MarvinTheParanoidAndroid
This will all end in tears, I just know it.
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Feb 24, 2015
To preface, I'm going to start by criticizing the name. The purpose of a demo is to demonstrate the capabilities & innovations of the company behind it. Nowhere at any time are Donnie DuPre, Doug Walker's character or any of his cohorts, ever making actual demos, because that wouldn't be retarded.
What they are doing, however, is creating backyard remakes of blockbuster movies on a shoe string budget so right from the get-go the title lies to you & the premise rips off the concept of Sweding from Michel Gondry's "Be Kind, Rewind", only more retarded and with far less ingenuity as all the effects in demo reel are shitty, generic video effects picked from a library in their editing software, like making an actor transparent to pass them off as a ghost, whereas in Be Kind, Rewind, the characters actually attempted to pull off practical and optical effects. The closest we get here is shitty green screening.
In the first episode, their first "demo" is of Doug having a discussion about seeing dead people to his actress who's pretending to be the six year old boy from the Sixth Sense. In this shit-parody, the ghosts of Casper, Bill Cosby and Beetle Juice appear only to be zapped with fake lightning being emitted from plastic, Halloween proton packs. I'd like to mention that this was Doug's attempt at an original IP since this was meant to be his step away from a crumbling business model of reacting to movie footage for a half hour. It even still has the parody version of Casper from the Nostalgia Critic reviews, same art assets and everything.
Then he takes yet another one of his gay ass stabs at Randy Newman, like anybody gives a shit that Randy Newman still makes music, apart from his fans.
What bothers me about this is there is blatantly and immediately nothing redeemable about this fag-fest since it's still the Nostalgia Critic only with the film footage and the Critic subtracted away, leaving only the shitty skits to fill in both roles of establishing context and providing critique, much like those shitty "still in theaters" skit-reviews he did of Jurassic Park and Pixels.
Then we are introduced to the shit-fest director, Donnie DuPre, proxy of Doug Walker. Behind him is a generic screen saver looking background that was likely an actual screen saver on his computer and at this point you can tell that the entire show, it's premise, characters and writing all revolve around technical limitations because the entire joke of the show is that they suck at film making.
Why exactly does that have to equate to ripping off Hollywood movies? The explanation given is that they're attempting to impress actual Hollywood producers with their gay Swedes and get funding for an actual, original film which is backwards and retarded.
Compare and contrast to other parody sketch shows, such as the Thumb parodies.
A parody movie starring literal thumbs didn't suck half as hard and it was made way earlier than Demo Reel, used really cheesy and cheap effects and actually managed to be competent to some degree.
Doug Walker can't even manage to build a set without the paint melting off or the electronic buzzers to his scripted game show obviously not work at all.
Then he takes a stab at M. Night Shyamalan, because that was necessary. You know what the difference between Shyamalan and Doug is? Shyamalan is a real people director who publishes his own ideas. If you had the opportunity to work with one or the other, are you really gonna pick the bankrupt scrub who's crushing debt is rivaled only by the size of his inept arrogance?
After the introduction is over is when they start ripping off the Office and change to black and white for some antiquated reason no one cares for. Probably because it makes the footage appear more "French".
This is where they start doing that cliche character introduction shit where they have the characters drop exposition on themselves straight to the camera with all the subtlety of the Hindenburg dropping from the sky.
So the formula thus far works like this; alternate between painfully unfunny skits and painfully dull behind the scenes garbage.
It is also during this segment in which they painfully rip off the Office where they do that bamboo fingernail torture typical of Comedy Central shows of having all but one character be blithering, oblivious morons who insist the straight man is mentally disturbed for correcting their obvious errors.
Example; they want to do a shitty ghost remake and black dude suggests Sweding "Withering Heights" which they shoot down immediately and decide to do Batman instead. They then double down by insisting that Batman is a vampire & when black man informs them they're thinking of Dracula, they refuse & start accusing him of being obsessed with Dracula.
Future comedians, if you're reading this, do not take notes from shows like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia or 30 Rock. You will end up like Doug Walker.
They then top it off by saying George Clooney feeds off the young or some shit. I don't know what the fuck that joke was supposed to reference or even mean but I can tell you what it wasn't, which is funny.
