18 Movies You Thought Were Stupid That Are Secretly Brilliant Satires lista 18

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Demolition Man doesn't have much of a reputation in the 21st century. It was advertised as a straight up, muscle bound throwdown between mega stars Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes upon its release in 1993, yet some critics recognized bits and pieces of satire piercing the veneer of masculine bravado. As Richard Schickel wrote in Time, „Some sharp social satire is almost undermined by excessive explosions and careless casting.” Writing in The New York Times, Vincent Canby derided the movie as an anti-PC desire to return to the rapey idiocy of the Reagan years.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and it's now safe to say Demolition Man is a genius satire with perfect casting. Wesley Snipes plays the antagonist with vaudevillian relish, while casting Stallone as a 20th century Neanderthal struggling to adapt to a socialist utopia is an incisive commentary on America and our taste for violence, stupidity, and perversion. Hell, his character's name is John Spartan, a combination of the most American of white American names (John) and a culture of ancient, homoerotic warriors (Sparta). Sandra Bullock is in the mix, too, as Huxley (Aldous reference!), a future cop assigned to hang out with Stallone.

Yet Demolition Man is far from a simple send up of classic American masculinity and Old West chaos rules. It takes its utopian peaceful PC society to task as much as it points out how unsustainable the opposite is. It's impossible to prevent malice from manifesting, and new speak oppression hardly helps matters. Violence is wrong, as is robbing people of the free will that begets violence. Perhaps more than anything else, Demolition Man is a conflicted, gleeful, nihilist manifesto. it also cannily played to increasing corporate ubiquity (all restaurants are Taco Bell following the "franchise wars"), „wellness obsession,” and the escalating hysteria over „cancel culture” decades later.

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Starship Troopers may be one of the most misunderstood films of the 20th century. At the time of its release, it was dismissed as a foolish, basic sci-fi movie with a higher-than-average budget and a lot of bare breasts. Critics, and many audience members, somehow missed the overt references to Nazi Germany, and the meditation on a nation (or, in this case, a planet) swept up jingoism inspired by a state-run media. Also, seriously, how do you not know a movie with a title as farcically generic as Starship Troopers is a satire?

Besides director Paul Verhoeven's warning to audiences of how easily governments make the masses complicit in fascism, the world of Starship Troopers is one in which who you are is determined by nothing more than standardized test scores. The dumb jocks become marines whose only purpose is to be fodder for war, and a culture of heroism is built around their acts so they never stop to consider how they're being exploited. Meanwhile, the smart kids climb the ranks and help perpetuate the cycle to keep themselves out of harm's way. It surely bears pointing out that Verhoeven, who is Dutch, lived through Nazi occupation as a child.

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Paul Verhoeven is seen by some in the cinematic community as a hack, a man obsessed with base violence and all things vile. What such criticism ignores is the director's pattern of pointing out the world's (and, lets face it, America's) obsession with violence and cheap thrills. Is he reveling in repugnance, or rubbing the audience's (and capitalists's) face in its own sh*t?

One of the most obvious instances of Verhoeven's satirical riffing on companies selling people sh*t and audiences gobbling it up are the „I'd Buy That For a Dollar” segments of the original Robocop, which hold a mirror to catchphrase-oriented garbage sitcoms of the late 80s and early 90s (and of course comment on the notion, prevalent in the Gordon Gecko days of the 1980s, that everything is for sale). Behind and all around its straight forward sci-fi narrative, Robocop offers insightful satire on out-of-control capitalists and the dangers of unchecked partnership between corporations and governments. There's something deliciously ironic about Verhoeven's habit of spending hundreds of millions of corporate dollars brazenly criticizing corporate America.

The rest of Robocop is essentially a funnel Verhoeven uses to force feed the audience violence until they choke on robots shooting each other. „This is what you want? Have so much of it you get sick!” Verhoeven seems to be screaming from behind the camera. Of course, the cynic would say capitalism always wins, because Robocop failed to light the world on fire with its satirical vision, and two completely unironic sequels followed.

