Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg: It's over. This is your intervention. This several-year bender you've been on has to come to a stop. Your parents must be worried sick. I can only imagine what they're thinking: "Oh, it's all our fault! We should have seen the signs. First it was those albums! Those Weird Al Yankovich records! Then it was Airplane. Then Airplane 2. Then they were freebasing Naked Gun 33 1/3 in the basement while doing lines of Hot Shots Part Deux. If only someone told us it would lead to them making Date Movie and then Epic Movie? Oh my god, Epic Movie!

Then there would be crying. There's always crying.

I almost thought that the only way to get through to you would be to take a really good review, then rewrite it (poorly), insert some jokes about dude parts and the occasional Britney Spears reference, then pass it off as parody. But then I remembered that there's more to it than that. A lot more. Then I realized you guys probably don't read reviews. I mean, if I were you I sure wouldn't.

So here we are at the dawn of a new era from you. You've grown up. Having graduated from simply putting the word "Movie" at the end of your titles (Scary Movie, Date Movie, Epic Movie) you've now simply started taking the titles of the films you're imitating and mash them together. Meet the Spartans. Clever. What? Was 300 K-fed Jokes taken? Or was Spartan Movie just a little too cerebral for your target audience?

Thankfully, this might be the end of your winning streak. I mean, sure your movies made money. It's hard not to when your movie is dumped amid the squalor and blight of the January-February dumping ground. But this year something unexpected happened. There's an honest-to-god good movie out there. And it's gonna kick the crap out of your rancid, festering pile of ecologically friendly (read: recycled) jokes. And it's going to be time to take a long hard look at your careers. Did you guys set out to make the 63rd most hated film of all time? Are you trying to top yourselves this time?

I know, I know. If you're even reading this at all you're going to immediately click over afterwards to your bank account and smile at all those zeros. I would too if I sold my soul. But people have pretty much caught on, and if there's any justice in this world, your movie will end up at the bottom of the heap this weekend. But if it doesn't, I look forward to writing this again next year – when you guys inevitably put out Monster Movie, which will feature whichever Z-grade stars are hard up enough to take your check and star in a hand-held camera movie about a bunch of vapid characters wandering through a dozen of this year's biggest hits while being chased by a giant monster.

Or was that plot still supposed to be a secret?

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EmailC. Robert Cargill

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