If Chain Restaurants Were Turned Into Movies

After all of the customers and German tourists have gone home at night, the second-rate rock n’ roll memorabilia comes to live and hops down off the walls. Why? To convince a Baby Boomer night watchman, who had a garage band in the ’60s and mentions to anyone who will listen about that time he once passed Stephen Stills in the bathroom at a baseball game, that he’s still cool. They dress him up in Roy Orbison’s brother’s sunglasses and teach him to play “Wild Thing” on a guitar once owned by the guitarist from Loverboy.

Tagline: “Rock n’ roll ‘all night!”

A successful lawyer travels back home to suburban New Jersey to visit his large Italian family. Between huge meals prepared by his animated grandmother, and sing-alongs to “That’s Amor ‘,” and basket after basket of breadsticks, he goes up to the attic to look at old photo albums, where, called to a dusty corner by a mysterious device that vibrates and flashes red lights, he discovers some documents that reveal a big secret: His family isn’t even remotely Italian.

Tagline: “When you’re here, you’re family. A hugely stereotypical family. More breadsticks?”

Aliens bent on destroying the Earth land behind a mall outside of Tyler, Texas, and venture into the first building they see, a Hooters. The aliens, na ‘ve to the ways of earth, believe that the waitresses are legitimately flirting with them and stand down, only to have the waitresses poison them with chicken wings.

Tagline: “They’re only doing this to pay for college ‘and to save the world.”

You can venture that this movie really is as good as your friends keep telling you it is. It’s probably the best movie you’ll ever see. Unfortunately, there will be only three prints of the movie and they’re not going anywhere outside of California.

Tagline: “Dude, it’s so good, you don’t even know.”

When a woman sends her dopey fianc ‘ to turn in the catering deposit for their upcoming wedding, he stops in at Dave and Buster’s instead, and spends all $2,000 on Pop-A-Shot, thinking he’s somehow going to win all the money back, even though Dave and Buster’s is not a better establishment. Now, he has to prove to his girlfriend ‘someway ‘that he’s mature enough to get married. He goes to Dave and Buster’s instead.

Tagline: “Busted!”

A husband and father of three children under the age of five takes his family to a suburban Applebee’s on a Friday night and is seated in the “Family Zone” amongst dozens of tables covered in sticky spilled soda, screaming children, and frazzled, catatonic parents. Suddenly, he is magically whisked away to his minivan after he says he “just needs to go grab something real quick” and disappears, forever.

Tagline: “No, this is 40.”