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How many movies have you seen where a hitman comes out of retirement to avenge the death of his dog? One. John f*cking Wick. This movie could have easily been a run-of-the-mill angry-middle-aged-man movie about your classic post-Taken invincible silver fox who karates his way to a final boss and drives off into the sunset with a quip and a babe. Instead, it undoes every trope of Hong Kong action-inspired cinema of the early 90s, while making sure audiences get the biggest bang for their buck. Gun fu? Check. Night club shoot out? Oh yeah. A scene on the docks? F*ckin' a right. Also, Eastern European bad guys, because duh.

There's not one scene in this film that would be out of place in Lionheart or any other movie where a smarmy guy tries to fight his way to the top of an organization, but the script is so well written the audience doesn't need characters to break the fourth wall to understand John Wick is as much a commentary on action films, and onscreen violence, as it is a movie in which the protagonist stabs his way through a busy nightclub.

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By 1993, Arnold Schwarzenegger had been on top of the Hollywood action world for over a decade. There was nothing left to do except blow it up. Enter Last Action Hero, a film that cleverly took the tropes of some of Schwarzenegger's biggest films (Commando, Terminator 2) and pushed them to the extreme or subverted them completely.

While Last Action Hero is mostly seen as lesser popcorn fare, it's actually an exploration of why people find the action genre so appealing. It's also the only early ’90s blockbuster that asks audiences to consider whether consciousness extends past our meat bags and into the minds of our creations, while dressing Schwarzenegger as Hamlet. Marinate on that.

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What could be dumber that a movie about skydiving bank robbers who also love to surf, and the FBI agent who loves them? A lot of things, actually. While the plot of Point Break sounds like something a six year old made up after a handful of Sweet Tarts, the execution of the film is brilliant and breath taking. Thanks to Road House, we know Patrick Swayze elevates any screen he graces. Under the direction of Kathryn Bigelow, he and Keanu Reeves explore a platonic love affair between two masculine bros.

Like the more blatantly satirical Fight Club, Point Break explores the natural point at which masculine bravado meets homoeroticism, and what it means for two men to be in love but never make love. Those crashing waves symbolize so much. Everything else in this film is incidental. Except the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

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Does Face/Off even count as a movie? It's an immersive experience. It should play on a constant loop at the Louvre. John Woo, realizing his stylized form of overblown action cinema was being gutted and repurposed by lesser filmmakers, filled Face/Off with every absurd set piece and psychological nightmare he could. This film is almost nihilistic in the amount of John Woo it contains. Only a filmmaker as operatic and self aware as Woo could bring out Travolta's camp hilarity and a Nic Cage so brilliant he manages to sell the idea of a good man becoming bad because he swapped faces with a criminal mastermind.

But Face/Off isn't just John Woo daring the audience to make themselves sick on a glut of Woo. It asks questions about identity, love, and the fine line between criminals and police. Are Sean Archer and Castor Troy two sides of the same coin? By the end of the film, are they essentially the same person? Having walked in another person's face, is any empathy gained? And do their loved ones really care about what's actually behind the face they find familiar? Or is it what the face gives in the form of security all they care about?

Face/Off can also be read as a satire on the nature of action movies. Are movie stars, and the movies they star in, so bereft of personality you could literally replace their faces and no one would know the difference? If we know what we watch is fake, and therefore not beholden to morality or merit, should everything we consume be construed as a big, dumb, f*cked up joke we're not sure we're in on? What is cinema? What is life? If, as Sartre says, the internal self is a myth, and we only exist through external action, do we exist at all? Also, that „Somewhere Over the Rainbow” scene. Seriously. Come on!

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Pain may not hurt, but lack of critical acclaim does. Most viewers only know Road House from its infinite weekend plays on TBS, but the film that introduced Patrick Swayze to a million horny step moms wearing Harley Davison shirts did more than teach us it's okay to rip a man's throat out after he informs you of what he did in prison. Like the films of Paul Verhoeven, Road House is in part a satire of what people think they want to see. Call it ironic self-commentary (or the ironic vision of the viewer).

