Tanya Batson-Savage, Freelance Writer
Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) lights up the way in a spoof of The Grudge from a scene in the new movie Scary Movie 4 - CONTRIBUTED
THE SCARIEST thing about horror movies is their unwillingness to die. Even when they have been 'zombified' and nothing resembling living art is left pumping in their celluloid veins, they keep lumbering forward. So it is that a Scary Movie 4 has been launched on the world and a shot to the head might not be enough to put it down.
The Wayans family have a knack for creating a good joke, but even good jokes sour when they are taken too far. So, what was a funny spoof of the run of horror flicks, especially Scream at the end of the last century, Scary Movie was already taken too far in the last instalment, this one is just dragging out the pain for the simple love of cruelty and interestingly, even the Wayans have bailed out by now.
Of course, if one lies somewhere below 15 years old, Scary Movie 4 might come across as funny, that is if simply the thought of urine, excrement and wanton violence are enough to make you laugh. The jokes which populate this film are unnecessarily gross, happily wallowing in all forms of bodily excrement and references to them.
SIMPLE FORMULA
Writers Craig Mazin and Jim Abrahams have a simple formula, when in doubt liberally apply some urine, make reference to faecal matter (or show somebody making some) or at least hit somebody, hard. That formula has been used before and to much better effect.
The premise behind the Scary Movie series is that they make fun of popular blockbusters. Scary Movie 4 does not. It borrows from blockbusters such as The Village, The Grudge, War of the Worlds and Saw, and moves beyond the horror movie realm and included Brokeback Mountain and Million Dollar Baby taking a hodgepodge of characters and trying to force them together.
Unfortunately, there is no real attempt at parodying those movies. Parody, takes smarts and none was applied here. Indeed, smarts might just be the antidote to Scary Movie 4. Admittedly, to say that Scary Movie 4 is juvenile may simply seem redundant. It was meant to be, but had it been smartly written, it would still have managed to appeal to the lowest common denominator and still be funny.
The closest it comes to any real parody is with the President Bush and his delayed reaction to the announcement of the 9/11 attacks. The attempts to show Tom Cruise as an idiot also go way overboard (and it really shouldn't have been that hard), seeming to have come about because the movie had failed to reach its prescribed length.
What the creators of this film forget is that the stupid and the comic are not the same. Rather than merely blurring the lines between the two, Scary Movie 4 obliterates it with a laser gun. As a result, the humour is so inane that doing oneself bodily harm might seem like a happier alternative to staying through to the end.
Of course, if you had watched Scary Movie 3 and managed to find that one funny, then Scary Movie 4 might be your cup or tea, or in this case - urine. Alas the rest of us can simply clutch our chests in fright and hope that the Scary Movie zombie will never walk the earth again.
