MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*Though "gross humor" is often derided as an "easy" way for a comedian to get a laugh, in truth it's just as hard to do *good* gross humor as any other kind.
SPY HARD, the earliest of the three I'll review here, is not a particularly good film, but it probably comes closer to its goal than the other two. Like the ZAZ-team parodies it emulates, SPY HARD takes a scattershot approach to spoofing its subject-- this time the genre of the "superspy film"-- but its best jokes only come up to the level of the Zuckers' lesser ones. (To be sure, ZAZ didn't do that well with its superspy spoof in TOP SECRET.)
All the expected jokes, particularly the sexual ones, make their usual appearances, particularly in the name of Leslie Nielsen's bumbling spy, "Dick Steele," aka "Agent WD-40." Nielsen's character is indistinguishable from his Frank Drebbin character of the NAKED GUN films and teleseries, so it's not surprising that the villain steals the show. Andy Griffith plays the evil genius General Rancor, who gets all the mileage he can out of being a spoof of James Bond's "Doctor No." Where No merely lost one hand, Rancor lost both arms due to Dick Steele, and tends to lose his substitute robot arms at the drop of, well, an arm. Best Rancor joke: Steele greets him by saying, "I'd shake your hand, but I don't remember where I left it."
Aside from Griffith, SPY HARD's main asset is that, like the better Bond films, it supplies an ample quantity of sexy women, including Nicolette Sheridan, Stephanie Romanov, and Marcia Gay Harden, most accompanied by goofy names of the "Pussy Galore" variety. The gross humor is applied with a light touch, which puts the film a little ahead of the second two AUSTIN POWERS films. The script is partly credited to the Friedberg-Seltzer writing-team, who have become infamous for a spate of lame, unfocused gross-humor spoofs whose titles are always some version of "[fill in the blank] MOVIE." These films, which are almost uniformly awful, have earned the scorn by many film-fans, but detractors of F&S may be surprised to find that SPY HARD sticks pretty close to the subject of Bond-spoofery rather than wandering into a host of irrelevant pop-culture venues, as the "MOVIES" do. However, SPY HARD does take a shot at HOME ALONE for no good reason.
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