Remember the bright minds behind the italian duck parody of Avatar, Anatar, one so stupid and cowardly it couldn’t even release before or close to the second Avatar movie it wanted to leech off?
No? Well, i did a review of Anatar, go read that. It’s definitely quite the something.
Today we’re talking shit. Super hero shit.
In one way, i can at least understand the idea of Anatar: it’s a mockbuster of a franchise that made gajillions and had a new movie coming out back then.
Tale as old as cinema itself.
This one is even more dead on arrival, it is when you do an Avengers parody, an Avengers Endgame parody after what feels like a decade since movie released, with Marvel still pumping them out to a public that notably was reasonably confused to see the sagas go on after something called “ENDGAME”, and reasonably tired of them trying to redo the same magic but cheaper, faster, taking for granted you just had to press the “redo button” to actually duplicate the success.
But it just fits, it’s that outdated, decades late to the party, or unaware that the building you rammed a tank through even had a party in it, that attitude defining most of the lowest fuckin italian media trash.
And like Anatar, Avenzers was outdated (moldy, even) the second it came out, and i still believe it actually releasing in theather is a psy-op of sorts, just gaslighting people into believing that it did receive a theathrical release, despite very few evidence to be found online, aside from an european theather chain, UCI Cinemas, advertising as it did with Anatar, and a report of it raking the miserable box office of 1.200 euros.
Which is so fuckin pathetic it ain’t even funny, just plain sad.
This time though i didn’t bother to follow up, and i waited for it to eventually being quietly released (the usual “fart in the elevator” analogy is juvenile, but correct and this movie doesn’t deserve better criticism anyway, if we’re being 100 % honest) on Amazon Prime Video, like Anatar, in what was most likely always the plan, the only real plan.
Being “free” still doesn’t excuse the time investment, but any time even looking at the title (which is a pun on “Avengers” and “Avanzi”, the latter meaning “leftovers”, FIY) is wasted and gone forever, so let’s part cheeks and see if there’s any gerbil to save from the manflesh assprison.
So what’s the plot? More importantly, is there a plot?
Nominally, yes, not really, but let’s pretend this qualifies.
Gaethanos is a race of space aliens, the only surviving after the other were decimated by – and i quote – “Marvel and Warner’s superheroes”, that scans the universe for a race akin to their own in culture, and eventually they find it: Italians. Not humans, Italians.
So they become huge simps, try to imitate their art and culture, buy all Italian kiotchiks they can get their hands on, become soccer fans of the many regional soccer teams, but tired of failing at imitating them, they decide to go down to Italy, Earth, and conquer the Gem of “Made In Italy” (a branding term used to promote Italian products around the globe, FIY) for themselves.
So it’s up the cheap knockoff superheroes of Italy, Earth to unite… and eventually arrange the whole fate of the Earth in a soccer match agains the aliens.
In other cases, i might commend the metaplot and the self-awareness, but i’ve seen this trick before, it’s just to excuse away any preemptive criticism while doing less than the bare minimum, because, look at us, we’re meta about it and aware of our national clichès, we’re doing self-deprecating humour too (and ripping off ideas from popular movies that don’t deserve the indignity of being referenced here), you know, we’re smart! We’re hip!
Some of the witless shit you’ll ever see, but the kind Italian audiences are quite familiar due to a specific subgenre of low brow popular comedy films that originated in the 90s as “Christmas films” and persisted well in the 2000s and 2010s, though now mostly died out, but we’re not doing the history of the “cinepanettone”, honestly in comparison to this modern shit even those are starting to not look/being THAT bad.
Nor does it deserve the extra effort i’m putting in anyway, not that the makers of the film know what that is, they might but it’s hard to believe when they made a movie like Avenzers: Italian Super Heroes.
To even say this is low brow it’s an understatement, there’s no brow, upper or lower, just utter bullshit, derelict of any spark of creativity, right from the parody names that honestly don’t even make sense if you don’t speak or understand italian, but even so you might guess that it entails: puns, lot of shitty puns, crass, beyond outdated humour AND shitty modern self-deprecating humour as cynical as it sounds, “topical” as well as incredibly tired references, alongside just a torrent of stupid, tired, uninspired cliched shit. Just missing are the fart jokes.
There’s also some new bottom of the barrell crap, as many images and videos used to explain and-or introduce the knockoff Avengers and Guardians Of The Galaxy equivalents are clearly IA slop, because we have no shame, no standards at all, please, please, for fuck’s sake, please fuckin laugh!
At the very least it knows how a comedy italian movie is supposed to resolve conflict: a football match. As cliched as it is, it’s kind of an old staple that’s undeniably Italian.
Not the american college stuff, the ol’ European “soccer”. The western “kemari”, if you will.
Maybe it would be less intollerable if it didn’t heavily rely on the narrator explaining shit for most of the movie.. and if it wasn’t more than 2 hours longs, that is foul, just cruel and evil. Maybe not.