We then get to learn that black man is their staff writer and as it turns out, nothing he writes ends up getting filmed, because Doug is an artiste director who's vision reaches a paramount above all other achievements in the world.
Thing is, the premise of a shit director with a bloated sense of purpose & depth has all kinds of potential to be funny. Thing is, Ed Wood already gave us just that so this show really has no redeeming value.
My question is why does the black man continue working for Doug since he repeatedly keeps getting shat on. He's the only semi-tolerable character, by the way.
Then we're introduced to ditzy actress who flips her hair around like a shampoo commercial because pointlessly flipping your hair around is apparently funny, to, like, nobody. Her background is she did a solo Hamlet and Titanic on stage. Yes, she performed both plays without any other actors.
The only way this back story could ever amount to a chuckle is if she staged the play for the Andy Warhol society or something. One hack entertaining a group of hacks would've actually had the potential to be funny satire and not just a character being brain deflatingly retarded.
That, however, would require building a theater set & filling it with people and that's just out of the paper thin budget.
Oh and they don't actually own the building they shoot in. It belongs to the mafia. That joke is retarded on so many levels. Let's count the ways; why would a criminal organization let a camera crew wonder around and shoot footage inside the building when they're performing criminal executions in the next room?
And now we finally get to my "favorite" character, Carl Copehagen, played by Rob Walker. He's supposed to be that unique "cool" character who's overqualified for the group in some capacity. In this show, they chose the "cynical outlier" variety and holy fuck do they butcher the concept. They have no idea how to do this type of character and should a writer manage to fuck this up, the character will always come off as the biggest faggot, which he does. Between his faggy snark and fakey German accent lays a weabooish imitation of German people much like those vampire wannabes who refuse to break character, drink literal animal blood and hiss at fucking sunlight. The difference is the vampire faggots actually try to be convincing.
His sole character trait is that he's stereotypically German, complete with being a cagey, prideful, smug-ass with a military past he cannot divulge. He goes on and on about before the Wall fell, refuses to answer questions on a sheet by blacking them out with a sharpie and that's about all there is to him. I'm not fucking kidding. He even wears military garb.
Last and least, we have Quinn. Just Quinn. No last name. He's Scottish and that's the extent of his character.
Look, when Jar Jar Binks is funnier than the sum total of every character you've introduced and undoubtedly he is, I will not be surprised if it turns out you're an internet reviewer.
Then it's revealed that Donnie shoots his Swedes on his wife's income, basically making him a complete deadbeat as he even mentions that they actively lose money by filming these craptacular parodies. He then tries to worm his way out how scummy that makes him with mental gymnastics, saying he's giving his wife and women everywhere the opportunity to be working women while he remains a "stay at home husband". When art imitates life.
In case you can't tell, Doug is trying to go for a Daffy Duck character and it's just as pure, uncut, facepunchingly unlikeable as you can imagine, especially when he tacks on that unique Walker Bros. brand of smug.
Then we're back to the clawing at chalkboard quality skits you can expect from a clipless review without the Nostalgia Critic in which Doug tries on a bunch of retarded costumes before eventually settling on becoming Batman. I can just imagine the logic behind this skit, "could you imagine what it'd be like if Bruce's fear of bats wasn't his top fear and his top fear was something fringe and stupid, like Mario and that's what he tries to imitate?"
The only way this could be funny is if he dressed up like a sexual deviant and said shit like "What? You mean people won't run away from an adult baby?"
Dressing up like Mario and over explaining the logic behind it isn't fucking funny. Oh but it gets even more unfunny when he holds a graph he made with a sharpie over his face and starts making references to the 2008 mortgage crash.
Here's a piece of advice, the more bland, pedestrian and boring it is, it isn't going to be fucking funny. There's a reason why fart jokes and slapstick are popular forms of humor and it isn't because they're random, juvenile or easy, it's because they're not bereft of fucking life. If Doug himself ever reads this, I would like to let him know that I would rather watch Eight Crazy Nights than any of his clipless reviews because Eight Crazy Nights at least isn't jingling plastic car keys at my face.
Okay, since each story of Demo Reel comes in two parts anyways, I'm gonna take a break and post this before the intestines leap up to strangle my brain in a vain effort to save all of life kind. Just a heads up, I'm going to marathon review every episode. I'll be back.
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