The best fake movies in film and television, from Simple Jack to Honk If You’re Horny

There are worlds in which Troy McClure, Tracy Jordan and Tugg Speedman are the most successful actors in showbiz. They are infinitely better worlds than ours. As long as there have been richly drawn fictional universes, there has been fictional entertainment hidden within them – fake films and television shows mentioned offhandedly in lines of dialogue, or serving as backdrops to plotlines.

The best ones combine sharp social satire with overt silliness, exposing the hypocrisies and oddities of Hollywood, or culture at large. Others are purely absurdist, combining unlikely co-stars or driven by outlandish if vaguely irresistible scenarios.

Because who wouldn’t want to see the various vehicles for Chris Evans’s fictional movie star Lucas Lee in Scott Pilgrim vs the World (among them Action Doctor, The Game Is Over 2 and Let’s Hope There’s a Heaven)? Or Arrested Development’s somewhat incestuous French erotica Les Cousins Dangereux?

And is anything more enticing than Joey Tribbiani’s cruelly aborted thriller Shutter Speed, a film in Friends in which a New Yorker falls in love with a mysterious young woman, only to find out, upon visiting her sinister grandmother, that she’s been “dead for 10 years”?

With cinemas closed at least until early July, we’ve ranked the greatest fake movies we wish beyond all reason were real.

10. Ass: The Movie, Idiocracy (2006)

Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s cult comedy, envisions a world of rampant stupidity, where a movie called Ass dominates the US box office. As described by the film’s saddened narrator, it is 90 minutes of a single static shot of a man’s rear end, which delights audiences and wins a coveted Best Original Screenplay Oscar. As with the rest of Idiocracy, it’s a joke that feels less and less farfetched as the years go by. Honestly, though, perhaps there is more to Ass than first meets the eye?

9. Chubby Rain, Bowfinger (1999)

The movie at the centre of this underrated Steve Martin/Eddie Murphy filmmaking comedy is deliberately nonsensical – it’s seemingly about spies, stalkers, and aliens that travel to Earth in the chubby rain molecules of the title – but it’s also intriguing. Featuring severed heads, a script built entirely around a catchphrase and police officers that bleed brown goo from their heads, Chubby Rain sounds like the greatest movie ever made. Who wouldn’t want to watch this thing?

8. Stab, Scream 2 (1997)

Wes Craven’s Scream distinguished itself early on as a horror movie that knew it was a horror movie, with characters openly referencing fictional slashers of the past. It went even further in its 1997 sequel, with Heather Graham, Tori Spelling, Luke Wilson and (apparently) David Schwimmer all starring in a movie inspired by the characters and events of the first Scream. Unlike the generally superb Scream franchise, the Stab movies seemed to fly off the rails quickly. The fifth entry in the series, as noted in Scream 4 (2011), introduced time travel to the mix. The supposedly in-the-works Scream 5 would be smart to avoid similar territory.

7. Deception, The Holiday (2006)

Few films are as inherently mid-2000s as The Holiday, with Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet living lives of luxury as, respectively, a movie-trailer editor in Los Angeles and a mid-level Telegraph columnist who for some reason commutes from London to a tiny cottage in the Cotswolds each day. But buried deep in The Holiday is also a glimpse at what could be the most 2006 fake movie in the world – one that stars Lindsay Lohan and James Franco and seems to involve terrorists, guns and Lohan as a waitress with a missing spy for a father. “It finally looks like a hit,” Diaz’s character insists upon cutting together its promotional trailer. It really doesn’t, but that’s what makes it potentially compelling.

6. Re-Do, Funny People (2009)

One of the most curious elements of Judd Apatow’s underrated comedy is its depiction of a tired and unambitious comedy actor played by Adam Sandler, who collects enormous paycheques for incredibly dumb movies. Among the films referenced include MerMan (starring Sandler’s George Simmons as a mermaid), Astro-Not (as a slacker in space), and the genuinely surreal Re-Do, about a man cursed by a wizard and given the body of a baby. It’s a knowing bit of humour considering Sandler’s presence in high-concept hokum like Click (2006) and Jack and Jill (2011), but one that also implies, for all intents and purposes, that the joke has been on us all along.

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5. See You Next Wednesday, various (1973-2006)

A running gag found in a number of projects directed and produced by John Landis, See You Next Wednesday is a fictional movie advertised in the background of shots in everything from The Blues Brothers (1980) to Coming to America (1988). Intriguingly, it appears to inhabit a slightly different genre each time, while starring everyone from Donald Sutherland to James Brown to a giant killer gorilla. It’s also billed, in An American Werewolf in London, as “a non-stop orgy” exclusively being shown at UK porn cinemas. Of course, they could all be unrelated films – just coincidentally bearing the same title. To make it that bit more fascinating, we have chosen to instead believe that they are all indeed the exact same movie.

4. Hard to Watch: Based on the Novel Stone-Cold Bummer by Manipulate, 30 Rock (2010)

A long-running US comedy about the inner workings of a US sketch show, 30 Rock was also filled with a number of glorious fake movie projects. Most involved Tracy Jordan, a thinly veiled Eddie Murphy clone, who starred in a run of vulgar, albeit fictional, star vehicles. While Honky Grandma Be Trippin’ and Fat Bitch (in which he is transformed into a dog) earned horrifying in-show reviews, it was the Precious knock-off Hard to Watch that finally won him an Oscar. “You’re about to watch a film that holds a mirror up to your own terrible lives,” Tracy tells an audience of domestic violence survivors at a special advance screening. “You’re going to see poverty, drug abuse, and a bunch of babies having a hammer fight in a dumpster.”

3. Simple Jack, Tropic Thunder (2008)

On a similar note, Tropic Thunder’s Simple Jack has had incredible pop-culture longevity, effortlessly lampooning the sort of roles that lead able-bodied white actors to awards glory. Like much of film around it, the Simple Jack subplot breezily toes the line between discomfort and satirical genius, with Ben Stiller’s clueless movie star Tugg Speedman expressing regret about going too “method” in his role as a mentally handicapped farm boy. It was a gag that earned enormous controversy at the time, which is fair, but most importantly was driven by a nugget of raw truth.

2. Rochelle Rochelle, Seinfeld (1993)

Seinfeld featured several wonderful fake movies in its time, specifically the dramatic weepie The Pain and the Yearning and the eagerly anticipated action thriller Death Blow (“When someone tries to blow you up, not because of who you are, but because of different reasons altogether”). But Rochelle Rochelle is the most notorious, a film described as being about “a young girl’s strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk” and reportedly containing copious amounts of nudity. It’s also the exact kind of vaguely pornographic European art movie you’re meant to like, even if it’s secretly terrible.

1. Honk If You’re Horny, The Simpsons (1995)

The Simpsons is the undisputed king of fake movie references. From the Space Mutants franchise and the Julia Roberts romcom Love Is Nice, to the entirety of the Troy McClure oeuvre (Gladys the Groovy Mule and The President’s Neck Is Missing being our personal favourites), Springfield has played host to a vast tapestry of fictional pop culture.

But it’s Honk If You’re Horny, starring forgotten 1990s hack Pauly Shore and a slumming-it Faye Dunaway, that is most genius – a throwaway line of wild silliness, featured in the seventh season episode King-Size Homer, already stuffed to the gills with perfect gags, and so devoid of context that you’re desperate to have it further explained. “Give me my dignity!” Homer urges his fellow cinemagoers. “I just came here to see Honk If You’re Horny in peace!” We’d honestly love to join him.