Humor Doesn’t Translate Internationally

The Notoriety Traders

In his influential 1961 book The Image: A Guide to ­Pseudo-Events in America, scholar Daniel J. Boorstin noted that “the successful dealer in literary, dramatic, and musical commodities is one who discovers a formula for what the public wants, and then varies the formula just enough to sell each new product, but not enough to risk loss of the market.” For the entirety of its hundred-year existence, mainstream American cinema has so faithfully operated on this formulaic-variance principle that it’s hard to watch a Hollywood action movie or romantic comedy without instinctively knowing what’s going to happen next. Even when these movies surprise, the audience knows that all surprises exist within the accepted formula of what is and is not expected.

Historically, B movies have existed as simplistic, in­expensive distillations of Hollywood’s big-budget genre fare. When a mainstream film like John Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach dazzled western fans, B westerns began to mimic its flashier elements (blazing gunfights, constant suspense, “type” characters) to attract audiences. Simi­larly, when Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho thrilled movie­goers in 1960, B horror films went to outrageous lengths to provide similar shocks and frights on a small budget. Since most B-movie plots derived from better-financed A-movie formulas, they were forced to set themselves apart through gimmickry: outlandish cha­racters and settings; titillation and exploitation; silly PR stunts (such as distributing barf bags before gore-horror movies, or installing seat-buzzers to startle sci-fi fans); and titles so outrageous—think Women in Bondage, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!—that the name alone could help a movie achieve cult status.

In recent years, the most vivid legacy of this B-movie gimmickry has been the emergence of “mockbusters”—cheaply produced straight-to-DVD films with names like Transmorphers and The Da Vinci Treasure—created with the clear intention of trading in on the notoriety of theatrical films like Transformers and The Da Vinci Code. In one sense this is nothing new, since mainstream movies and B movies alike have always cannibalized successful templates. What sets mockbusters apart, however, is that these films are deliberately released on DVD just as their blockbuster namesakes hit the big screen, thus creating a niche market based on simple consumer confusion.

Track the history of mockbusters, and you’ll find that one in­dependent production company, the Asylum, is responsible for most of the titles in this curious sub-genre. In 2005, for example, the Asylum released a DVD version of War of the Worlds to video stores one day before the Steven Spielberg movie of the same name ap­peared in movie theaters. American movie fans...