10 Best Fake Horror Movies Within Horror Movies
8. Groundhog Day
Appears in: The Monster Squad
The fake film: Not to be confused with the beloved 90s Bill Murray repeating the same day comedy, this Groundhog Day is an archetypal dumb 80s slasher franchise. With it's unkillable axe wielding murderer hacking his way through one particular point in the calendar, Groundhog Day is definitely one of the lesser holiday themed slashers. Not even a Halloween knock-off, more a cut price Friday 13th, Groundhog Day nevertheless seems to enjoy more of an audience than the likes of April Fool's Day or Silent Night, Deadly Night.
The main success of the Groundhog Day franchise is its mega-productive ability at churning out sequels more often than the day itself comes around. By 1987, the Groundhog Day series had already hit Part XII (by comparison, its most obvious equivalent Friday 13th was on Part VI: Jason Lives, even with releasing an episode almost every year). Part XII is pretty standard with the axe hacking killer back from the dead again with none of the creativity of Part VII that saw him exploded and his head put in a blender and still rising from the grave.
The real film: Just the kind of movie that Super 8 hearkens fondly back to, Monster Squad may not have enjoyed The Goonies level of enduring popularity, but it is very much cut from the same cloth. This time the gang of gore loving kids have to save the day from the classic Universal monsters, teaming up with a lovable Frankenstein's monster to prevent Dracula's evil schemes. Hero Sean wants to see Groundhog Day XII because it's a scary film, but its killer doesn't match up to the fun of the classic monsters.
Director Fred Dekker's previous film Night Of The Creeps ("The good news is your dates are here. The bad news is...they're dead!") was itself a ridiculous B-movie horror pastiche. It would be hard to tell which of it and Groundhog Day were real if you did not already know. Writer Shane Black, meanwhile, went on to have a whole career of writing knowingly meta movie-movies with Groundhog Day just the first in a series a fakes that would include Last Action Hero's Jack Slater (and Hamlet!) and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang's unnamed Colin Farrell crime flick.