Credit: UMC (Universal Marion Corporation
Tue 15 September 2026 0:30, UK
Just because he’s become so synonymous with comedy, Mel Brooks isn’t only allowed to like movies designed to have audiences rolling in the aisles, with his personal tastes proving eclectic.
One film he definitely doesn’t like is Sylvester Stallone’s Demolition Man, which he summed up as possibly the stupidest thing he’s ever seen, but a blockbuster sci-fi action flick wouldn’t necessarily appeal to the brains behind some of Hollywood’s most iconic and anarchic capers.
He’s a big fan of The Bourne Identity, calling it one of his favourites of the 21st century, and it ticks a lot of boxes associated with the pictures he used to love watching with his long-time best friend, Carl Reiner, with the duo proving to be a pair of suckers for anything that involved securing a perimeter.
The EGOT-winning veteran has been obsessed with ‘Golden Age’ musicals for as long as he can remember, not that they’re ‘Golden Age’ musicals to him when he’s old enough to remember them as modern-day cinema releases, and he’s even got a soft spot for a little bit of horror now and then.
However, when one of the medium’s finest-ever auteurs crafted a decadent, debauched, and indulgent period piece that revelled in its own outlandishness, he’d seen enough. The title in question runs for 129 minutes, but, according to Brooks, he barely made it past the hour mark before leaving.
Summing it up as a big, fat slice of “phoney baloney,” the Blazing Saddles creator didn’t hold back when sharing his feelings on an admittedly polarising Federico Fellini flick, although it was still one that earned him an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Director’, even if it was rejected for ‘Best International Feature’ consideration.
“Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!” Brooks understatedly put it. “Fellini is a genius, but when he made Satyricon, I walked out in the middle.” The filmmaker’s hedonistic, Rome-set period piece isn’t the easiest thing to get on board with, and you have to be in the right mindset to exist on its wavelength, but the comic legend didn’t even give it the time of day.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
By the midway point, he’d seen enough, and no matter what unfolded in the back half of Satyricon, which was more of the same, to be honest, nothing could change Brooks’ mind and have him consider attempting to make it all the way through on a second watch. Once was enough, and even at that, he feels like he wasted too many minutes of his life on it.
The mastermind behind the first-ever fart joke to be beamed onto the big screen doesn’t come across as someone who’d be particularly invested in Fellini’s sprawling, impressionist, and occasionally phantasmagorical film, so he was at least living up to type by making his excuses and abandoning his one and only screening.
