Word: spoof
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What's left is a comedy, a spoof of films about do-gooder killers a la Rambo, 007, and Dirty Harry. Remo, played by Fred Ward, has a little bit of all these guys. He belongs to a secret organization, is a Vietnam vet, and was once a tough...
What makes Greater Tuna's sense of humor honestly "American" is its sardonic yet down-to-earth spoof on what has become a revived common theme: family morality and the claustrophobic individual, the contemporary southern syndrome of small town suffocation. In Tuna, matters like segregation, Christian biology, and textbook censorship aren't issues--they're fact, as fundamental as hunting season and hell. The town's moral crusades attack hippies, the liberal press, and literary art with a zeal that makes the Conservative Club look tolerant...
...desperation by pointing out life's pitiful, somehow funny underpinnings. It works as self-satire in which the director knowingly winks at the audience--mocking yet still sympathetic to the foibles of his characters. Schlock should not be confused either with camp, where the actors are in on the spoof, or kitsch, which scores its levity precisely because everybody involved misses the joke...
...Since all things human are alien to him, he lacks both the affection and the understanding that might make his sexual satire work. Something similar might be said of his new vehicle. Director Paul Bartel and Writer Philip John Taylor neither know nor care enough about horse operas to spoof them well, although a few veterans of the form (Tab Hunter among them) know enough to keep their faces straight. The plot has to do with recovering a cache of lost gold, one-half of the map to which is tattooed to Divine's backside, one-half to Lainie Kazan...
...modern psychoanalysis (played by David Suchet). But the promising subject has been turned into plodding and uninspired drama, all furrowed brows and discordant cellos. Another British multiparter, The Old Men at the Zoo, adapted from Angus Wilson's satirical novel about an impending nuclear disaster, is a musty spoof of British politics and manners whose wit has not survived the transatlantic crossing...