Starring Kal Penn, Jennifer Coolidge, and Fred Willard. Rated 14A.

Do Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer know anything about satire? You might think after having written and helped produce the Scary Movie series (number V is now in production) they would have learned something about the art of the spoof. But nothing in Epic Movie—a second attempt at directing from one of their own scripts, after last year’s Date Movie—indicates that they have learned a damn thing about the industry from which they steal a living. Now I’m not sure they’ve even seen Mad TV.

As with the other Movie movies, the decidedly small Epic consists of a hastily strung together set of riffs on multiplex hits. Ostensibly combining elements of The Da Vinci Code, and the Harry Potter, X-Men, and Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, it leans on The Chronicles of Narnia to keep moving.

The so-called story involves the fates of four seemingly random victims, er, protagonists: timid Englishman Peter (Date’s Adam Campbell), cute dumbbell Lucy (Red Eye’s charming Jayma Mays), childlike Edward (Kal Penn, looking mad at his agent), and Susan (Faune A. Chambers), who is, well, black—because no one remembered to give her any other distinguishing characteristics.

Also onboard are Fred Willard, a surprisingly convincing Liam Neeson substitute in the land they call Gnarnia (“for legal reasons”), and Jennifer Coolidge, who prompts one of the bigger laughs as the Gnarnia ruler cleverly called the White Bitch. “All right,” Edward sighs on the first meeting. “Stiffler’s mom!”

That’s about as close to meta- humour as we get here. I kind of liked it that Nacho Libre’s funny-looking Héctor Jiménez showed up right after a Jack Black rip-off, but I’m not sure that the filmmakers noticed. The rest is mostly celebrity look-alikes or feeble impersonations, with Darrell Hammond as Captain Jack Swallows, Kevin McDonald as a superannuated Harry Potter, a guy who doesn’t look like Samuel L. Jackson in a witless Snakes on a Plane parody, and one who does look like Borat.

Of course there are fart jokes, crude sexual references, and some serious barfing—which makes sense, since the Movie itself is a special kind of projectile vomiting.