SCARY MOVIE 5 (Malcolm D. Lee). 85 minutes. Opens Friday (April 12). See listings. Rating: N
Scary Movie was bad. Scary Movie 2 was worse. The trend continued. Now we come to Scary Movie 5. Within the first few minutes, Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan stage a sex tape with a roving collection of little people and farm animals set to Yakety Sax.
When a comedy makes Benny Hill look good, it’s a bad a sign, and things only get worse from there. It’s hard to even consider this a real movie. It feels more like a series of half-baked jokes submitted by a team of wilfully uncredited writers on cocktail napkins. The fact that a crew and actors actually showed up to film those gags says more about the current state of the economy than anything else.
Like all Scary Movies, it doesn’t really have a plot, just interconnected parodies.
Jody (Ashley Tisdale) is a ballerina starring in Black Swan, while her scientist husband (Simon Rex) raises hyper-intelligent apes (the kind that might rise to rule a planet). The couple and their children move into a haunted house and film everything with hidden cameras.
Remember those movies? No? Don’t worry, they get to Inception as well. What’s most distracting is that substantial portions of Scary 5 were clearly reshot to incorporate parodies of the still-in-theaters Mama and Evil Dead.
That’s fast work, but the new and old footage awkwardly clash, with actors who are visibly different from scene to scene (including a baby who ages from newborn to toddler and back again). It’s the kind of thing that would seem unprofessional in most movies, but the folks behind this one know their audience won’t care. Just throw those viewers a Snoop Dog or Mike Tyson cameo and they’re happy.
Watching this, it’s hard to imagine that the parody genre began with something as strong as Airplane. The movies mocked don’t even require an inherent absurdity worth exaggerating any more. Now they’re picked simply because they’re new, while an avalanche of jokes try to make up for low quality with sheer quantity.
There must been several hundred jokes in Scary Movie 5, but fewer than five of them work. With any luck, that’s enough to kill off this series for good.
movie@nowtoronto.com
