Hidden Writings of Epic Movie

Introduction and Dossier 001: Blossoms Black and Sweet as Norwegian Crude

Paul Sunday: We have oil and it seeps through the ground.

Daniel Plainview: Just because there’s something on the ground doesn’t mean there’s anything beneath it.

— There Will Be Blood (2007)

If what Derrida says about ghosts of the past that haunt us is true, then naturally in every waking moment, we are all haunted all the time. Epic Movie (2007) is a film that has, in its own twisted way, haunted me for nearly two decades. It appears like a black hole, a film whose reception is outrageously negative that it only provokes me to inspect it.

I am not unfamiliar with cinematic detritus. I have seen much of the 2000s IMDb canon of bad cinema, including Battlefield Earth (2000) some eight times. Some of these films have become re-evaluated, like Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered (2001), (a film, above all, about how capitalism cannot tolerate pure libidinal energy until Gordon’s Oedipalisation is outright demonstrated in front of a Hollywood CEO) or Uwe Boll’s Postal (2007) (one I have admittedly not engaged with yet, but I have heard is rife with such sarcastic bitterness that it has earned admirers), some immediately beloved like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (2003) (still unexplored for its potency as a catastrophic disintegration of the immigrant psyche). At the same time, these are works by, in one sense or another, auteurs whose intensity not only exceeds but brutally violates Hollywood norms.

Friedberg and Seltzer’s Epic Movie is a different work altogether, and this is why it haunts me. Unlike most other ‘bad films’, it curiously was a box office hit while sustaining ruthless evisceration at the hands of audiences and critics alike. Friedberg and Seltzer would go on to make several movies in this vein, each drawing similar reaction although with declining ticket sales. Epic Movie would settle on IMDb’s infamous 100 worst films list at #10. The general criticism of the film is this: it is just a stream of pop culture references and nothing more. This of course flies in the face of traditional satire or parody, where the work is supposed to mean something, to do something with the content it engages with. To viewers, Epic Movie seemed to say nothing at all, that it was as empty and vacuous as the culture it takes its aim at. Mick LaSalle of SF Chronicle writes, ‘[only] a complete idiot could think Epic Movie is remotely funny or worth making at all’. Some even go so far as to say that the work is a labour of pure cynicism, a proto-algorithmic hot keyword targeting deployed to get as much attention as possible. There is, to date, hardly anything positive written about this film nor any attempt to engage with its themes.

At the same time, Friedberg and Seltzer are virtual apparitions; they do not have any presence the way Wiseau, Boll or Green do. The film instead foregrounds the so-called Barthesian death of the author: they are anonymous with little authorial subconscious to excavate. The subconscious is then deferred to the general spirit of the time or, as Raymond Williams calls it, the structures of feeling. Whether intentional or not, I leave this for the reader to decide,¹ but the film nevertheless, in its references, creates a factory line of McBling-period signifiers that cannot be ignored, whether they are pop culture symbols (Paris Hilton, Jack Sparrow, Harry Potter, MTV Cribs), then-topoi (orphans, hypersexual older women, breakdancing), or contemporaneous geopolitical events (Hurricane Katrina, 2003 invasion of Iraq). Hardly dated by these references—what is dated other than another ghost waiting to haunt us?—the film instead weaves through this complex web of discourse traversing through other works and other media at the time and says very much about them. The semiotic excesses of the film, as a McBling-meaning-machine, then imbue it with a profound meaning.

Whereas the Nostalgia Critic in his review of the film (one of the few to produce a full-length review of the film) evaluates it strictly on a narrative basis, the film’s seemingly glaring plot holes themselves destabilise the hold of the barely coherent plot. In fact, Epic Movie even suggests this reading: in an early scene, based on The Da Vinci Code (2006), one of the main characters, Lucy, confesses she has not read the book. It then invites a hermeneutic of Hidden Writing: in the sprawling theory-fiction work Cyclonopedia, Reza Negarestani introduces this method of narratology in which plot holes themselves become the mechanism of narrative construction. The narrative of the work is then only a surface, a blueprint for the radical, subterranean connections that lie underneath. If Epic Movie is likened to ‘Swiss cheese’ as a narrative, its porousness in fact only allows for its dark undercurrents, like oil at the Sunday Ranch in There Will Be Blood (2007), to seep up.

