12 Movie Satires That Do the Same Thing They Satirize

In honor of Sabrina Carpenter's hotly debated album cover for Man's Best Friend — in which the pop singer poses on her knees, being held by her hair — here are 12 movie satires that do the same trick of doing the same thing they satirize.

The Sabrina Carpenter album sparked an immediate backlash from fans who saw it as regressive and degrading. But fans defended it as satirizing images of female servitude and mocking so-called trad wife aesthetics.

It seems that Man's Best Friend is rather skillfully playing the game previously played by the likes of Madonna, Britney Spears, and countless other artists — using sexual images while ostensibly satirizing such images. And it's a very old trick in Hollywood, where some of the best movie satires are occasionally indistinguishable from the kinds of movies they satirize. A film may work as a satire of horror, for example, while still being quite scary.

So with that said, here are 13 movie satires that have it both ways.

Kentucky Fried Movie

Kentucky Fried Movie is the film that that started it all for Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker, the team behind Airplane and The Naked Gun films. It consists of a string of dead-on movie parodies — basically making fun of every popular genre in the 1970s.

The most over the top is a parody of sexploitation films that was, at the young age when we saw it, probably the dirtiest thing we'd ever seen. It includes all variety of shocking perversions, and gets fairly explicit. It's funny, sure, but also quite salacious.

It continues to make us confused.

Robocop (1987)

Paul Verhoeven is the master of movie satires that have it both ways. The Dutch filmmaker arrived in the United States in the '80s and quickly committed to outdoing the excessive sex and violence he saw on American screens.

Robocop is a masterpiece, as satire goes — it appeals to audiences tough-on-crime wish-fulfillment fantasies while also noting that corporate, mechanized crimefighting may be more dangerous than crime itself.

It successfully anticipated the potential flaws of AI-based law enforcement — does anyone really want to be pulled over by a drone? — and arguably also anticipated the rise of the for-profit prison system.

At the same time, though, it's a wonderfully silly movie about a half-man half-robot trying to clean the scum off the streets of New Detroit. And one of our favorite movies ever.

Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers, another Verhoeven film, nailed its satire so successfully that some critics didn't even catch the satire.

The New York Times Janet Maslin, for example, dismissively wrote, "Where exactly are the hordes of moviegoers who will exclaim: ''Great idea! Let's go see the one about the cute young co-ed army and the big bugs from space.'"

Yes, Starship Troopers is the best movie ever made about a cute co-ed army and big bugs from space. But it's also relentlessly mocks jingoistic, fake patriotism and our tendency to dehumanize anyone with whom we disagree.

Scream

Written by Kevin Williamson and directed by master of horror Wes Craven, Scream deconstructs slasher movies even while serving up supremely competent chills and kills.

It also changed horror forever, and for the better: It was almost impossible to make an unironic slasher movie after Scream made it a requirement to include at least one character in every group of slasher movie friends to point out tropes they had better not fall into.

Even movies that play it very straight are now in a kind of pact with the audience: We all know these tropes. Now here's how this movie will undermine them.

Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

Though Scream did the have-it-both ways slasher movie satire the best, Slumber Party Massacre got there first. The first of the four films in the franchise (including two sequels and a revamp) was written by lesbian feminist author Rita Mae Brown, who set out to satirize slasher movies, not celebrate them.

But under the astute direction of Amy Holden Jones, Slumber Party Massacre turned out to be one of the best slasher movies ever made, as well as a knowing satire of other films popular at the time, like Friday the 13th.

It also captures early '80s Southern California — where we grew up watching movies we weren't supposed to — with a keenly accurate eye.

The next film in the series, Slumber Party II, goes even further into satire with a villain (Atanas Ilitch) who dances like a cross between Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson and kills with a drill-shaped red electric guitar.

American Psycho (2000)

Another of our all-time favorite movies, American Psycho is a sharp satire of '80s yuppiedom that also makes '80s yuppiedom seem... pretty glamorous, actually. Aside from all the chainsaw murders, of course.

