The Scary Movie Franchise

A Partially Educated Look At The Scary Movie Franchise

The Cinematic Equivalent of Waterboarding

There should be a rule when it comes to spoof movies; you can only spoof films that your film is better than. You may be thinking "but that would mean they'd never release any spoof movies". Isn't that a wonderful thought?

There's no point reviewing each film in the Scary Movie franchise individually, because you can pretty much say the same thing about all of them. None of them are good, with the level of bad being the only thing that varies. The franchise itself has a lot to answer for. For starters, the original film was responsible for producing a Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer script, something that should have been outlawed after Spy Hard. The success of that film convinced Friedberg and Seltzer to direct the likes of Epic Movie and Disaster Movie. Arguably those films are the bigger affront to humour, but they wouldn't even exist without this franchise.

The series began under the control of the Wayans brothers, with Keenen Ivory Wayans assuming directorial duties. These were the days before White Chicks and Little Man though, so alarm bells weren't immediately sounding. In fact, I remember Scary Movie coming out and the huge levels of hype that were around it. People were excited and wanted to see this film, while myself and my friends cursed when we found out it was an 18 and realised we'd have to wait for a rental release. In the eyes of a 13-year old boy, this was to be the movie event of the year along with X-Men and Kevin & Perry Go Large. Fast forward to a later time when I was, of course, of the legal age to watch it. I'd seen X-Men. I'd seen Kevin & Perry Go Large. It was time to complete the trilogy, as Scary Movie arrived. An hour and a half later; meh. Not "well that was shit". Just meh.

The first film is, by and large, average. There's some bits that make you laugh, there's a lot of bits that don't. It's similar for Scary Movie 3, meaning that if you do feel the urge to watch one of these films, those are the two to go for. Though if you're getting urges to watch these films and you are above the legal age to do so, may I suggest lobotomisation as a better option for both yourself and society as a whole.

It's in the other three films that the real crap lies. Again, they're not all completely dry on the laugh-count. Scary Movie 2 has two laughs, as does Scary Movie 4, although it milks one of them dry and so ruins it. Let's face it though, if all you're able to produce is two laughs in an hour and a half comedy, you should have never been allowed to make the film. The sickener here is that Scary Movies 3 and 4 were both directed by David Zucker; one of the minds behind Airplane and The Naked Gun. This explains how Leslie Nielsen got involved, but it doesn't explain why either thought it was a good idea. However, any suggestion that Zucker was simply being saddled with a bad script is entirely negated by last year's arrival of Scary Movie 5.

The fifth (and please let it be final) instalment of the franchise is the absolute nadir, reaching Disaster Movie levels of annoyance. It cements the fact that Zucker has completely lost it, as he steps aside from directing and sullies himself as a writer instead, and is a film so bad that even Anna Faris didn't return to be in it. Instead, we get an opening cameo with Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen going all self-referential on us and forgetting to have any dignity, charisma or knowledge of comic-timing whilst doing it. This then leads to Ashley Tisdale taking over from Faris as series lead. I've never seen Tisdale in anything else and after Scary Movie 5, I don't WANT to see her in anything else. Her screen presence is so irritating that she's giving Paris Hilton in House Of Wax a run for her money and there's no skewering scene to make up for it.

Over 13 years and 5 films, the franchise has spoofed the likes of Scream, The Exorcist and that most well-known of horror films War Of The Worlds. It has, on occasion, also decided to spoof films that it has some chance of gaining credibility against, with The Grudge and The Village serving as the main targets in the fourth instalment. Even when it is spoofing awful films such as these, it manages to make them look like masterpieces, purely on the basis of just how much better they are than the film that is trying to mock them. The franchise could have been intelligent, sending up a genre that is ripe for the picking, but instead the whole thing feels pettily inept and slightly pathetic.

Scary Movie TWO out of five

Scary Movie 2 ONE out of five

Scary Movie 3 TWO out of five

Scary Movie 4 ONE out of five

Scary Movie 5 ONE out of five

Next time (5th June)

Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the milking of another bad idea!