I myself did not watch Epic Movie until last year even though I was aware of it and its reputation since its release. Looking back, I suspect that I was not ready for it. Surely not enough time had passed, and I did not know enough about its references. Since viewing it, I have been filled with an urgency to talk about it. It has led me down so many paths, to so many secondary and tertiary sources, and new ways of thinking, that I am beginning to believe no other film will affect me in this way. This is why I am writing this series, to share and make note of my discoveries of this film.

Therefore, here we have the Hidden Writings of Epic Movie, a study in McBling cinema. In this, I will dive down the holey structure of Epic Movie and see what subterranean structures lie beneath. Perhaps there is something to dig up, even in this film.

Dossier 001: Blossoms Black and Sweet as Norwegian Crude

I saw the future flowering like a ruptured vessel
Somebody’s gonna get screwed.

— The Mountain Goats and Kaki King ‘Black Pear Tree’

A large portion of the plot of Epic Movie is lifted from the 2005 film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Rather than ‘Narnia’, Epic Movie instead takes place in Gnarnia, a wintry kingdom run by a despotic queen, the White Bitch. The homophonic name, as Epic Movie’s counterpart Mr. Tumnus explains, is due to copyright claims. The orphans—Lucy, Peter, Edward, and Susan Pervertski²—first enter Gnarnia through a wardrobe at the Wonka Chocolate Factory. They do so to escape the Promethean fate of endless organ harvesting at the hands of Wonka.³

The Kingdom of Gnarnia, as it turns out, is a backwards, oppressive, authoritarian (with wire taps), mediæval state ruled by a brutal dictator, the White Bitch. Her regime not only suppresses mutants and banned gay marriage but also mismanaged a ‘hurricane’ crisis, an event which prompts Kanye West to say, ‘The White Bitch doesn’t care about black people’. On top of that, the White Bitch harbours an incredibly dangerous ‘weapon of mass destruction’, a ‘real’ one and not a fake ‘Saddam’ one. Here, the White Bitch is not only George W. Bush, but also Saddam Hussein—an actual Saddam Hussein with a ‘real’ weapon:

Mr. Tumnus: ‘Under her two terms, we now have wiretaps, no gay marriage, not to mention her bumbling of the hurricane relief effort.’
Kanye West: ‘And the White Bitch doesn’t care about black people.’
Mr. Tumnus: ‘There is a small resistance movement. They learned she’s developing a weapon of mass destruction that can kill all of us.’
Lucy: ‘Wait, a real WMD, or like, a fake Saddam one?’
Mr. Tumnus: ‘No, a real one!’

The only solution is to enact regime change: to support a rebel militia, composed of mutants, Wonderbread men, Borat (‘My name Borat, this is my country of Gnarnia, is nice!’), and an Ewok. The militia is run by Aslo, a lion figure who is a McBling archetype of the sleazy and influential man of power—a cross between Hugh Hefner and Jeffrey Epstein.⁴ The film’s climax is a battle, a confrontation between the orphans and the White Bitch’s army. Despite being outnumbered, with the entire resistance movement abandoning them due to a vomiting accident, the orphans nevertheless triumph. This is all thanks to Peter’s discovery of the remote from Click (2007).⁵ After an outright and joyful massacre of the entire army, the White Bitch is spared. A familiar speech follows:

Peter: ‘The new Gnarnia will be a democracy, complete with due process. She shall be given a fair trial, judged by a jury of peers.’

She is however immediately disposed of, mercilessly, by Jack Swallows on his wheel. Peter not only abandons democracy, but in the next scene, along with his fellow orphans, accepts the coronation as the new monarchs of Gnarnia.