Road House helped create the blueprint for non-western westerns. Meta westerns. Whatever you want to call them. Those movie that take western tropes and turn them on their heads, gleefully subverting expectations and satirizing the cartoonish stereotypes audiences expect from marquee genre films. More specifically, Road House takes the Yojimbo premise – a mysterious man rides into town and saves the saloon by fighting all the bad guys – adds some Shaw Brothers influence (and Sam Elliot's dulcet baritone), and casts the classic American macho action hero as a man most well known for his ballroom dancing skills.

Of course, it's possible Road House is so bad, and painfully unaware of how bad it is, that it plays like a satire but somehow isn't. To quote Roger Ebert's review, „Was it intended as a parody? I have no idea, but I laughed more during this movie than during any of the so-called comedies I saw during the same week.”

Even if Road House's genius is an accident, it's present.

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In the decades since Paul Bartel's Roger Corman-produced film about weirdoes trying to kill each other while driving cross country was released, Death Race 2000 has become closer to reality than you may care to admit. Couched in this ridiculous film, whose lead character is named Frankenstein, you'll find the type of foresight only possible when a science fiction film swings for the fences and throws out any hope of realism.

Aside from presaging the horrid nature of reality television and its ironic detachment from reality, Death Race 2000 explores the near-insatiable blood lust of television audiences that disassociate themselves from the bloodshed, pain, and embarrassment of contestants losing a televised „reality” contest (and their dignity). Or just the bloodlust of TV audiences in general, in the era of Game of Thrones, when expectations of rape, slaughter, malice, embarrassment, stupidity, and gore loom so large even hackneyed spy dramas have graphic rape scenes in their pilots.

When Death Race 2000 takes a break from skewering television viewers and the media that courts them, it makes succinct points about domestic terrorism and the lengths to which some will go to to get their point across. Parts of the film may be goofy (we're looking at you, Sylvester Stallone), but its ability to identify unique American problems makes this movie a brilliant satire of a future it predicted with creepy accuracy.

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Where to even start with this cinematic tour de force? Written by Roger Ebert as a commentary on trash cinema and directed by trash cinema auteur Russ Meyer, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls has a dream-like quality that makes it impossible to tell what its intentions are from one scene to the next. Is it an indictment of the ’60s drug culture that influenced Easy Rider and Two Lane Blacktop? Is it the trump card of B-Movies played by a man regarded as one of the greatest film critics of the 20th century?

Having earned his living watching film after film full of rock n roll hepcat garbage, Ebert knows what sells, and he rams those things down the audience's throat until they can't take any more. It's a puke-inducing cocktail of so many flavors it tastes like pastel nothingness, but that's the point. Sexism masquerading as groovy progressivism? Check. Obvious racial hierarchy disguised as diverse casting? Check. Bad music dressed up as experimental cool? Yep.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is the rare film that can be enjoyed on a variety of levels. You can get your rocks off to the visceral thrill of watching a groovy ’60s gang get its comeuppance via broadsword, or you can engage the myriad intellectual questions the film raises about violence and exploitation in movies, the culture such cinema produces, and the culture that produces such cinema.

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Remember in Gladiator when Russell Crowe screams, „Are you not entertained?” at the audience in the Colosseum? Showgirls is essentially Paul Verhoeven's two-hour version of Crowe's ironic bellow, complete with lines so genius they've been misconstrued as idiotic. Here are some examples:

Man, everybody got AIDS and shit!
Honey, you could never handle me with all these wrinkles of fat. Why, you'd never find the thing. I'd have to piss on you to give you a clue.
She looks better than a ten-inch dick and you know it!
She misses us like that lump on my twat I had taken off last week.
It must be weird, not having anybody cum on you.
Wouldn't it be great if one night she just fell down the stairs?
It's worth noting that Verhoeven's films can seem like maximalist expansions of titles pulled out of a hat. Or, more specifically, in this case, off a cocktail napkin a screenwriter had lying around. Yet, somewhere along the way, Showgirls became an insane, deadpan satire of blind American ambition and the bloated excesses of a backstabbing industry pumping out a deluge of sh*t and raking in obscene profits.

