10 – Bringing Up Baby

The oldest film on the list, Bringing Up Baby is classic slapstick, mile a minute comedy. It’s a story about a scatterbrained heiress who has a pet leopard named Baby, and a paleontologist who keeps on getting wrapped up into the misadventures and clumsiness that goes on. What really makes this film stand out, though, is the frenetic pace that it’s written. They generally say that a page of a screenplay is the same as about a minute of screen time. Bringing Up Baby has a 102 minute run time and a 200+ page script, so the dialog doesn’t stop, which is where so much of the humor comes form.

9 – The Fearless Vampire Killers

Also known as Pardon Me, Your Teeth Are In My Neck, The Fearless Vampire Killers walks that line between horror, of the time period, and comedy. It follows an inept group of vampire hunters who end up in a remote village in Transylvania. There, the dimwitted assistant falls in love with the beautiful daughter of the innkeeper. Unfortunately for them, the mysterious Count Krolock is also interested in her. I think that this one is a bit more of a deep cut for a lot of people in terms of comedy. I really enjoy the way that the story unfolds.

8 – Shaun of the Dead

Basically anything that Edgar Wright does is brilliant, and his work with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost at the top of what he does. The start of their parody trilogy, Shaun of the Dead is a humorous look at a zombie apocalypse. Oddly enough, though, not my highest zombie comedy. This one just parodies zombie films so well and also is just very British. If you haven’t seen it, check it out, I think even if you don’t like zombies normally, this parodies it just so well.

7 – Cockneys vs Zombies

Straight into the other zombie film, this one is a much smaller budget but funnier in my opinion. Some of that is because it has Shaun of the Dead leading the way, but also because it’s just more British. They weren’t trying to create something to hit theaters, they just wanted to make something very goofy. And it works, with a cast that isn’t highly recognizable, the tropes it plays off of are and the acting is good enough to really make it work. It has some of the most iconic zombie moments I’ve seen, such as a slow speed chase that I won’t spoil, but so good. This does lean into a bit more of the zombie gore that you’d expect, so probably not where I’d start with zombie comedies.

6 – The Fifth Element

The Fifth Element is one of those movies that whenever it’s on TV, I have to stop and watch it, at least for a minute, which is bad because it’s always on TV. The absurd world that is created and the juxtaposition of Bruce Willis and Chris Tucker’s characters just works so extremely well. And to have Gary Oldman in a role that is completely out there is fun as well. This film really shouldn’t work, there are so many random parts working against each other, but it’s just a hot mess but an enjoyable and very funny one. Maybe not originally meant to be a comedy, because of how it plays out, it’s hard to see it as anything else than that, with some adventure undertones.

5 – Doctor Strangelove

Back into older films, Doctor Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Love the Bomb is a satire of American lifestyle and the power and destruction that it might be bring, but at the same time having much more going on than that. Peter Sellers does a great job in all of the roles that he plays in the film, and it just moves along so quickly as well. The whole thing is completely absurd and doesn’t ever really stop pushing itself further out there. And it’s not just simple comedy in the film, but there’s a lot more going on, which was fun to dig into after a few viewings. I think this film still holds up even with it being a bit older.

4 – Hot Fuzz

The second film from Edgar Wright and Nick Frost and Simon Pegg makes the list a bit higher than Shaun of the Dead. This film, because I think we’re all more familiar with cop shows, just has the parodying nature work better. This whole play on a buddy cop film and just even regular cop films works really well, and the jokes are very good. While there is a bit of gore, the whole thing plays out well in the film and definitely a parody worth checking out, especially if you’re not sure about parodies.

3 – Big Trouble in Little China

Jack Burton is an incompetent buffoon who happens to stumble onto some Big Trouble in Little China. What works so well in this film is that fairly often an incompetent main character will luck their way into being the hero in the end. In the end, though, Jack Burton is still an incompetent buffoon who has to be saved by a lot of other people throughout the film and can’t do really anything for himself when stuff starts to get weird. However, when stuff gets weird, you start to get a lot of good comedic moments as Burton needs to be bailed out of situation after situation. Definitely a cult classic comedy.

