Scary Movie 4

Out-sequelling original inspiration Scream, the Scary Movie series continues with what the new film’s poster assures us will be ‘the fourth and final chapter of the trilogy’. As with his Scary Movie 3 (2003), director David Zucker shows increasingly less interest in the horror genre parody of the Wayans brothers’ first two films in the series in favour of a less focused pastiche. With non-horror fare like Brokeback Mountain and Million Dollar Baby brought in for lampooning alongside Saw and The Village, and featuring running jokes from the previous instalments, Scary Movie 4 presents a thick pea soup of intertextuality that would likely flummox even ardent cinernagoers were its humour subtler.

More than ever before, the plot exists as a surreal pot-pourri of elements from better films. The forced logic of the narrative is best experienced as a warped dream. Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) moves into a new house to look after an elderly disabled woman (played by Cloris Leachman providing an unfortunate reminder of earlier, funnier horror spoof Young Frankenstein) and is menaced by the sprite-child from Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge, who claims that his father holds the secret to repelling a destructive invasion by ‘Karma Chameleon’-playing alien tripods (or tr-iPods). As displaced communities take to the road in an apocalyptic exodus a la Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, Cindy and Scary Movie regular Brenda (Regina Hall) make their way to a prelapsarian settlement straight out of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. There they find the boy’s father, and much fun is had by the characters not speaking about ‘those we don’t speak of.’

These random, unconnected cinematic targets make for a more piecemeal parody than was provided by the first Scary Movie film, which focused on the Wes Craven school of ironic teen slasher movies. If it seemed redundant to satirise films that were essentially commentaries upon themselves (Scream had already made all the knowing genre jokes that the Scary Movie series has subsequently turned into a cottage industry), at least the portentous, post-9/11 solemnity of the Spielberg and Shyamalan films is more in need of deflation. Yet of the movies spoofed in Scary Movie 4, perhaps only Brokeback Mountain is sufficiently iconic to raise audience-wide chuckles of familiarity, and this opportunity is squandered with a broad and rather obvious camping-up of that film’s delicate love story. The romance is squeezed into the narrative in one of those self-contained flashbacks that Zucker has been doing since the Saturday Night Fever sequence in Airplane! (1980).

Infantile comedy and snide stereotyping still dominate, making it difficult to warm to the few compensatory pleasures. Craig Bierko’s merciless send-up of Tom Cruise’s infamously animated appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show arrives too late. In one of the more inspired gags, a dazed swarm of dispossessed citizens of the type familiar from so many disaster movies is mistaken – as if they have wandered into another film for an army of zombies and gunned down: it is a witty acknowledgement of Scary Movie 4’s genre confusion, albeit one with unpleasant echoes of real-life post-trauma imagery.

This review features in the June 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.