On the surface, Showgirls delivers on its title and NC-17 rating. You're gonna see a lot of naked women writhing to 90s beats, and some totally cray sex scenes. The film also acts as a mirror in which the entertainment industry's worst tendencies are reflected in their most drastic forms. A psychedelic carnival funhouse asking audiences to consider the essence of cinema and the nature of entertainment, art, product, narrative, and meaning.

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How far would you go for fame? Would you sign a deal with the Devil (literally)? Would you allow your work to be bastardized to make it more palatable for an audience that truly doesn't care about you? These are just two of the questions raised by a 1974 Brian De Palma film that's all but been written off as a camp musical. That movie is Phantom of the Paradise, and chances are you've never even heard of it, let alone seen it.

By ripping apart the narrative of Phantom of the Opera and stitching it back together with ideas borrowed from Faust using thread made of pure kitsch, De Palma examines the world of entertainment, and searches out the moment when the impetus for creating art changes from personal expression to the desire for fame and fortune. Everything from the opening montage to the final images of the audience literally tearing the stars apart seems to stress that achievement is death, which kinda makes you wonder what the point of anything is. Bravo, De Palma. That is art.

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It's unfortunate Freddy's Revenge is reviled as the worst of the Nightmare on Elm Street films, when it was clearly trying to do something more than squeeze scares out of an empty premise. In a scant 85 minutes, this film manages to explore ontology, create a powerful metaphor about living in the closet as a gay teen in middle America, and invert the final girl trope.

The most telling aspect of Freddy's Revenge is the main character's (Jesse Walsh) fear that a monster is living inside of him (Freddy). He worries that, if it's released, his true self will be exposed to the world, outing him as a disgusting freak. It's only through acceptance from someone else his age that Jesse is able to come to terms with himself.

In taking the road map of the by-the-numbers horror films that proceeded it and subtly altering the rules, Freddy's Dead make something pure and inspirational, while also serving as a straight-faced satire of, and commentary on, expectations, tropes, and gender roles in horror films and American society. The movie also provides one of the greatest solo dance sequences of all time.

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People really didn't get Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives when it was released in 1986 (Maybe because the colon in the title makes it look as much like an academic paper as it does a slasher film?). After five films of sexy teens getting chased down by a machete-wielding maniac, writer/director Tom McLoughlin decided to burn the whole thing down and rebuild Jason in the image of true horror gods, the Universal Monsters.

The initial plan for Jason Lives was to make the previous film's protagonist, Tommy Jarvis, the new villain, but anyone with a pulse can recognize how terrible an idea that is. Rather than make some mealy-mouthed garbage, McLoughlin created what is essentially the Bride of Frankenstein of the Friday the 13th series, a totally gonzo masterpiece of insanity.

Jason Lives is blatantly self-aware, as much a satire of itself as it is another chapter in the Friday the 13th franchise. In one scene, a man's face is smashed against a tree and leaves the imprint of a smiley face in the bark. Also, did you know Jason is brought back to life in the movie when lighting strikes a metal rod someone is using to destroy his corpse?

Here's an excerpt from the script:
Standing in the middle of the road, illuminated by the headlights… JASON. He holds the deadly spear before him. Needless to say, Lizbeth is becoming more afraid.
LIZBETH: Darren, we better turn around.
DARREN: Why?
LIZBETH: Why? Because I've seen enough horror movies to know masked weirdos are never friendly.

The pinnacle of the film's genius comes toward the end, when a shot of a hamster running in a wheel cuts to a kid in bed at summer camp reading Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit.

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When The Fast and the Furious was released in 2001, you weren't wrong to think it was just a money suck for boneheads who like to watch dudes drive cars real fast. But by the time the fourth and fifth films in the franchise rolled around, the series had reinvented itself as a savvy, physics-defying set of heist films unconcerned with authenticity or self-seriousness.