2 – Tucker and Dale vs Evil

What happens when you go up to the cabin for the weekend with a bunch of college friends? Nothing good, that’s for sure, and those hillbillies who live next door, they are definitely trouble and out to kill you. Then, deaths start to happen, and it’s totally them. But Tucker and Dale aren’t killers, they’re actually just pretty laid back good guys who are getting way to stressed out as the college friends start dropping like flies and they keep on getting blamed. A great parody of standard horror tropes, while definitely bloody and gross at times, it’s simply so funny with all the misunderstandings that happen.

1 – Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

So, by now you’ll see that I like parodies and satires a lot, and at the top of my list, it’s no exception. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is an amazing film that parodies buddy cop films, Robert Downey Jr’s criminal character accidentally stumbling into a casting room and then getting paired up with a hyper particular Val Kilmer to learn how to become a detective just works so well. The whole thing is completely absurd and plays off of the trope of two seemingly unconnected stories actually being connected. This one is just over the top, and it has a big name cast that works really well.

What are some of your favorite comedy movies? Do you like a more slapstick style of comedy, or dark comedy, parody, what is your favorite type?

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As one glance at the book cover will tell you, Chemistry is a parody of Twilight, but with zombies this time instead of vampires. Or at least, that’s how it started out — as the author notes in her Goodreads profile, she set out to write a book that was the exact opposite of Twilight, and the characters took on a life (er…undeath, in some cases) of their own. What is on its surface a goofy satire of Twilight that plays for laughs is in actuality a book with more depth, heart, and well-rounded characters than I’ve chanced across in quite some time.

Our heroine is Stella Blunt, a tall, curvy, brash, and supremely confident junior in high school. After Stella’s mom gets her dream job, Stella is forced to move across the country (Canada, in particular) with her parents, to Vancouver, British Columbia. To Stella, the move might as well be the end of the world — to say she doesn’t make friends easily is a vast understatement, and she dreads trying to fit somewhere into an unknown social sphere. At first, it’s just as bad as she fears — the students at her new school bully her relentlessly from the start (not that she puts up with it in the slightest, but this doesn’t even seem to slow them down). But then, she comes across Howard Mullins (known by all as Howie) in her chemistry class, and life as she knows it changes still further.

As soon as Stella sits down beside Howie, he can’t keep his eyes off her. His relentless yet unassuming adoration intrigues Stella, and she forms a tentative, curious friendship with him. She discovers that he is unfailingly sweet, if a little slow when he hasn’t eaten in a while, and full of an old-fashioned charm the likes of which she’s never seen. His pallid complexion, monotone voice, and lurching gait confuse her at first, so she does some research — and finds out that Howie, along with his father, brother, and sister, are all zombies. They eat brains (from animals only, of course) and inject themselves with formaldehyde on the reg in order to stay functioning/semi-normal, and to keep the virus from progressing or making them contagious. Naturally, Stella finds this beyond strange, but by the time she finds out, she’s gotten to know Howie well enough to know that he’s a rare gem, virus or no virus — and that she’s crushing on him, hard. Love quickly blossoms between them — but will it be enough to carry them through all the dangers and difficulties that lie ahead?

As I mentioned, this book is indeed a parody of Twilight, but to limit it to that would do it a disservice. More than just a feminist response to Twilight, Chemistry is a compelling feminist work that can stand on its own two feet. Thus, to my thinking, reading Twilight before reading Chemistry is only necessary for deriving maximum enjoyment from the jokes throughout the book — certainly not for enjoying the book as a whole. Not only does the story take every potentially questionable part of Twilight and stand it on its head, as well as elegantly fill in every plot hole that tripped up Twilight, its characters understand what feminism really is (i.e., what true equity, agency, and respect really mean) — and it manages to communicate this without sounding preachy, which was refreshing as all get-out.

