'Superhero Movie' (12A) Starring Drake Bell, Sara Paxton & Leslie Nielsen

It’s a good time to be in the spoof business at the moment. Music send-up Walk Hard won critical and popular acclaim, and Meet The Spartans went to number one at the US box office (despite being rubbish). So now that biopics, horror, date movies and epic movies have all been lampooned, it’s the superhero genre’s turn.

Rick Riker (Drake Bell) has had a tough life - his parents were killed in front of him, he’s unpopular at school and longs for the attentions of Jill Johnson (Sara Paxton), a girl at his school who doesn’t know he exists. This miserable existence changes, however, when he is bitten by a genetically modified dragonfly and becomes a superhero known as, er, ‘The Dragonfly’. He must use his new powers to defeat super villain ‘The Hourglass’, who drains people of their youth to keep himself alive.

As you may imagine, the plot is merely a launch pad for a multitude of gags, poking fun at everything from Fantastic Four to X-Men. It’s a good time for this sort of spoof, as whilst it’s a relatively new genre, there are a lot of superhero movies to draw from. What this really benefits from is a fairly linear plot littered with gags, not merely the series of sketches ...Spartans was. It’s still the same routine - fart gags, boob gags, Tom Cruise jokes - but with a clear beginning, middle and end there’s at least a vague point to it.

The cast is either unknown or veterans of the Scary Movie series (such as Regina Hall), with the grandfather of spoof, Leslie Nielsen, still just about looking like he knows where he is. There’s no real standouts but the presence of some cult TV actors (including Dan Castellaneta, the voice Homer Simpson) may be of interest to some viewers.

By now you know the drill. It’s testament to the filmmakers that this has more in common with the earlier Scary Movie instalments that the recent spin-offs, but at it’s heart it’s daft and low brow comedy, which never really rises to the level of anything interesting. You may catch yourself having the odd guilty giggle at some of the more basic jokes, but we have a feeling one viewing may be more than enough.