Scary Movie 4

David Zucker

BY Cam LindsayPublished Apr 1, 2006

The Smiths said it best: that joke isn’t funny anymore. With the sometimes clever, but most often stupid parodying of everything from War of the Worlds and The Grudge to Brokeback Mountain and Saw, Scary Movie 4 is much of the same from the king of parodies: director David Zucker (Airplane!, The Naked Gun).
There is a loose plot within all of the silliness, again featuring main character Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) and her struggle to, well, go through some kind of growth, but along the way she gets caught up in a haphazard invasion by aliens. Essentially, it’s another chance to drop perverted gags from films that mostly reached their "best before date” months, even years ago. While the opening Saw gag featuring Shaquille O’Neal and Dr. Phil actually did a good job of both delivering a spirited parody as well as self-deprecating jokes by both men, unfortunately, after these first ten minutes, the next 70 make you want to saw your own leg off.
The problem with this franchise, besides the sloppy writing, is how quickly we’ve lost interest in seeing a spoof of a two-year old film. The relevance of a skit satirising The Village loses out before it even gets started. Even the whole Tom Cruise on Oprah meltdown feels a little stale at this point. Since Zucker took over for the third and fourth film from creators the Wayans Brothers, who obviously knew it was time to get out, the whole series seems to have shifted into more of his style, which, despite valiant attempts, just doesn’t manage to capture the same level of raunchy, sex-driven comedy of the original film.
Word on the street is this will be the final film of the series, but as we’ve learned from parodied horror films, you can never count out the dollar signs that come with another sequel. And something tells me moviegoers aren’t quite done with Scary Movie just yet. (Miramax)


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