Review of Scary Movie 3 (2003) by Halfwelshman — 23 Sep 2012

With the third film in the Scary Movie franchise, David Zucker adds a certain level of competence to proceedings, the addition of Leslie Nielsen is always a positive, and Charlie Sheen playing Mel Gibson's character from Signs is a stroke of comedy genius.

The film just about hits the good joke quota, and Anna Farris is still mildly amusing and gets the job done reprising her ditsy lead role. The best film parody is 8 Mile (which incorporates a certain egotistical British talent judge playing himself) which is a bit odd considering the film is a "Scary Movie".

All the film spoofs are pretty well executed, probably slicker than they ever have been in this series, and in much of Zucker's own career, though it's a bit odd that so few of the parodies relate directly to the horror genre.

The whole film still never quite comes together - some of the gags fall flat, and some of it is just plain embarrassing, and not in an intentionally hilarious way. While the vast majority of the jokes and parodies will at least raise a smile, Scary Movie 3's main achievement is unfortunately reminding you how good David Zucker used to be, but no longer is.

His current work can still loosely be classed as comedy, so at least he's doing a bit better than his early writing partners, brother Jerry and Jim Abrahams, but David must still be pining for the good old days of Airplane!, Naked Gun and even BASEketball.