3. Breaking Wind Part 1 (2012, Dir. Craig Moss)
What Was The Comedy? A straight-to-DVD parody of Twilight.
Why Was It Appalling? First of all, to give writer and director Craig Moss his due, (and its not a big compliment but is still something that bears mentioning) this film is largely on target in mocking Twilight and only slips into Friedberg and Seltzer territory a few times with scenes of characters planking and a Navi from Avatar turning up at one point as well as a few other random bits and pieces like an Angry Birds parody. But other than it largely parodying what it's supposed to (which is an increasingly rare thing in modern spoof films), this film is god-awful. As its title may suggest, Breaking Wind Part 1 has some of the biggest focus on scatological humour in the history of cinema. The title is a fart joke, the title card farts, and there are fart and turd jokes about every five minutes, with it even being a major plot element at one point. Also, logic dictates that this should either parody Twilight as a whole so that people who arent overly familiar with the franchise can be given a basic introduction to the story and understand the jokes, or of Breaking Dawn since thats what the title is based on and what the film was released to coincide with. Instead, it mainly parodies the third film Eclipse with some dialogue being lifted verbatim from it.
Who Should Have Known Better? Writer and director Craig Moss.
Why Should He Have Known Better? For a start, his previous film The 41 Year Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall And Felt Superbad About It was almost as critically derided as the works of Friedberg and Seltzer (whose style he shamelessly ripped off in the first place), which should have been a big warning sign that he should immediately change his approach. As well as that, not only had the We hate Twilight bandwagon more or less stopped by the time Breaking Wind was released but the franchise had also been mocked into oblivion. Even Friedberg and Seltzer had already parodied Twilight two years before with Vampires Suck. Its like criticizing the Star Wars Prequels. Theres nothing more to say about it. And by 2012, Twilight had stopped being the hate sponge du jour and everyone had moved on, considering the franchise and its fans to be a mild irritant more than anything else. And finally, if youre going to do an in-depth parody of something, you need to fully research it and draw enough material from it that you can make comedic. With Twilight, there is a colossal amount of stuff you can work with; Bella having very little personality, Edward basically being a creepy stalker, the heavy-handed abstinence message, the endless staring. Its a goldmine of mockery. But instead, Moss just followed the basic plot of Eclipse and filled it with farting, sex jokes, and dwarves (because in his mind theyre apparently hilarious). The only thing in the film that even comes close to satire is when Edward starts handing out Team Edward merchandise in his schools cafeteria.