Beyond this, the characters in this book are just fantastic. I believe we’ve noted in past reviews that there seems to be a trend among a lot of fiction these days where the protagonist of the story is totally flat and uninteresting, while being surrounded by loads of great side characters, all of whose stories we’d much rather read than the main character’s. So much of the time (especially with stuff that’s written in first-person POV), the protagonist is nothing more than a benign lens through which to view the story happening around them. That’s definitely the case for the material Chemistry is inspired by, and it’s something I’ve run into more times than I care to count. Because of this, finding a protagonist who actually feels like a real, multi-faceted, actually interesting human being in a book that I expected to be all goofiness and absurdity, well — it blew my tiny little mind, you guys.

And Stella, magnificent as she is, isn’t the only great character in this story. Howie is an absolute delight (beautiful cinnamon roll too good for this world, too pure), and is the kind of sweet, respectful, capable male protagonist I want to see way more of. Almost all of the side characters have a compelling persona and backstory, everybody’s motivations feel well-founded and understandable, and the majority of them go through some level of believable character development.

As much as I could continue gushing about this book for ages, I do have a couple of critiques — the most prominent one, for me, was the way Stella’s new classmates take to brutally bullying her right away. Like, they are instantly peppering her with fat jokes and mean, snide comments. Now, it’s been a little while since I was in high school, so maybe the memory is slightly less seared onto my brain, but it seemed a little implausible coming from students who didn’t know Stella or have any sort of history with her. I’ll grant you that kids can sometimes be jerkwads for no reason, and for the purposes of this story, it worked okay, but it felt like a lot to swallow at some points. This behavior is partially explained by the fact that Stella draws attention not so much because she’s tall and plus-size, but more so because of the sheer force of her personality (which is considerable). Basically, her peers are threatened by her way of owning whatever room she walks into, so they lash out at her. This goes some distance toward explaining why Stella’s classmates are so hostile, but it still felt over-the-top to me at times.

Another thing I noticed is that the reader is sometimes asked to suspend disbelief just a smidge too far, or sometimes a moment goes a step past the point of no return in terms of cheesiness. These moments are few, and easily forgivable in the larger scheme of the plot, but there were a couple of points where it was enough to give me pause and pull me back out of the story a bit. But then I reminded myself I was reading satire, and that it all serves the larger purpose, and I dove back in to the amazingness.

Lastly — and this isn’t a flaw so much as a heads up — the content often veers toward the very mature (swear words and sex talk and violence, oh my!) — I didn’t find it too much to swallow, but some readers might, and it was enough that I’d be hesitant to call this book a straight-up Young Adult novel, even though it’s billed as such. I would maybe recommend it to a mature 17- or 18-year-old, but that’s a pretty hard maybe. Basically, use your judgement–if this sort of stuff tends to be a bit much for you, approach with caution.

Despite these things, though, I pretty much enjoyed every minute of this book. The powerful combination of fantastic characters I wish I could befriend in real life, a ton of refreshing themes, and a pace that doesn’t let up, this book was exactly what I wanted to read right now, and nearly impossible to put down. It had so many of the tropes and themes I want to see more of, like the soft action boy (listen, I know this is barely a thing, but I’m trying to make it a thing, so there), the BBW, great platonic friendships, and some really great, non-token-y representation. Basically, it did a lot of the things I love to see a story doing, and beyond that, it was a straight up blast, and I already kinda want to re-read it (and I definitely want to do fan art of it).

After finishing Chemistry, I was beyond stoked to find that History, the second book in the series, is out now too, and I promptly devoured it as well (I may do a separate review of it later, but I’m still deciding…with the way it plays out, it’d be a challenge to review it without dropping some major spoilers, and I am morally opposed to spoilers). There’s a third book, Biology, in the works as well, but Chemistry just came out in 2016, and History in December of 2017 (fresh as fresh gets, y’all!), so needless to say, it’ll be awhile. And I shall be waiting with bated breath until it’s out!

Love or hate Twilight, would you read Chemistry? If you’ve read it, what did you like and/or dislike about it? What popular book would you love to see someone do a parody of?

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