One of my numerous character flaws is a tolerance for cheap laff-a-minute parodies, which is why I sat through two parodies of The Hunger Games. This one is slightly worse than The Hungover Games, though it has its moments and really isn’t hugely worse than, say, the bulk of The Interview. The lead actress, Maiara Walsh, is quite appealing, and I was glad to see on her IMDb page that she’s been in a lot of better movies and television shows. In fact, a lot of the cast rises above the material.

Writers-directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have made a number of movies skewering various film genres (Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Vampires Suck) and were also part of the writing team for the original Scary Movie. According to IMDb, this is the first of their films to be a box-office flop, though one IMDb commenter thought it was the least awful thing they’d done.

One segment features a team of lookalikes for major action stars (Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Bruce Willis, et al), and the actors in question reportedly got along so well during the filming that they now hang out together and call themselves The Expandables.

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