Review: Scary Movie 4

The plot? Do you honestly expect me to provide you with a synopsis? Here’s an idea: Ask the filmmakers, I bet they can’t provide you with one either. Let’s just say our heroines Anna Faris and Regina King are faced with a bunch of lukewarm genre movie parodies.

 

2006 David Zucker (“The Naked Gun!”) spoof of all kinds of popular films (“Saw”, “The Grudge” remake, “The Village”, “Brokeback Mountain”, “The War of the Worlds”, “Million Dollar Baby”) has some chuckle-inducing moments to be sure (an hilarious musical cue provides laughs during the otherwise homophobic “Brokeback Mountain” parody), but the plot of the film is…well, bizarrely structured. The film runs through several genre pieces, some that just don’t fit, though I’ll give Leslie Nielsen’s extraneous U.S. President schtick a pass because it’s the funniest bit. This plays as though the plots for each of these films are running at the same time, so that Craig Bierko’s (admittedly amusing) Tom Cruise in “War of the Worlds” gets to meet up with Anna Faris’ parody of Sarah Michelle Gellar in “The Grudge”…and it just plays out weirdly and totally incoherently. Given that Zucker and co-writer Abrahams are pretty talented guys, one expected more from this, even if it is the fourth instalment in a franchise that was mediocre to begin with. At least there aren’t any Wayans’ in this one.

 

You’ll probably laugh, but I doubt you’ll remember terribly much of what you were laughing at the next morning.

 

Rating: C

 

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