One thing I never liked about these was the horrid low-budget...well, low budget everything. I'm sure with the kind of script writing these movies produce that having a $30,000 budget is the only way to build a profit, but in my opinion, if you're not going to make something decent, don't bother with it at all.
Meet the Spartans appears to be a tad better than Epic Movie in my opinion, but only because I couldn't stand the actors in Epic Movie, nor the settings.
It really seems nowadays like they're not even trying anymore. I want to see them try to do parodies that don't involve a gallon of some bodily fluid being thrown on someone somehow, be it Aliens pissing from their fingers, Nacho Libre blowing snot onto the Harold and Kumar guy, a needlessly placed and horribly done Shrek Baby puking or a similarly stupidly placed stuffed penguin doll blowing white **** into Leonidas' face. I hate it when comedy has to delve into bad taste and crude potty humor. It's the reason I stay the Hell away from Nickelodeon (or Cartoon Network, for that matter nowadays...how did they suddenly go so ****ty?). I prefer it when the writers respect my intelligence and don't try to force a cheap laugh out of me by initiating a hundred farting sound effects, which frankly only annoys me, and hopefully, most of the rest of the people in the theater as well.
Space Balls was indeed the definition of a good parody flick. They had the low budget, they had the death star or whatever morph into a giant maid with a vacuum, they had the "Schwartz", and yet they made something memorable, something you could quote, something worth laughing at. These days, a parody movie is never taken seriously, even by the people producing them, which is why parodies with such potencial do nothing more than force me to groan.