn't even appear to have a story, as such, but rather a series of loosely connected movie sendups. Same for Scary Movie 4, which was not a movie or story unto itself, but the characters wandering into and out of various SNLesque parody sketches. It seems lazy to me, and more importantly, it doesn't make for great movies.

PS- I realize Loaded Weapon predates Scream, so my thesis is imperfect. I'm OK with that.