Well, TMZ is not the only assault on Hollywood`s way of life. There`s something worse. It`s called the Mockbuster, as in mock Blockbuster. It`s a cheap send-up of a Hollywood hit done by wannabe filmmakers on a shoestring budget. It`s outrageous because passing off cheesy recycled material as art should be reserved for only the big movie studios.
—"Countdown," MSNBC, July 28, 2006
Early this past summer, around the time Hollywood's 2007 blockbusters were set to make their debut on the big screen, movie junkies could find a film that might, at first glance, have been confused with the box office hit 'Transformers.' Set in a dystopian future that looks suspiciously like an abandoned parking lot, 'Transmorphers' tells the story of a war between humans and an evil race of extraterrestrial machines. Unlike its namesake, 'Transmorphers' has no recognizable actors, no merchandising tie-ins and a garbled sound mix. Also unlike 'Transformers,' it has cheap special effects and a subplot involving lesbians. In short, though 'Transmorphers' features the occasional shape-shifting robot, it bears little resemblance to Michael Bay's big-screen phenomenon.
Yet 'Transmorphers' had its own kind of success, earning back its meager production costs in less than three months. Created by a company called the Asylum, 'Transmorphers' was only the latest in a string of cheaply made straight-to-DVD 'mockbusters.'
—Rolf Potts, "The New B Movie," The New York Times, October 7, 2007
Where "Snakes on a Plane" stars Samuel L. Jackson as a U.S. marshal coping with venom at 20,000 feet, "Snakes on a Train" features the much lower-profile Alby Castro (who?) in a yarn about snakes unleashed by a "Mayan curse" aboard a Los Angeles-bound train from Mexico.
"Snakes on a Train" is the seventh in a series of low-budget, direct-to-video "mockbusters" over the past year designed to ride the coattails of big-budget studio releases like "The War of the Worlds," "King Kong" and "The Da Vinci Code."
—Lou Lumenick, "Mockbusters," The New York Post, July 26, 2006
You also see the word
blockbuster used to refer to something that's the opposite of a blockbuster:
Or perhaps hockey historians will ultimately record this thing as a draw, just as Buffalo GM Scotty Bowman did early last decade after a
mockbuster trade with Detroit involving six players.
'Great trade,' he snorted two years afterwards, 'nothing for nothing.'
—John Kernaghan, "Risebrough ambushed by ex-mentor Fletcher," Hamilton Spectator, January 3, 1992
