With all the superhero movies we’ve also been getting over the last eight years, it’s kind of hard to believe that no one has stepped up to spoof them. Oh, wait – they have! Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superhero Movie!

[crickets chirping]

Okay, the good news is that this one actually isn’t terrible. (How’s that for damning a film with faint praise?) Airplane! co-creator David Zucker is on board as producer, and writer/director Craig Mazin has worked with him for a long time and has at least picked up a few pointers. And rather than merely seeing how many other pictures it can reference in a short time frame, Superhero Movie generally sticks close to the Spider-Man template, only occasionally tossing in a jab at other Marvel/DC-inspired flicks.

It’s all rather simple: Geeky teenage boy Rick (Drake Bell) gets bitten by radioactive dragonfly during class field trip and realizes he has gained superhuman powers as a result. He uses them to woo class hottie Jill (Sara Paxton) whom he has never been able to approach. Rick also dons a costume and squares off against madman scientist Lou Landers (Christopher McDonald), who has likewise gained powers during an experiment gone awry. Landers becomes the villain known as Hourglass. Toss in Leslie Nielsen as an Uncle Ben-like character and you’ve got the whole deal.

Superhero Movie is the living definition of “hit or miss.” Parts of it admittedly made me laugh out loud, but for every joke that scored, there were two that didn’t. Oddly, the film is funniest when satirizing modern technology, such as iPods, Facebook, and Web MD. You’d think that a comedy attempting to spoof comic book pictures would be at its best making fun of, you know, superheroes. But the truth is that Dragonfly isn’t all that hilarious a character. How about having Rick get bitten by a radioactive ladybug? Surely, there would be some laughs inherent in a teenage boy running around in a homemade ladybug costume.

The stuff that’s funniest tends to be the peripheral stuff: out-of-nowhere sight gags, cameos from people like Jeffrey Tambor (who truly understands the need to play it completely straight for maximum comedy value), and the most outrageous extended fart joke since Blazing Saddles. Save for a brief sequence in which Rick visits a superhero school similar to Professor Xavier’s in X-Men, the comic book parodies are often surprisingly limp.

Like the other recent spoofs, Superhero Movie runs about an hour and 15 minutes. The end credits are then interrupted for (literally) a full ten minutes of unused footage and bloopers. It’s not like going to see a movie; it’s more like going to see a DVD. You watch the feature film first, then sit through the bonus material. In this case, there are so many deleted scenes and outtakes that I half expected a making-of documentary to pop up as well.

This style of comedy used to be an artistic choice. Filmmakers like the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team used it to poke fun at the conventions of genre films. These days, the spoof has become less of a choice and more of an obligation. Any screen genre that becomes popular must automatically have a movie that parodies it. There seems to be less overall thought given to the recent entries. They simply don’t try as hard. Pictures like Airplane! and The Naked Gun often worked on two levels: there was a joke happening in the foreground, but also one happening simultaneously in the background. (Remember the scene in Airplane! when Lloyd Bridges slams his hand on the desk while a watermelon falls from the sky directly behind him?) As a result, those older spoofs made me laugh so hard that I often thought I’d wet myself. If one joke didn’t work, you only had to wait half a second for the next one to come around. The recent spoofs have about half the number of jokes. They may occasionally generate a stray laugh, yet they never achieve that consistency of hilarity that initially made spoofs so irresistible.

But now I’m reviewing the genre rather than reviewing Superhero Movie, aren’t I? It’s kind of inevitable; the spoofs have become tiresome, and it’s time to give them a rest. Yet, in fairness, Superhero Movie is better than it could have been. While no one is going to mistake it for a classic like Airplane! and The Naked Gun, it at least made me laugh occasionally, and a few times it made me laugh hard. That’s more than I can say for Date Movie and Epic Movie, which only made me want to find the filmmakers and smack them back into the Stone Age.

( 1/2 out of four)

Superhero Movie is rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content, comic violence, drug references and language. The running time is 1 hour and 25 minutes.