Christian Bale played Wall Street serial killer Patrick Bateman as anything but cool — "We looked at him as an alien who landed in the unabashedly capitalist New York of the ’80s, and looked around and said, ‘How do I perform like a successful male in this world?,’" Bale once told MovieMaker.

And while his behavior is reprehensible, he has really good abs. And taste in business cards. We don't root for him, but he's hypnotically amusing to watch.

Tropic Thunder (2008)

Tropic Thunder isn't so much a satire of war movies as a satire of actors who take on showy, ludicrous roles in pursuit of acclaim. One of the joys of the movie is that it allows to take on a variety of showy, ludicrous roles while playing actors playing showy, ludicrous roles.

The most extreme example is Robert Downey Jr. as Kirk Lazarus, an Australian Oscar winner who undergoes "pigmentation alteration: surgery in order to play a Black character, Staff Sergeant Lincoln Osiris.

But Ben Stiller also gets to shine as Tugg Speedman, who has made the mistake of committing too hard to his role as "Simple Jack."

Austin Powers (1997)

The James Bond movies are so full of characters with names like Xenia Onatopp and Holly Goodhead that they're basically self-satires.

But Mike Myers sixties spy spoof classic makes fun of the excessive sexualization of female characters by surrounding Myers' defiantly average Austin "Danger" Powers with scantily-clad "fembots" and Elizabeth Hurley.

It holds up remarkably well. And it remains high on our list of the funniest comedies we've ever seen.

Thanksgiving (2023)

Another comical sendup of slasher movies that is also a very effective slasher, with creative methods of dispatching cast members and a quite solid twist.

The ensemble cast in the Eli Roth film includes Patrick Dempsey as a sheriff in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where a Black Friday riot at a local big box story inspires a mystery man to dress up as Puritan town founder John Carver... and start carving.

Carver does a little cooking, too. It's all overdone, but deliberately so.

Planet Terror (2007)

We got our first look at Thanksgiving in a trailer that appeared in Grindhouse, a curious and very cool 2007 release that paired Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror with Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof.

Let's start with Planet Terror, which makes fun of grotesque, violent B-movies while outdoing most of them in terms of violence and grotesquerie. It centers on a biochemical outbreak that creates zombielike hordes, and its heroine is a machine-gun-legged go-go dancer named Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan).

Are the gross-outs effective? Funny you should ask. We saw this one hungover, on opening day, and had to run out of the theater to throw up, several times. That seems to go beyond satire.

Death Proof (2007)

Quentin Tarantino opens this one with a shot of a woman's feet, which is the first sign that nothing — even his own suspected predilections — will be off-limits.

It works as an excellent satire of those movies where bad men terrorize young women, or just as an excellent movie about a bad men terrorizing young women.

It also has its fun with various gearhead '70s movies, including Gone in Sixty Seconds, and dozens of other underground pop-cultural references Tarantino knows like the back of a video store.

Machete (2010)

Are you picking up on our fondness for Grindhouse? Like Thanksgiving, this film originated as one of the film's in-movie trailers.

Anchored by Danny Trejo as the titular Mexican cop-turned-avenger, it has a B-movie spirit and A-list cast, including Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba and Don Johnston.

It's gloriously silly — especially a scene where a character explains the length of intestines before we see his point graphically illustrated — but it also contains sharp social commentary about race-baiting and scapegoating. We love it, and also lined up for 2013's Machete Kills.

Companion (2025)

We don't want to reveal anything about Companion, starring Sophie Thatcher (above) and Jack Quaid.

We'll just say that it starts off seeming like a rom-com — it's about a newish couple going to meet the guy's friends at a lake house — but then turns into something else.

It's a note-for-note perfect parody of rom-coms, but then starts satirizing other genres as well. To even list them here would spoil the movie for you.

Liked This List of 12 Movie Satires That Do the Same Thing They Satirize

You may also enjoy this list of 12 Rad '80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember.

And for more on the two sides of the Sabrina Carpenter Man's Best Friend debate, check out this thoughtful writeup.

Main image: Sabrina Carpenter, Man's Best Friend. Universal Music Group.