Review of Scary Movie 4 (2006) by Halfwelshman — 23 Sep 2012

David Zucker's second stab at a Scary Movie is about as hit-and-miss as his first attempt. Leslie Nielsen is still great (when was he not?), and his not too subtle moronic presidential parody of George W.

Bush has to deal with various threats to the planet from various Hollywood genres, with help from returning haphazard heroine Cindy (Anna Farris) and Craig Bierko, who's playing Tom Cruise from Spielberg's War of the Worlds.

Easily the funniest scene in the film is the prologue, which finds Dr Phil and Shaquille O'Neal imprisoned in the infamous Saw bathroom. All the J-Horror spoofs (dominated by The Grudge) are also executed pretty well, but like always with this series, when the humour becomes lazily crude and body function-obsessed, the film achieves more in terms of sheer annoyance than anything that actually makes you laugh.

I'm not saying Zucker is a dignified comedy genius lowering himself to depravity for the first time - Airplane and Naked gun were often very juvenile, but this kind of humour was well-timed and balanced with different kinds of jokes.

When a film only uses gross-out comedy to promote childish snickers, then it comes across as incredibly shallow and unmemorable. Thankfully, Scary Movie 4, like its predecessor, has a couple of memorable and funny sequences, but the big laughs are few and far between.