The Hungover Games (2014)

The Hungover Games arrives from 2014 with the confidence of a film that has assembled its entire comic architecture from the discarded sets of better movies. The premise is a collision of two titles, one about a missing groom and one about teenagers murdering each other in a televised arena, and the resulting narrative wanders through references to Ted, Carrie, Avatar, and the Lone Ranger like a man reading aloud from a list of things he has seen. Josh Stolberg directs with the energy of someone handed a camera, a deadline, and no further instruction.

There is a bachelor party, and the groom is marrying a man named Tracey, which gives the proceedings a mild current of gay content that the film treats as a running gag. A character called gay Thor appears in the arena, and the joke is largely that he is gay and also Thor. This is the extent of the film's engagement with queer life, presented without malice but also without much thought. The cast includes Martin Klebba, and a handful of minority performers fill out the tributes, though the film's interest in them begins and ends with what they can be mocked for.

The parody of Django Unchained and the Lone Ranger deploys racial caricature as a punchline, which is not racial consciousness but its opposite. Women exist to remove their clothing. There is no body positivity, no climate anxiety, no anti-capitalist reading of the games, no neurodivergent arc, no revisionist history, and no lecture. The film has no message to deliver and no sermon to preach, and it arrives at this position not through restraint but through a total absence of ambition. We are left with a comedy that offends nobody in particular because it is thinking about nothing at all.