Here are 12 movie satires that have it both ways. Kentucky Fried Movie United Film Distribution Company Kentucky Fried Movie is the film that that started it all for Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker, the team behind Airplane and The Naked Gun films. It consists of a string of dead-on movie parodies — basically making fun of every popular genre in the 1970s.

The most over the top is a parody of sexploitation films that was, at the young age when we saw it, probably the dirtiest thing we'd ever seen. It includes all variety of shocking perversions, and gets fairly explicit. It's funny, sure, but also quite salacious.

It continues to make us confused. Robocop (1987) Orion Pictures - Credit: C/O Paul Verhoeven is the master of movie satires that have it both ways. The Dutch filmmaker arrived in the United States in the '80s and quickly committed to outdoing the excessive sex and violence he saw on American screens.

Robocop is a masterpiece, as satire goes — it appeals to audiences tough-on-crime wish-fulfillment fantasies while also noting that corporate, mechanized crimefighting may be more dangerous than crime itself. It successfully anticipated the potential flaws of AI-based law enforcement — does anyone really want to be pulled over by a drone? — and arguably also anticipated the rise of the for-profit prison system. At the same time, though, it's a wonderfully silly movie about a half-man half-robot trying to clean the scum off the streets of New Detroit.

And one of our favorite movies ever. Scream (1996) Drew Barrymore in Scream. Dimension Films - Credit: C/O Written by Kevin Williamson and directed by master of horror Wes Craven, Scream deconstructs slasher movies even while serving up supremely competent chills and kills.

It also changed horror forever, and for the better: It was almost impossible to make an unironic slasher movie after Scream made it a requirement to include at least one character in every group of slasher movie friends to point out tropes they had better not fall into. Even movies that play it very straight are now in a kind of pact with the audience: We all know these tropes. Now here's how this movie will undermine them.

Slumber Party Massacre (1982) New World Pictures - Credit: C/O New World Pictures Though Scream did the have-it-both ways slasher movie satire the best, Slumber Party Massacre got there first. The first of the four films in the franchise (including two sequels and a revamp) was written by lesbian feminist author Rita Mae Brown, who set out to satirize slasher movies, not celebrate them. But under the astute direction of Amy Holden Jones, Slumber Party Massacre turned out to be one of the best slasher movies ever made, as well as a knowing satire of other films popular at the time, like Friday the 13th.

It also captures early '80s Southern California — where we grew up watching movies we weren't supposed to — with a keenly accurate eye. The next film in the series, Slumber Party II, goes even further into satire with a villain (Atanas Ilitch) who dances like a cross between Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson and kills with a drill-shaped red electric guitar. American Psycho (2000) Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.

Lionsgate - Credit: Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, Lionsgate Another of our all-time favorite movies, American Psycho is a sharp satire of '80s yuppiedom that also makes '80s yuppiedom seem... pretty glamorous, actually. Aside from all the chainsaw murders, of course. Christian Bale played Wall Street serial killer Patrick Bateman as anything but cool — "We looked at him as an alien who landed in the unabashedly capitalist New York of the ’80s, and looked around and said, ‘How do I perform like a successful male in this world?,’" Bale once told MovieMaker.

And while his behavior is reprehensible, he has really good abs. And taste in business cards. We don't root for him, but he's hypnotically amusing to watch.

Tropic Thunder (2008) Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder. Dreamworks - Credit: Paramount Tropic Thunder isn't so much a satire of war movies as a satire of actors who take on showy, ludicrous roles in pursuit of acclaim. One of the joys of the movie is that it allows to take on a variety of showy, ludicrous roles while playing actors playing showy, ludicrous roles.

The most extreme example is Robert Downey Jr. as Kirk Lazarus, an Australian Oscar winner who undergoes "pigmentation alteration: surgery in order to play a Black character, Staff Sergeant Lincoln Osiris. But Ben Stiller also gets to shine as Tugg Speedman, who has made the mistake of committing too hard to his role as "Simple Jack." Starship Troopers (1997) TriStar Pictures Starship Troopers, another Verhoeven film, nailed its