Dir. Tom Brady
Writ. Ed Yeager, Joey Gutierrez,
Act. David Koechner, Carl Weathers, Melora Hardin

Since the Zucker Brothers have disappeared (the creators of Airplane and The Naked Gun Franchise) movie audiences across the land have had to put up with some of the worst parody movies ever created. Just this year the movie Epic Movie brought a new meaning to God-awful parody movies. The Comebacks is not that bad but it is not even worthy of mention in the same breath as the Zucker brothers and Pat Proft.

The Comebacks is a "comedy" that is "spoofing" all of the inspirational sports movies of the recent years. Coach Lambeau Fields, played by David Koechner (Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Jeremy) has been responsible for nearly every famous sporting loss in his entire coaching career and had decided to retire when a friend of his talks him into coaching a small Texas college football team with a bunch of misfits on the team. There he is convinced that he is not a loser but a winner as he tries to lead his team to the conference championship.

The only laughs that I got in this movie were because I knew something about the sport that they were mocking in the opening scene. For Example, once Fields arrives at the first day of college practice he cuts three guys who doesn't think will help the team. The three are, in real life, NFL Hall of Famers Lawrence Taylor, Eric Dickerson, and Michael Irvin. This scene describes the problem with this kind of comedy in the movie, if you don't know who those three guys are then you won't get the humor of the movie. The additional problem is that if the target audience is between the ages of 15 - 25, then the only player that the target audience will remember on the field would have been Irvin, and that is if they are 25 now. Dickerson retired in the early 90's and Taylor did so in the mid 90's. So unless someone who is older than the target audience is in the theater, they won't get the joke.

The rest of the movie just plain sucks and really isn't worth the film that it is printed on. However there are two women worthy of note in the film. Noureen DeWulf who is hot in a bikini in the music video scene, and Melora Hardin, who is the wife to the coach in the movie, who also plays Jan Levinson in TV's The Office. They are both hot in the movie but aren't enough to make you think about seeing this film.

That sums it up, this film should not be used for anything other than toilet paper. This movie confirms that spoof films are dead. Unfortunately we are going to get to see Epic Movie 2 next year and by that point I will have committed the first murder on these crappy directors and writers.

Brian - the Naked Gun