Rain of Madness sends up Tropic Thunder... kind of

Published at 9:33 AM on September 9, 2008

By Jeffrey Bloomer

The rabid satire that is Tropic Thunder hit all the stops: A big, bloody Vietnam epic-within-an-epic. Robert Downey Jr. as an Australian superstar in blackface, “the dude playin' the dude disguised as another dude.” Tom Cruise as a grotesque incarnation of the Hollywood executive.

The benevolent observer would assume the makers of Tropic Thunder have had their fill, but the benevolent observer would be wrong.

Rain of Madness, now available on iTunes, is a mockumentary in the style of the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (which chronicled the making of Apocalypse Now) about the making of Tropic Thunder. Not, mind you, the Tropic Thunder currently in theaters, but the Tropic Thunder within Tropic Thunder—the movie within the movie that the actual movie makes fun of.

Got that? Don’t sweat it. For all its meta-posturing, Rain of Madness is more coherent than it sounds, and with dialogue like “The only difference between this film and Vietnam is that with this film, we’re going to win,” its satire is often fiercer and funnier than its inspiration’s. And at just under a half hour, it’s also much, much shorter.

The free download, very NSFW, is available here.