Director: Craig Mazin, 12A, 85min

Stars: Drake Bell, Leslie Nielsen, Marion Ross

On general release

While rooting around the bottom of a well-scraped barrel marked “parody movies”, the producer-director of Airplane, Naked Gun and the later Scream films, David Zucker, dislodged this scatological Spider-Man spoof. He then gave the writer a stab at directing. Big mistake.

The timing is way off. When a declaration of love is interrupted by a bout of flatulence that would shame Mel Brooks, this could just about be hilarious in some parallel universe; when a Stephen Hawking lookalike gets his head stuck in a nest of killer bees and robotically repeats “shit, shit, shit”, grown men might, conceivably, weep from laughing.

But Mazin has forgotten his own producer’s golden rule: play parody utterly straight. Instead, Nielsen mugs for all he is worth as the uncle of Spider-Man – sorry, Dragonfly -– while Marion Happy Days Ross looks bewildered throughout. The only superhero I started to envy was Daredevil. He wouldn’t be able to see this mess.

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