I thought I had seen it all when it came to parody films until I came across one that was as painful to watch as the films it sought to parody. Vampires Suck made every Twilight movie before and after it look like high art. An American Carol made me realize that one could suffer even worse films and find solace in the fact that there is some truth to be revealed. And let’s just say, The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It was not even slightly better than the worst Judd Apatow movie that just came out.
Not Another Church Movie does the impossible. It aims stunningly low and goes even lower apparently, though that’s hard to believe considering how terrible any film made by Tyler Perry must be in the first place. For Perry fans who find such vitriolic curiosity amusing, it makes Temptation look like Daddy’s Little Girls. As if the use of “Not Another” in the title didn’t already give it away, this is a badly timed and inexpensive spoof of Perry’s movies. One can’t help but wonder how the people behind it failed to appreciate that no one does a greater parody of Perry’s unsolicited attempts at religion than Perry himself.
Television talk-show host Hoprah Windfall, also known as Luc Ashley, is leaving her television career for the last time, live on air, and is searching for her female replacement. Helping her with this difficult task is God himself (Jamie Foxx, of course), who drops an angel feather on entrepreneur and filmmaker Taylor Pherry the ‘P’ is silent, of course Kevin Daniels, who plays Taylor. Taylor is a member of an enormous family consisting of foul-mouthed grandmother MaDude played by the same actor, also, and sex addicted brother Moe, played by Wayne Stamps. And within this blend that is around in Modern Family makes looking for a permanent replacement of the host of The Daily Show seem like a walk in the park are thick layers of family chaos including but not limited to a woman embroiled in a messy divorce with an unfaithful husband, a stupidly incompetent mover, throw in a love-seeking lawyer, and a woman steadily getting back to her routine after losing her job and having to unwind her father’s estate.
Since writer/director Johnny Mack does not wish to develop any kind of story at all, let alone scripting any of the plot lines for humor, we are to believe that the chaos associated with the narrative is in fact an attribute of Perry’s overused style of throwing dozens of cut-ins into what he is saying at the moment. We’re mostly talking about how Foxx’s God, the most aggressive of them all since he was sitting for a roundtable in Heaven, is the one who tastes the most laughs. This includes meager scenes with the Devil (Mickey Rourke). But Mack quite conveniently ignores the unusual and possibly original premise of the act of the movie and goes for creating several other, less witty, but more dramatic stories. The loud, ugly MaDude is also useless as one would expect her to be. She is a caricature of a caricature. Have you ever tried to read one paper that has already been photocopied seven times? It never works.
As aggressively unfunny as it is, Not Another Church Movie is also good at being as dull and uninspiring as the very bottom in Perry’s body of work. This is a spoof that is approximately a decade overdue, and it is also somewhat scornful to the extent that these days Perry’s most recent works go relatively unnoticed because they get such muted exposure on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Even managing to get a theatrical release and making more than half a million dollars at the box office, Not Another Church Movie is set to have a similar and justifiably warranted destiny: anonymity.
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