Fast Five bypasses exposition, getting straight to what audiences paid to see. In this way, it works as a satire of itself – „This is what you want? This is what you get! F*ck yeah!” For anyone who thinks this film isn't in some way a joke on overblown tentpole franchise films, see the scene in which Vin Diesel and The Rock have the most absurd, homoerotic onscreen broment since Keanu Reeves gave the sky a money shot after staring deep into Patrick Swayze's eyes during a scene of sweaty romping in Point Break. Seems like it's no coincidence the men in Fast Five are more voluptuous than the woman, and touch each other a lot more.

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You probably haven't seen Stone Cold. Maybe you've seen it peeking out of DVD dollar bins in dirt malls, but that's about it. This over-the-top action film serves as an indictment of the late ’80s early ’90s tough guy outlaw culture that took America by storm. Stone Cold stars college football star (and NFL burnout) Brian Bosworth as a tough-as-nails cop hired to infiltrate a biker gang planning a series of political assassinations.

Stone Cold would be a ho-hum, by-the-numbers B movie if it were left to Bosworth and the rest of cast, but the film's writer and director, Craig R. Baxley and Walter Doniger, knew the only way to create a memorable film was to lean into the cartoonish violence and narrative nonsense the film traffics in. If you're a fan of fourth-wall-shattering action comedies like Deadpool or Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, you need to watch Stone Cold stat.

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Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is a complete inversion of its predecessor, a psychosexual tour de force that builds to a climax symmetrically opposite in every way to the original. But you wouldn't know that, because you've never seen it. The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a splendid slice of horror that mixes the haunting emptiness of central Texas with the debauchery of a family full of men who eat hitch hikers and wear their skin. It's a film about men who brutalize, rape, and psychologically destroy a woman until she manages to escape thanks to a man who's not as bad.

TCM2 takes that concept and runs through the same funhouse of slaughtered teens and roaring chainsaws. By the end of the film, female DJ „Stretch” Brock has entered the yonic cavern where the Sawyer family (perpetrators of titular chainsaw massacres) grind human meat into chili and, in an act of defiance, takes up the phallic chainsaw. Prey becomes predator, and the phallus is brought to bear on its maker. Eve skullf*cks god.

If you think this is mere coincidence, and the film is not a deadpan satirical comment on the toxic rape-culture-as-entertainment content of horror films, consider this: the final shot mirrors that of the original movie – someone hoisting a chainsaw into the air. Only this time, it's the female protagonist, who has succeeded in stealing the phallic power of the male antagonists and used it against them. If the final frame of the original is a nauseating simulacra of rape, the final frame in the sequel is a castration of that culture.

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If you haven't experienced Double Team, you need to stop reading this, watch it, and come back for a lengthy discussion of the ramifications of imprisoning Jean Claude Van Damme on an island of super spies. The film, seemingly cobbled together from loose script pages found on the floor of the Cannon Films office, manages to turn three (or is it four?) idiotic plot lines into a transformative work of art. How can you not love a movie that has: an island full of super spies, hacker monks, Dennis Rodman driving a tiny car, Mickey Rourke fighting a tiger, and JCVD doing splits in every country in Eastern Europe?

It's possible no one involved in making this film thought they were making great art. The director, Hong Kong veteran Tsui Hark, has a long track record of making maximalist, overblown, tongue-in-cheek action movies that seem to be making fun of themselves, and by accepting the limitations placed on him by a ridiculous script and two actors who barely speak English, he managed to find the elusive ideal of the sublime, a form of complete transcendence Romantic artists spent their entire careers chasing. It's possible Double Team is the logical conclusion of human existence, and you've all been living in the Matrix since it was released.

To circle back to Roger Ebert's comments on Road House: „Was it intended as a parody? I have no idea, but I laughed more during this movie than during any of the so-called comedies I saw during the same week.” Writing in Biblioklept, Edwin Turner responds to Ebert's question of intention in ironic cinema: „The simple answer to the question is that it doesn’t really matter…” The author is dead. Long live the audience.