ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ

Everyone assumes that movie critics have the world's easiest job, but spare a thought for the hapless hack who has to sit through Meet The Spartans, the latest useless movie spoof from the team behind Epic Movie. We should get danger money for this stuff. This year's target is Frank Miller's stylised gorefest , but as usual Meet The Spartans is less a parody than a mechanically recovered mulch of YouTube skits, American TV shows and product placement.

When making a spoof, it helps to be funnier than the movie you are mocking, but there are more laughs in half an hour of 300 than the entire pathetic running time (barely 80 minutes) of Meet The Spartans. The big joke here is the homoerotic subtext of Miller's buff warriors, but Meet the Spartans makes the implicit tiresomely obvious by having King Leonidas (ex- star Sean Maguire) and his crew skip into battle, singing I Will Survive. Twice. Even the most obvious gags are signposted in DayGlo lettering. For instance, the Persian emperor Xerxes is played by Ken Davitian, AKA the fat guy from . Not massively funny, to be sure, but any potential giggles are strangled at birth by a voiceover informing us that "he looked like the fat guy from Borat".

"VOMIT, FAECES AND PUS"

There are, predictably, a great many scenes involving vomit, faeces and pus, usually splurted into some luckless performer's face - a good metaphor for the experience of watching the film. The gross-out material is leavened with appearances from celebrity looklalikes: Britney, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan are all subjected to the same pixelated up-skirt shot. It's just so lazy, so depressing, that I can't think of a single nice thing to say about it. Please don't waste your money.

Meet The Spartans is out in the UK on 21 March 2008.