Meet Nestflix, where fake movies and TV shows are the real deal
Move over Netflix.
- Third place film critic, 2021 LA Press Club National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards
"Hey, Claudius. You killed my father. Big mistake."
You haven't seen Hamlet till you've seen Arnold Schwarzenegger in the starring role as a ripped, cigar-puffing prince shoving his corrupt uncle out of a castle window.
You probably won't catch the scene at any Shakespeare film festival, but you will see it in a parody movie version of Hamlet that appears in another flick, 1993 action comedy Last Action Hero.
The prince will be back.
It's one of the "nested films" on Nestflix, a new online platform that rounds up all those wacky fake movies and TV shows that appear in real entertainment offerings (think The Itchy and Scratchy Show from The Simpsons).
"I've been interested in nested films and shows for years, since I learned that Angels with Filthy Souls from Home Alone was a fake movie," says Lynn Fisher, the Phoenix-based web developer and digital illustrator behind the amusing site. "After a web search didn't show a super comprehensive list, I thought it could be a fun data aggregation site."
Nestflix looks like Netflix's twin, though you can't actually play the fake films and shows listed -- "feels like a copyright mess I don't want to worry about," Fisher wisely says. It is, however, a great place to discover the phonies and go watch them elsewhere.
I, for example, hadn't yet seen Ghandi II ("Gandhi's back and this time he's mad. No more Mr. Passive Resistance") from 1989 parody film UHF, starring Weird Al Yankovic. And until now, I hadn't caught crime show Homicide Life on Sesame Street, as seen on Family Guy. It's a sobering look at the dark side of Sesame Street, brought to you by the letter H.
The stories within stories, more than 400 of them, are broken down by category -- dramas, comedies, thrillers, spy movies, westerns, reality TV and the like. It took Fisher two months to gather all the information and assets she needed to build the site. Not surprisingly, "I have some intense spreadsheets and Photoshop/Illustrator files," she says.
Fisher's other online projects include a Dress David Rose, where you can outfit a digital version of the Schitt's Creek character in every shirt, sweater and jacket David wore on the show. Another project tries to make sense of those ever-confusing airport codes. MSY for New Orleans? Really?
Fisher encourages fans to submit any favorite nested films or shows missing from her latest project, though she's paused submissions temporarily due to the windfall received since the site launched last week. Or maybe she's just too busy watching the Thomas Jefferson biopic starring Tracy Jordan to tinker with Nestflix right now.