Anatar was barely under 90 minutes but even that had more of an actual plot, i can’t not mention that again because it’s clearly from the same production studio, leaving aside it is produced by Salvatore Scarico once again, you can tell they reused props as a lot of “alien extras” have fake beak ducks and so on, and it just has that feel, that it shouldn’t be a 2020s release, but something 2 decades older, but yet, it just looks like 100 euro were used as budget for the costumes.
…. you can tell if you actually watched Anatar to begin with, which i don’t recommend anyway, but the movie itself references Anatar way too many times anyway, so i guess it doesn’t matter.
The effects make some of the Asylum films look like Hollywood production, and on this note, i do wonder what the fuck is the endgame (har har) of Scarico (also credited as an editor for the film, alonsgide his producer role), whom claimed to want create an italian specific new genre of films, like the “spaghetti-fi” that allegedly he kicked off with Anatar, but i honestly wonder why even set out to make deliberate crap like this, because it’s deliberately “ i don’t give a shit and i know im utter trash, fuck you” bungum, creatively bankrupt, intellectually dishonest, even leaving aside it aims for the trashbin more than the low hanging fruit.
But i don’t think even the trashbin would want this.
Why now chase after what even The Asylum mostly stopped doing years ago? Even if these production are cheap, nobody is gonna go see them in theathers, especially as in there’s no marketing at all even in Italy for these, and by now even the people in the know like me just expect crap like this to trickle to streaming services, often included in the base subscription too.
Plus, there are plenty of other small companies that filled the gap previously occupied by The Asylum and some other companies like that still exists and mostly know publish stuff that has budget of (and most time IS) a Mark Polonia film, so again, why?
Why try to be a lesser ambitious and crafty “early era” Roger Corman?
I honestly don’t get it, but i will say i would rather see people do earnest attempts like The Creator, that sci fi movie with William Shatner that actually had a budget and a gonzo charm, even if it clearly tried too much for its own good… and also was barely marketed, at all.
Yes, i know i said this in the review for Anatar, but it bears repeating when no one learns a damn thing, or – more correctly- doesn’t care/want to learn anything in the first place.
As it stands, a film like Avenzers: Italian Super Heroes is utterly pointless and devoid of any reason to existence as an actual movie, taking the joke so far it’s not even funny anymore, just baffling, especially when you deliver suck a boring, cynical joyless farce of a comedy film, full of italian actors that are mostly talented but clearly are given feces to play with, not that you will recognize them (the actors, not the feces) unless you’ve seen a lot of modern italian movies or live in Italy.
This is something that should be a fake poster or a meme like Goncharov, by actually making the movie you miss the point and set yourself up to ridicule, and it’s not like these movies make any real money, so i’m just baffled. Plus even with the subtitles provided by Amazon Prime Video (implying this is available in other markets outside of Italy, which might be true)…. so many of the puns and jokes and references are gonna be completely lost on anyone that isn’t italian or actually lived in Italy for a substantial amount of time, and what its so obviously parodying the Avengers is just gonna make the viewer collapse into a “cringe singularity”.
Not that it needed to be said, but yes, it’s unwatchable, unbearable, without hyperbole i did had more fun at the dentist, heck, it’s somehow even worse than Anatar, i don’t care who gamed the metacritic to make it have a more positive rating on IMDB (at least at the time of writing/posting).
I’d say it couldn’t be any worst if they tried to… but i feel this might be interpreted as a challenge, and who knows, by the time they make Avenzers Volume 3, i might have lost enough brain cells and actually enjoy this brain dead shit soup, as it stooped lower and lower as it went on, and kept regurgitating itself like a vomit uroborus, just in case you missed a shit Berlusconi impression the first time around, or didn’t see them reuse the same reaction scenes over and over again.
“Abysmal” doesn’t make it justice, even for bad movies buffs this is just painful to sit through.
You may think you wanna see this because it’s so bad… this is so bad you’d wish you didn’t, just pure, boring, misery.
Also, fuck off with the IA slop used so much in here, just fuck off, most likely we’ll see another attempt that somehow makes even less money, i do hope these movies die off altogether, but i just know more attempts and cash will be wasted to make comedy movies that make Mark Pirro’s filmography seem classy (or make me miss the Asylum attempt with their Avengers Grimm movies) .
Because – again – it’s also very italian to be proudly conceptually ancient, uncaring of modern standards and completely out of touch with the audiences.
I’ll say this for free: if you have to call yourself trash… you’re not that, you’re not even worthy of what the modern label and the modern appreciation (ironic or not) for genre cinema implies, you’re honestly just a miserable poser so desperate to fit in the “cool kids” when you’re so obviously cynically motivated and sporting such a self-serving tone, a sadsack of a movie if i ever saw one, but even pitying you it’s way too much and plain undeserved.
Honestly, the Wood Rocket porn parody of Guardians Of The Galaxy is less embarassing and more ambititious than this, heck, their stuff is often nightmarish but i’ll remember that weird “hand puppet porno behind the scenes biopic” forever.
This…. i will anyway, i think, but it’s not worth even committing to memory.
Wise Cafe (International) 