Lists of movies within movies are fairly common on the internet, enough that I now realize I need to finally see Bowfinger simply because I’ve counted about a million list makers in love with something titled “Chubby Rain.” And the lists are likely to keep on coming thanks to this week’s hot release, Tropic Thunder, which actually features two movies within (the Vietnam War film “Tropic Thunder” and the festival-winning making-of documentary “Rain of Madness”), as well as the upcoming How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which has spawned a popular fake movie trailer for an NC-17 film titled “Mother Theresa: The Making of a Saint” (previewed above). Yet until someone makes a Wikipedia page for “List of Fictional Films,” these blogged and forumed lists are necessary to keep us movie fans remembering those non-existent movies we wish existed.

Narrowing down to ten seemed to be difficult — fictional films have been at least nominally been created for tons of films about filmmaking, otherwise reflexive films, sketch comedies, spoofs, etc. — until I realized that a lot of these films within films are appropriately nominal or trailer- or clip-sized gags and would in reality be terrible (imagine actually watching the entirety of “Asses of Fire” from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut). Even “Je Vous Présente Paméla” (”Meet Pamela”) from Day for Night and the sci-fi film being made in 8½ would probably be major disappointments in actuality if you expected from them the work of Truffaut and Fellini, respectively.

So, I went mostly with fictional films that would probably be bad, but would at least be amusingly bad — though I purposefully avoided fictional porns, including those from Boogie Nights and The Big Lebowski, of which there are literally thousands:

1. “Gandhi II” from UHF - There’s just something about watching good people gone bad. But while the idea of the Good Will Hunting sequel, subtitled “Hunting Season”, thought up for Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is pretty ingenious, it just doesn’t have the same level of ludicrous exaggeration that a bloodletting follow-up to the Oscar-winning Gandhi has. Dude drives a Ferrari, can punch completely through a guy’s abdomen, and of course he knows how to party. He even eats meat, now. It’s not only funny because it’s the antithesis of what the Indian leader was all about, it’s also funny because it reminds me of all those straight-edge and vegetarian kids you knew in high school who now drink way too much (oh, yeah, I’m one of them).
2. “Odyssey” from Contempt - When Fritz Lang showed up as himself in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, he’d already given the world his final film as a director (The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse). If only he’d really given us this one additional adaptation of Homer’s epic poem. Either as an art film, as Lang originally intends, or as a more commercial picture, as desired by the American producer played by Jack Palance.
3. “Ants in Your Pants 1938″ from Sullivan’s Travels - The other famously named film within this film, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” was, at least in title, already made by the Coen brothers (see the side-by-side comparison in the video above — interestingly enough, their O Brother, Where Art Thou? is also an adaptation of Homer’s “Odyssey”, uniting #2 and #3 of this list). But I always try to imagine what a film titled “Ants in Your Pants 1938″ would have looked like. I always picture a cross between the Marx Brothers and Busby Berkeley, yet it’s got to be more shallow than that, according to how it’s referenced in Preston Sturges’ movie.
4. “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure - What fan of the real Big Adventure wouldn’t like to watch it all over again as an action picture starring James Brolin and Morgan Fairchild? Maybe it wouldn’t be as good, but it does have ninjas. Anyway, because I love to relate seemingly unrelated movies via lists, let it be known that an episode of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse was titled “Ants in Your Pants”. And now that I think about it, that show was kinda like a cross between the Marx Brothers and Busby Berkeley. Kinda.
5. “Habeas Corpus” from The Player - It’s a common staple for lists like this, and pretty much all Bruce Willis movies from the first half of the ’90s were awful (obviously Pulp Fiction is an exception), but I’d definitely watch the whole of this fake film, even though I’ve already seen how it ends. As with Fritz Lang’s “Odyssey”, I’d be curious to see both the originally planned version and the commercialized final version.
6. “Crossed Sabres of Truth” from The Big Picture - Forget “Home for Purim”, that lame movie within a movie from Christopher Guest’s For Your Consideration. This earlier satire of Hollywood from Guest had far greater fake films, most of them fake student films, such as this one, made by the full-of-himself character played by Dan Schneider. It may not have starred Elliott Gould (as does “The Trial of Janet Kingsley”), or been an overly avant-garde work titled “Afterbirth of a Notion” (which reminds me of the opening to Pee-Wee’s Playhouse), or the actual winner of the National Film Institute’s student film award (that would be Kevin Bacon’s character’s “First Date”), but it has the fat kid from Head of the Class and Better Off Dead riding a horse in a 19th century war movie. How could you not want to see more?
7. “See You Next Wednesday” from The Kentucky Fried Movie - I’m probably a bigger fan of weird movie theater gimmicks than the average moviegoer, but that’s probably because I didn’t get a chance to live through things like Smell-O-Vision, which sound neat in theory but which were reportedly very obnoxious in reality (I recently wrote elsewhere about how the return of Smell-O-Vision in pre-show advertising sounds terrible). The joke about “See You Next Wednesday” (a fake movie title referenced in most of John Landis’ films) is that it’s in “feel-around”, a gimmick that’s clearly annoying to experience. I’d definitely be willing to try it out once, though. Especially if it’s the closest thing I could get to one of the Feelies (tactual motion pictures) from Huxley’s “Brave New World”.
8. “MANT” from Matinee - Movie theater gimmicks also have me curious about experiencing the schlock horror film shown in Atomo-Vision and Rumble-Rama. This is one of those film within a films that you get to see more than enough footage of, but I want to actually suffer it as it’s intended to be seen.
9. “Jews in Space” from History of the World, Part I - Mel Brooks eventually did make a Star Wars spoof, one that featured a lot of Jews in space (Spaceballs), but that doesn’t mean this earlier parody idea wouldn’t also be worth seeing. I’d even settle for seeing the apparently hilarious 2005 Argentine film Jews in Space Or Why Is This Night Different, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to actually take place in space nor, tragically, involve spaceships shaped like the Star of David.
10. “Those Darn Amigos” from ¡Three Amigos! - Because the synopsis of Tropic Thunder reminds me of the plot to Three Amigos, I feel it appropriate to include one of the fake films from the underrated comedy. At the beginning of the movie, we see one of the silent movies starring the Three Amigos (see the clip above), but I’m more interested in the trio’s flop, which diverted from the usual premise to be about three wealthy Spanish landowners who take a little vacation in Manhattan. If it didn’t appeal to the masses, I’ll probably love it. I’d also settle for seeing one of the early shorts featuring Ned Nederlander (Martin Short) known as “Little Neddy’s Knickers.” Considering ¡Three Amigos! is set in 1916, and Short was in his mid-30s, I believe it impossible that Ned could have been a child star of any younger than 30, so I’m pretty curious.

BONUS: “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” from Lost in La Mancha - It isn’t a fake film, but it is technically a film within a film. And it’s so far non-existent, really. Terry Gilliam’s attempted loose adaptation of Cervantes was actually being made, with Johnny Depp in the lead. However, due to multiple complications, the production was canceled after shooting had begun, and all that remained was Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s depressing documentary Lost in La Mancha. Because sometimes the gods are good to us Gilliam fans, though, it was recently announced that the film is on being attempted again, reportedly still with Depp and possibly also starring Michael Palin.