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Angels with Filthy Souls is a classic tale of betrayal featuring a power struggle between local mob bosses Johnny and Acey. Angels with Filthy Souls throws out noir era mobster dialogue and slings out enough brutal violence to scare a 9-year-old, a pizza delivery guy, and the fierce twosome known only as the Sticky Bandits.
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Kevin Smith has his moments (Clerks, Mallrats, Dogma). Although in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, the New Jersey auteur teases a sequel to Good Will Hunting that makes us wonder if he's a secret comedic genius.
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Tropic Thunder squeezed every drop of comedy out of the fake movie trope that it could, and that included fake trailers. Our favorite is Satan's Alley, a film starring Downey Jr.'s Kirk Lazarus and Tobey Maguire as a pair of gay monks in a 12th-century Irish monastery.Do you wish this was real?featured
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You know you would pay all the money in the world to see Arnold Schwarzenegger clumsily dish out Shakespearean quips while he blows up a castle or two. Thank goodness for the underloved Last Action Hero for staging the best scenes for us.Do you wish this was real?featured
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More often than not, Christmas movies are a joke. If there were more seasonally-appropriate films the Roger Moore action-rescue flick within Scrooged, audiences might just be more inclined to deck the halls.
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'Scorcher VI: Global Meltdown' In Tropic Thunder
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Our favorite of the fake trailers from Grindhouse (although the wonderfully named Nic Cage non-movie Werewolf Women of the SS is a close second), Don't was produced in the style of classic '70s Hammer Horror films.
Edgar Wright, the director of Don't (along with Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and every other reference-heavy movie in the last 10 years) scratched the film with steel wool and dragged it across a parking lot to give it the look of a neglected, long-forgotten film. Why couldn't they have made Don't instead of Machete Kills?
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Sure, we could tell you about the plot to Weird Al's UHF, but we don't really care about any of that noise. The portions of the film that really made the cult classic pop were the far-out film parodies. Our favorite is the blacksploitation film starring Gandhi.
Who doesn't want to see the man who said: "Be the change you want to see in the world" punch a hole in a thug's stomach?
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We don't get to see much from Action Doctor, an action movie starring non-existent pro skateboarder/actor Lucas Lee (played by Chris Evans). But we do get one amazing scene that promises an epically stupid action movie for the ages.Do you wish this was real?featured
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- Scream 2
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Scream is the perfect mix of funny, smart, and scary. And it has Matthew Lillard in his prime. The sequels have a steep drop off in quality, but the one thing they always have going for them is the spoof of the film within the film, Stab. In the Scream universe, Stab is everything that Scream makes fun of.
It's cheap, full of nudity, and severely lacking in self-awareness. The Stab series does feature Luke Wilson, though, and that's something.
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Dirk Diggler is the nom de sex of Eddie Adams, the fictional porn star at the center of Boogie Nights. After success goes to his head, he creates Brock Landers, a take-no-prisoners spy (or something like that) who uses kung fu and lovemaking to get his information.
Angels Live In My Town is the first in a series of many hardcore films that lead to Dirk's downfall.
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In the horror spoof Scary Movie, we were given this fake trailer for what appears to be Titanic but after a cruel twist at the end, is revealed to be a sequel to Steven Spielberg's slavery drama, Amistad. It also features a brief appearance from the third Wayans brother, director Keenan Ivory Wayans.
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Strange Brew is a forgotten spinoff of Canada's SCTV, a nonstop barrage of comic sketches and pop-culture skewering. While the movie has a plot, our favorite part is the spot-on Mad Max parody - The Mutants of 2051 AD - featuring Rick Moranis in the bulkiest pair of underwear we've ever seen.
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Coming Home In a Body Bag is the beloved fictional Vietnam epic featured in True Romance that plays in the background of the tense, violent climax. We think it's supposed to be an homage to Oliver Stone's Platoon, but knowing Quentin Tarantino, who wrote the script, it might be Big Bad Vietnam Mamas.
