The 10 Best Movies Within A Movie, According To Reddit

Writers and directors often go to such great lengths when it comes to world-building that they even create fake movies within the universe. More often than not, these movies within movies are silly and on the nose, but some are also genuinely fascinating.

Sometimes the fake movie is part of the narrative and, other times, it’s completely inconsequential and just in the background. Either way, these fictional films are so entertaining from what fans have seen of them, and some of them would even make genuinely great full-length movies. And others are better left as two-minute clips.

Pineapple Express 2

In This Is The End, real-life Hollywood actors play themselves as they attend James Franco’s party while the apocalypse takes place. When Franco, Seth Rogen, and several other real-life comedy actors are locked in Franco’s mansion, they get a little bored and have to find creative ways to pass the time.

One of those creative projects is writing and filming Pineapple Express 2, which Haunting_opinion90 explains is “so good and I think they could actually make a solid sequel out of that idea.” The premise of the sequel sees Dale and Saul attempt to assassinate Woody Harrelson, who, as the President of the United States, is attempting to legalize marijuana.

The 14 Fists Of McCluskey

Rick Dalton is Leonardo DiCaprio’s best role, and it’s partly because he plays multiple roles at once. Dalton is an actor in the movie, and audiences get a glimpse of many of his different roles, including a screen test of him playing Captain Virgil Hilts in The Great Escape, which was originally played by Steve McQueen.

But according to PallSerpent, the best of all of Dalton’s performances in The 14 Fists of McCluskey, a war drama that largely resembles Inglourious Basterds. In the scene of the movie that audiences get to see, Dalton storms into a building and kills a group of Nazis with a flame thrower as he screams, “did anybody order fried sauerkraut?!”

Stab

The Scream series is a genius satire on the horror genre as well as a homage to it and being an incredible horror itself. But one of the most brilliant ways the franchise pokes fun at the genre and at itself is with the very meta movie-within-a-movie, Stab, which is essentially the universe’s version of Scream.

Drfatleg mentions that they “loved the trailer for Stab 8 in the new one.” One of the most creative uses of the fictional franchise is at the beginning of Scream 2, when it’s the premiere of the movie and everyone in the movie theatre is dressed as the Ghostface killer, and the real Ghostface killer is hiding amongst them.

Every 22 Jump Street Sequel

With 22 Jump Street and its predecessor being a fascinating, self-aware approach to the original TV show, it takes the meta jokes to a whole other level in the mid-credits sequence. It’s one of the ways the sequel is better than the original, as it teases over 20 sequels.

JohnnyJayce wants to see all of those sequels, “especially 27 Jump Street: Culinary School with Bill Hader as the bad guy.” In the short clip of Culinary School, Schmitt finds a microchip in an empanada right before Jacob impales Hader with a meat cleaver. There’s even a tease for a sequel where Seth Rogen replaces Jonah Hill as Schmitt in 28 Jump Street: Sunday School.

Angels With Filthy Souls

Angels With Filthy Souls is such a well-crafted movie within a movie that is surely convinced audiences that it was a real 40s gangster movie. The scene is in black and white, it’s shot like films were shot decades ago, and even the audio is altered.

The scene was also incorporated into Home Alone in such an original way, and the scene in which Kevin terrifies the pizza delivery guy has become iconic. These-things-happen makes an interesting observation that Angels With Filthy Souls was “also in Detective Pikachu, which confirms that Home Alone takes place in the Pokémon universe.”

Crime Scene: Scene Of The Crime

General_poopypants admits that “it’s a TV show in a movie, but Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” Even the name of the fictional show is making fun of the ridiculous, copious amounts of crime shows on TV, many of which are spin-offs with similarly outrageous subtitles. And the show parodies everything from the cheesy music to the cliched troubled detective.

However, Crime Scene also inadvertently predicted the future. In the movie, the show was exclusively on NBC.com. And while that might have been joking that the show wasn’t good enough to air on TV, NBC is now creating a lot of exclusive content for its streaming service, Peacock.

Austinpussy

SaltySteveD87 cites Austinpussy as the best movie within a movie, which is found in the third Austin Powers film, Goldmember. The film is an adaptation of Powers’ life, with Tom Cruise playing the goofy spy, and the Redditor argues that “the opening was the only great part of that third Austin Powers movie.”

Austinpussy is especially hilarious because so much more production value went into it than the rest of the actual movie. On top of that, the way it’s presented is genius, as viewers don’t see Cruise’s face until the last second, making audiences believe that it’s actually the start of Goldmember. And hearing Cruise say “yeah, baby” in a British accent is priceless.

Don’t

Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s collaboration, Grindhouse, is full of trailers for fake movies from guest directors between the two main features. Apoplectic-confetti claims the best of the lot is the Edgar Wright-directed Don’t. The Redditor cites the tagline, “if you’re thinking of seeing this film alone…Don’t!”

Interestingly, just how Machete actually got made into a full-length movie (and even got a sequel,) the same was supposed to happen with Don’t, with Wright returning. Unfortunately, it has remained in development hell ever since it was announced, making it one of many unrealized Edgar Wright movies.

Ow! My Balls!

Idiocracy was a box office bomb when it was first released in 2006, but it has since become a cult classic thanks to the hilarious way it depicts a dystopian future. It’s a satire that blames humans for destroying the Earth that was released 15 years before Don’t Look Up, and it’s much funnier too. And as it’s set 500 years in the future, it depicts humans as being much stupider.

As Neinbozobozobozo notes, the most popular thing to watch in the year 2505 is Ow! My balls!, which sees a random man continuously getting his testicles injured. However, there’s an even better movie within a movie in Idiocracy, Ass, which is a still shot of that very thing for 90 minutes. The movie won eight Academy Awards, including Best Screenplay.

Coming Home In A Body Bag

True Romance is one of the best crime action movies of the 1990s, and as it’s written by Quentin Tarantino, there’s, unsurprisingly, a movie within a movie, which is one of his less popular trademarks. AdamCicatello believes that Coming Home In A Body Bag is the best movie within a movie.

Not much is seen of the fake movie, but the dailies are being played on a giant wall while Clarence is pulling off a cocaine deal with a Hollywood producer. But the movie uses the fictional flick in such a unique way, as the whirring of helicopters on the dailies adds to the machine-gun fire and intensity when a shootout inevitably unfolds.