Gnarnia then can be read as a petro-state in a regime-change narrative. Oil never appears once in the script, yet its traces seep out of the film’s holes through the despotic ruler armed with a ‘weapon of mass destruction’. Yet this is not merely the Middle East of Bush-era cinema. There are no orientalised Arabs like in Team America: World Police (2004). Nor is this the Middle East as a backdrop, as in Three Kings (1999). Unlike In the Loop (2009) where Iraq is an abstract entity to be invaded or not, Iraq does not exist at all apart from the mention of Saddam. Instead, the film displaces Iraq into a different place altogether.

It is, in fact, possible to conclude that Gnarnia is a mediæval Norway: a perennially frozen, mountainous, evergreen landscape with European peasants, an evil ‘White Bitch’ with fantastical Viking dreadlocks—Vikings did not have dreads, but they do in revisionist mediæval imaginations.⁶ Europe, in McBling films, represents a relatively neutral non-other on which projections of desire and domination can safely be enacted without the political baggage. Europe then becomes a fantasy-space, a playground of vague erotic, touristic, and geopolitical imaginaries. Sometimes, this is in the shape of the ‘Sexy Foreigner’: in Boat Trip (2002), Nick’s attempt to escape the gay cruise leads him to down an aircraft full of Swedish bikini models. EuroTrip (2004) functions entirely off the European imaginary as a locus for sex tourism. For Epic Movie, C. S. Lewis, author of the original Narnia, seems to all but invite this: if Narnia takes place in a parallel universe, can’t Gnarnia as well, in a twisted world where a Scandinavian petro-state becomes the target of US invasion for ‘weapons of mass destruction’?

After all, Norway is rich with oil, a resource discovered in the North Sea in 1969. A newly arrived Iraqi immigrant with a background in geology, Farouk al-Kasim, was recruited by sheer happenstance to steer the Scandinavian monarchy into its new position as a petro-state. Oil is largely considered a curse, a resource that attracts such an outpouring of wealth that it brings destruction to a state unlucky enough to uncover it. Norway, the largest producer of oil in Europe after Russia, is a special place, thanks to al-Kasim, a displaced Iraqi who had largely spared his adoptive kingdom the fate that befell his homeland. Despite Norway’s security, its founding membership in NATO, and close alliance with the US, Gnarnia suggests an American fantasy of overthrowing even its European allies. Perhaps this is not so absurd: the Arctic and Greenland are well within the geopolitical desires of the USA. Even the sweet taste of Norwegian crude cannot escape the yearning of the American id.

With the orphans’ joyful return to their imprisonment in the Wonka factory, they are greeted by Borat who says, ‘You did it! You made movie film have happy ending!’ before Jack Swallows returns and crushes the orphans. Borat slaps his rear and says, ‘Not!’ Like anyone else who takes over a petro-state, the petro-geist eventually comes for them.

Postscript (2026.06.07)

It should, perhaps, not be ignored that Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe itself portrays a retreat into a regime change fantasy. The perforated map of Gnarnia can in turn be placed on top of Narnia.

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References

Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press.

Channel Awesome. 2025. “Epic Movie - Nostalgia Critic.” YouTube. June 18, 2025.

Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York: Routledge.

LaSalle, Mick. 2007. “REVIEW / ‘Epic Movie’s’ Tries at Satire Fail on a Grand Scale.” SFGATE. January 29, 2007. https://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/REVIEW-Epic-Movie-s-tries-at-satire-fail-on-a-2653241.php.

Reza Negarestani. 2008. Cyclonopedia : Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Melbourne: Re.Press.

Sandbu, Martin. 2009. “The Iraqi Who Saved Norway from Oil.” Financial Times. August 29, 2009. https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feabdc0.

Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford England: Oxford University Press.

1. Indicating awareness of their work, Friedberg and Seltzer have claimed in a rare interview that their parody films are the only screenplays studios want to buy.

2. Future dossier: Orphans.

3. Future dossier: Wonka as the Final Boss of the Disciplinary Society.

4. Future dossier: Aslo and the Christ-Epstein Complex.

5. Future dossier: The Funny Games of Remote Control.

6. Future dossier: Umberto Eco and Mediæval Dreams.