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Yes, Plan 9 From Outer Space is a real movie, possibly the worst movie ever made. But in Tim Burton's biopic about trash auteur Ed Wood, he lovingly depicts the making of Wood's 1959 debacle, allowing audiences to see a spectacularly bad movie in a totally new light and to really appreciate the accidental glory of a truly terrible film.Do you wish this was real?featured
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It's telling that the best part about 2006's The Holiday is the trailer for the Lindsay Lohan/James Franco spy thriller, Deception, an obviously bad movie that we'd definitely pay to see.
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Joe Dante is one of unsung masters of genre film, and his 1993 film Matinee deserves a second viewing (despite an overwhelmingly positive critical reception, the public basically ran away from the film when it came to theaters). In Dante's film about coming of age during the Cold War, the main characters go to a showing of Mant! a film about a radioactive praying mantis.
The faux film is a riff on Cold War-era science fiction films like Them! and The Monster That Challenged the World.
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It's set in space. It features neither horses nor hounds. The most famous actress in the world, Julia Roberts ahem Anna Scott, has a sensible bob. What more can you want?
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20'The Fatties: Fart 2' In 'Tropic Thunder'
Easily the lewdest of fake trailers on the list. As part of Tropic Thunder, this Jack Black comedy promised obesity, burps, and excessive flatulence. Taking on multiple roles, a la Eddie Murphy, the trailer gave us everything we'd expect to see from the year 2008.
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In the Hollywood-set show Entourage, Vincent Chase's career received a nasty speed-bump with this bloated melodrama that saw him miscast as Pablo Escobar. This trailer gives you an idea of how bad the finished film would be, from the clichéd voiceover to his unconvincing fatsuit. In the show, it limped straight onto DVD. In the real world, we've thankfully been spared it on any format.
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The fictional version of The Purple Rose Of Cairo involves a group of socialites frolicking through Cairo. It's the perfect kind of film for Depression-era Cecilia to watch again and again to forget her troubles. When the film's main character notice's Cecilia watching him for the umpteenth time, he leaves the screen to take her out on the town.
Woody Allen may be hit or miss, but this is one of his most heartfelt movies about his love for the cinema and using cinematic fantasies to escape harsh realities.
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It's probably the best part of How To Lose Friends And Alienate People. This spoof trailer featured Megan Fox take the lead in a film depicting the life of Mother Teresa. Gloriously miscast, she eroticizes and white-washes the clean-living saint in the NC-17 version pictured here. We'd love for this to actually exist, just to see the reaction on Fox News.
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Adaptation is a Russian nesting doll of films. It's a fictionalized version of Charlie Kaufman's own very real trouble with adapting The Orchid Thief, a non-fiction book about the poaching of rare orchids. The movie even features the rough and very clunky script for the original Orchid Thief.
It also includes The Three, a hacky serial killer thriller written by Donald Kaufman, Charlie's fictitious brother who is credited as a co-writer on Adaptation despite not existing.
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Unlike a lot of the movies on this list, Coven (pronounced like "oven") is a real movie, one filmed during the making of American Movie, a documentary about Coven's writer/director, Mark Borchardt, and his lovably inept friends and family.
Although the scrappy independent film faced numerous setbacks, Coven was finally finished in 1997. Coven itself is hard to find, but you can watch pieces of it being filmed in American Movie.
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Roman Coppola's retro sci-fi/spy throwback CQ is all about a director obsessed with his film's star and the search for love. There are a couple of films that exist inside of CQ. One of them is an experimental documentary about the film's editor's reflections on filmmaking, but the other, more intriguing movie is right in line with Barbarella and Danger: Diabolik.
Unfortunately, the only piece of Codename: Dragonfly that exists is the trailer.
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COLLECTION13 LISTS
Film Buff StuffLists for every cinephile and "movie guy" on your virtual trivia team.
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Film Buff Stuff
Lists for every cinephile and "movie guy" on your virtual trivia team.
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