How How It Should Have Ended Should Go in the Future

I apologize in advance if the tone of this review comes off as frustrated, but here’s the deal: I should love How It Should Have Ended, a recently relaunched series of movie satires produced by Starz Digital. Targeting major blockbusters, the series purports to offer “new” endings for big movies like Terminator and Braveheart. Using relatively well-executed Flash animation to recreate the films, it also mocks them: The director of The Blair Witch Project yelling at his heroine for dropping the camera, for example, or the eponymous Borat thanking America for giving him a dump truck of money. That sort of thing. It’s the kind of satire that usually hits the sweet spot for pop culture nerds like myself. However, as good an idea as it is and as solid as the execution might be, there’s something slightly off about these shorts.

Part of it comes down to the fact that they typically fail to live up to their premise. Take, for example, the Terminator short, which finds some clever gags in splicing together the entire Terminator franchise with Back to the Future (setting the Terminator loose in the world of 1955 Hill Valley being the source of most of them). But even looking past the fact that it structures itself as a trailer and not a traditional “final scene,” it’s still just a bit too long and a bit too ham-fisted in its humor. And it fails to really mock what’s actually dumb about the latest Terminator installment — which, speaking as someone who paid money to see it opening night, is a huge disappointment.

How It Should Have Ended is at its best when it’s actually pointing out inconsistencies in plot and overlooked ideas — such as with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which suffers from pacing problems but still gets in some well-aimed barbs about that film’s poorly constructed plot and characters. Or the Lord of the Rings spoof, which offers up with a much more efficient solution for destroying Sauron’s ring than walking around Mordor for nine hours of screen time.

Of course, the Terminator spoof has done very well on YouTube, racking up 1.2 million views over the last month, which is fortunate for the HISHE guys, as it was their first short following a year-long production hiatus (prior to said hiatus, their videos regularly received millions of views). After producing shorts on a sporadic basis since July 2005, they’ve recommitted to a monthly release schedule. The newest HISHE is a Transformers 2 spoof that isn’t quite as well-executed as previous episodes — the animation on Megan Fox’s running legs is pretty atrocious — but is at least closer to the tone of the original premise.

So, despite this uneven history, it’s probably worth continuing to check out this series. If only because 2012, the only major blockbuster coming out this month, begs to be mocked, and these guys might be just the ones to fix that film’s ending.