"The Starving Games" is yet another film in the idiotic teenager parody genre. This overused genre consists of many movies currently on IMDB's Bottom 100 list....with the likes of "Disaster Movie" (#1),"Epic Movie" (#12),"Date Movie" (#24),"Scary Movie V" (#50),"Fifty Shades of Black" (#65) and "Extreme Movie" (#99). "The Starving Games", incidentally, is #44 on this infamous list of badness.
These films are all essentially the same...each one parodies dozens of different movies and rarely, mostly by mistake, they actually provide one or two laughs. But they also provide dozens and dozens of unfunny, crude and stupid 'laughs' that make you cringe. A few examples are names of characters...such as Hugh Janus and President Snowballs. And, as is true of the genre, plenty of fart, poop, wedgie and testicle 'jokes'. Intellectual fare, this sure isn't!
So is this worth seeing? No.
The Starving Games
2013
Action / Adventure / Comedy / Sci-Fi
The Starving Games
2013
Action / Adventure / Comedy / Sci-Fi
Plot summary
Set in the most depressing corner of a post-apocalyptic future, our heroine Kantmiss Evershot (Maiara Walsh) volunteers to take her manipulative younger sister's place in the seventy-fifth annual "Starving Games." In doing so, she must leave behind her smoldering just-a-friend Dale (Brant Daugherty) and team up with the geeky baker's son Peter Malarkey (Cody Allen Christian) in a fight for her life. But wait, there's more! She could also win an old ham, a coupon for a foot-long sub at a six-inch price, and a partially eaten pickle! In The Starving Games, Friedberg and Seltzer's sixth cinematic spoof of box-office hits, the prolific parody duo has its sights trained on the adventure blockbuster The Hunger Games! It's all the laughs and half the calories as they sling dozens of cock-eyed, barbed arrows at sci-fi, action and fantasy films from The Avengers and Oz the Great and Powerful to pop culture characters and celebrities like Harry Potter and Taylor Swift.
Uploaded by: OTTO
Director
Top cast
Tech specs
720p.BLU 1080p.BLUMovie Reviews
About what we've come to expect from dreck like this.
DON'T HATE THE PLAYER, HATE THE GAME
I rate films on how well I enjoy them and not on their quality. There were scenes which admittedly had me ROFL. The film does not only satire "The Hunger Games" but also satires other films as well as modern society, an aspect which I liked. The humor was indeed stupid and even crude at times. One line from the film about a past game:
"No one could anticipate Oprah would eat all the other contestants."
The speech given at the end by the Samuel L. Jackson character actor had me in tears. Maiara Walsh who played the star Kantmiss Evershot reminded me of Zooey Deschanel more than Jennifer Lawrence. The actual film is short as it has a sad 10 minute blooper reel at the end.
I enjoyed the film, it reminded me of "Your Highness" minus some of the crudeness. Other films spoofed include, Oz, Potter, LOTR, Avatar, Avengers, Expendables, plus more.
Parental Guide: No F-bombs, but does have a lot of adult language. Censored sex scene. Male streaker with rear nudity.
Of course it's bad! But it's very funny in places
What does one really expect regarding this kind of spoof outing? The Hunger Games is certainly an above-average target given how serious it takes itself. What's too bad in terms of the humor used in The Starving Games is the amount of low-brow fart/elimination/kick-to-the-nuts stuff that seems to show up in lowest-common-denominator humor. Yes, it's a bunch of sight gags, but many are fun and well-done. The leads are pretty/handsome and very well matched to the characters in the Hunger Games. I imagine this movie benefits from lots of beer with some amount of pizza...so you won't starve while watching this outing and a bit of judicious inebriation will certainly help elevate this movie.