Awesomest Maximus

2010

AKA: National Lampoon's The Legend of Awesomest Maximus

This is the latest National Lampoon comedy. It's a spoof of recent sword-and-sandals movies, quite similar in that respect to Meet the Spartans, except that Awesomest Maximus takes its basic plotline from Troy and layers in characters from 300 and Gladiator, while Meet the Spartans took its basic plotline from 300 and layered in characters from every other source it could think of, ancient and modern. MTS probably included (bad) impersonations of The View, The Apprentice, rap videos, The Breakfast Club, several episodes of Jonny Quest, President Bush's press conferences, American Idol, and Fried Green Tomatoes. Actually I think it did include some of those things, while I just imagined the others. Or not. I'm not going to watch it again to find out.

Both this film and Meet the Spartans seem to spend way too much time pointing out the obvious fact that toga movies seem to be made by and for gay men, but I think it's fair to say that Meet the Spartans is basically just a series of mostly unrelated pop culture sketches and impersonations which are loosely held together by the structure of 300, while Awesomest Maximus is essentially a MAD-style parody of the film Troy, although it also uses materials from similar recent films.

Awesomest Maximus is better than Meet the Spartans. How could it not be? Meet the Spartans is on the IMDb all-time bottom 100. Amazingly, that places it in the middle of the careers of co-producers/directors Friedberg and Seltzer. They have three films in the bottom 100, including two worse than Meet the Spartans. Their worst film, the appropriately titled Disaster Movie, is rated 15th-worst of all time on that list! Before they came along, John Derek had held for more than two decades the dubious distinction of being the worst post-WW2 director among those with five or more theatrical releases. Derek directed five theatrical films, and two of his immortal classics are currently in the all-time bottom 100, but his throne in bad movie Valhalla has now been usurped. If you compare the two lists side-by-side, Seltzer and Friedberg make Mr. Derek seem like Stanley Kubrick in comparison:

Seltzer/Friedberg	John Derek
(3.30) - Vampires Suck (2010) (2.60) - Date Movie (2006) (2.50) - Meet the Spartans (2008) (2.20) - Epic Movie (2007) (1.70) - Disaster Movie (2008)	(4.10) - Once Before I Die (1966) (3.02) - Tarzan, the Ape Man (1981) (2.98) - Fantasies (1981/I) (2.63) - Bolero (1984) (2.08) - Ghosts Can't Do It (1989)

To establish a basis for perspective, consider that Uwe Boll, the German schlockmeister so often ridiculed as the contemporary Ed Wood, has directed six films which are rated 4.0 or higher at IMDb. The legendary Ed Wood himself made eight films rated higher than 3.3, which is the highest score Seltzer and Friedberg have ever achieved. (Altogether, Wood directed eleven films which have IMDb scores; Boll's total is 21 and counting.)

Here are the career medians for these directors:

• Ed Wood 3.64
• John Derek 2.98
• Uwe Boll 2.92
• Seltzer/Friedberg 2.50

Awesome achievement, you guys!

Getting back to the point ever-so-briefly, I have to ask myself how much room there is for an alternate version of Meet the Spartans. Very little. Awesomest Maximus is lame. It is not as lame as Meet the Spartans, and Maximus at least has some nudity and other R-rated shenanigans for us to enjoy. And is has Rip Torn, who is always pretty cool in his loony way.

But it's still pretty darned lame.

Nudity:

The woman who plays the Oracle in the special features (lying in front of a green screen) seems to be a different person from the one who appears in the final film. If these are indeed two different women, then one of them is Nathalie Walker and the other is not. Nathalie is the one credited both in the closing roll and at IMDb. Personally, I think that the one in the special features looks like Nathalie, while the other does not, but I'm just not sure, and I may well be wrong, since the credits would indicate that Natalie is either the one in the actual film, or both. At any rate, Natalie must show you her breasts in here somewhere.

Below are two caps, one from the film, one from the unfinished green-screen scene, thus allowing you to take your own guess.

Movie Oracle

Green-screen Oracle

There are lots of topless women scattered through the film. I can't determine their identities from the credits, but here are the scenes in question.