During a particularly bad run of recent movies, one of my fellow San Francisco critics made the comment that maybe if we put all the week's releases together (I won't mention which ones), the one movie might actually be entertaining. Brilliant idea; it would have to be better, I thought. That is until I saw Disaster Movie.

But before I get to why I didn't like Disaster Movie, let me first just say that the sheer number of pop culture institutions and icons the movie managed to make fun of in well under two hours is pretty amazing. From the Oscar-winning Juno and No Country for Old Men to duds like 10,000 B.C. and You Don't Mess with the Zohan, Disaster Movie may have easily grabbed from over half the movies released in the past year. And that's a lot. The fact that many of them had nothing to do with the end of the world—not a problem. And many of the movies referenced have only dropped into theaters in the past few months—a concept that has left me either impressed by the speedy filmmaking and improvisational abilities of the movie's creative team or incredibly amused by the thought of all the insider knowledge that may have gone into the movie (I can't decide which).

The frame of it all is Cloverfield, a fairly absurd premise in and of itself taken to a whole other level by inviting 20 to 30 other films to join it. After a dream which predicts the end of the world through a saber-toothed Amy Winehouse, the world does in fact begin to fall to pieces. There is an earthquake, there are asteroids, there's a tornado, there are even Alvin and his rabid chipmunk friends. The only recent apocalyptic phenomenon that I found noticeably missing: the gigantic Cloverfield monster himself, and either a plant attack or mass suicide tribute to M. Night Shayamalan. Since it is the end of the world, present for the festivities are almost all the (super)heroes of the past year, including: Batman, Ironman, Hellboy, Hancock, Hulk, Beowulf, Caspian, Kung Fu Panda, and Dr. Indiana Jones himself. And since the apocalypse is occurring in a non-descript city in which every person of note seems to live (LA meets NYC?), also present are Jessica Simpson, Justin Timberlake, Michael Jackson, Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus, Dr. Phil, Javier Bardem, and, of course, Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha. If you look closely in one of the movie's final scenes, you can even spot the very first (but probably not the last) Obama tattoo I have ever seen.

Stealing the stage, however, are Juno and the Enchanted Princess, the two main women on the run from the end of the world. While much of the humor in Disaster Movie is often so out of context and such a gag just to be a gag that it really isn't funny at all, Juno and the Princess bring enough originality and slightly deeper levels of cultural commentary to their parts that I actually kind of enjoyed them. As much as I loved the real Juno, her parody points out how unusual her character really is—her mannerisms, her way of speaking, her predicament in general. I mean really, what are the chances of finding a 16 year-old who listens to The Stooges and Patti Smith, speaks in nothing but witty quips, and also happens to be carrying a baby? Then there's the Princess. Sure, we all were probably fully aware of the suspension-of-disbelief switch we had to flip to fully enjoy last fall's Enchanted. But when we did, its simple joy was what we embraced. The fact that it all might actually make more sense if framed inside drug-produced insanity—not quite as inspiring, but strangely believable and amusingly entertaining.

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