Intermovie

A movie-within-a-movie.

Exploring “The rise of the intermovie” for The Guardian, Ryan Gilbeycited some recent examples, including “Vagiant” – a vampire/giant horror movie seen in “(500) Days of Summer,” and “My Best Friend is a Robot” – one of a number of dubious movies made by George Simmons, Adam Sandler’s character in “Funny People.”

According to Gilbey:

Intermovies have long been a way for filmmakers to offer wry asides on the industry. In “Burn After Reading,” the Coen brothers featured a rancid-looking cookie-cutter romcom called “Pushing Up Daisy” (hats off to Dermot Mulroney for appearing as himself in it, though the joke might have been more piquant with Matthew McConaughey). But then the Coens are old hands at that game, having named an earlier movie (“O Brother, Where Art Thou?”) after the faux-movie referred to in Preston Sturges’s “Sullivan’s Travels.”

Other intermovies, Gilbey argued, simply operate “in the tradition of films about filmmaking, where intermovies are part of the furniture”: such as “Habeas Corpus,” which features in Robert Altman’s “The Player.” Commenting on the dynamic use of the intermovie in “Scream 2” and “Adaptation,” Gilbey observed:

The trend lately has been for making trailers advertising films that don’t exist – the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez “Grindhouse” double-bill excelled at this, featuring ads for movies (including “Werewolf Women of the S.S.”) that looked better than either of the “Grindhouse” films themselves. The gravel-voiced narration on Eli Roth’s creepy “Thanksgiving” teaser (“White meat, dark meat, all will be carved”) captures the sleazy 1970s tone perfectly, while Edgar Wright’s snappily-edited trailer for the fake Brit horror “Don’t” is a mini-masterpiece.

This entire joke may be on us now that one of the “Grindhouse” trailers, Rodriguez’s “Machete,” is being expanded into a full-length “Mexploitation” film starring Robert De Niro, Lindsay Lohan and Steven Seagal.