So…A spoof sequel really isn’t a helpful concept. Sequels to spoofs usually just do their own thing, picking up new movies to mock, within a loosey-similar genre framework. The only spoof series to have anything like an arc is The Naked Gun, and that’s simply seeing Lt. Frank Drebin get together with Elvis Presley’s ex-wife. The only truly repetitive spoof sequel is Airplane II: The Sequel, which simply sees fit to repeat 128 of Airplane!’s jokes, and add 10 new ones of its own.
Then there’s Scary Movie 4, which finds its own way to be a sequel.
“Spoofs of horror movies.” By 2006, this framework oughta be plenty, what with the rise of torture pornography and nouveau exploitation. That’s something easily mockable right there! Then there’s the remake machine, which was still kicking into gear, though I’m not sure how a David Zucker movie could lampoon those. A Scary Movie remake is not a rabbit’s hole I want to contemplate.
But for all Scary Movie 4 could’ve done, it instead actually found a strict formula embedded solely within Scary Movie 3: Confusedly mash-up one part American remake of a Jal-horror picture, one part recent alien invasion blockbuster, and if neither of the above is an M. Night Shyamalan movie, toss in one of his too. And plop on a fourth movie as well, just to be safe.
Here’s what the 2006 edition gives us:
Jal-horror remake: The Grudge
Alien blockbuster: War of the Worlds
Shyamalan feces: The Village
The other one: Saw
Okay, so given this very specific parodic conception, the most we can expect of Scary Movie 4 is to be Scary Movie 3. In that sense, it’d be superior to 3 only if you happen to prefer that roster of targets over 3’s Signs, The Ring, The Matrix, 8 Mile. (Yeah, “scary movies” no longer play a part in the series, but I’m past bitching about that.) Yet somehow the makers of Scary Movie 4 – same as 3, David Zucker, with writers Pat Proft and Craig Mazin, with now Jim “Hot Shots!” Abrahams tossed in – fumble a ball you’d think unfumblable.
4 simply lacks the enthusiasm that apparently went into 3, the enthusiasm to salvage an abandoned body function franchise. The style here is basically the same as before, but things are a little off. The joke density is down, which is the largest possible failing in a Zucker movie. In its place, Scary Movie 4 actually embraces what was one of 3’s less endearing traits: Its occasional scenes of loud, frantic flailing. I’m thinking of scenes like a multi-minute attempt at corpse resuscitation, delivered as broad and incoherent slapstick. There are a lot more of these moments in Scary Movie 4, and they’re the furthest possible thing from deadpan – and without the deadpan, Zucker’s direction just doesn’t work.
As a demonstrative example, Cindy Campbell (Anna Farris, sexy and funny even when doing things like the above pic) is the caretaker of a catatonic old woman (such a challenging role, they got actual Young Frankenstein veteran Cloris Leachman to lie still for ‘em). Cindy is a neglectful nurse, and at one stage she shoves the woman’s head in an open fan so she (Cindy) can have a conversation with somebody else. Okay, fine. One pictures Airplane! would’ve treated the poor lady’s physical torture as a semi-subtle background gag, as our leads remain ignorant. Look to Airplane!’s sick little girl for a precise parallel. In the Scary Movie 4 mode, instead we get awkwardly edited close-ups of Leachman, so the scalping is the only thing we can notice. Oh, and the fan is ridiculously loud. Cindy’s conversation is ridiculously loud. The catatonic Leachman’s wails of pain are ridiculously loud. It’s all mightily overpowering, not trusting us to get the joke on our own.
God, I can’t imagine reading joke deconstruction is very much fun for you! Well, the same basic frantic, frenetic frenzy of frightful flailing reoccurs throughout the picture. Working from memory of a movie my brain is actively struggling to flush away, we also get –
• Sticking with Leachman, a sponge bath in her own urine.
• Tom Cruise stand-in Tom Ryan (Craig Bierko) mishandles industrial cranes, loosening multitudes of baboons.
• President Leslie Nielsen replays Bush’s kindergarten dismissal of the ongoing 9/11 attacks, and utilizes it to send schoolchildren into a directionless riot.
• Nielsen later invents a clothes-removing machine (good evidence War of the Worlds wasn’t the goldmine of untapped humor Zucker may have wished). He deploys it upon the UN, resulting in a fracases of undulating elderly flesh.
• In a one-minute attempt to “deconstruct” the otherwise ignored zombie craze (28 Days Later..., Dawn of the Dead, FUNCTIONAL satire Shaun of the Dead), two characters beat up the poor and the hungry.
• Charlie Sheen gulps down an entire bottle of Viagra, and a cat angrily attacks his raging erection…Actually, this one might be a true story.
• When the time comes to mock The Village, Zucker simply has every extra panic and run randomly at once, enduring head-bonks.
It goes without saying that the scenes recreating the widespread devastation and chaos of War of the Worlds are equally frenetic, but it seems a little more apropos there.
I am reminded of the underwhelming “Futurama” episode “That’s Lobstertainment,” where a washed-up hack comedian director advises his extras to throw pies and act like monkeys. And that was a satire of this mentality!
This is the chief flaw of Scary Movie 4, but it speaks of another major issue: There aren’t many clever jokes available, hence necessitating lunacy. Scary Movie 4 reverts to the scatological fixation which somewhat defined the first two Scary Movies, but without the R-rating to actually take advantage of that fact. And it seems damn near every joke at the expense of a preexisting movie concerns a bodily function. Recall the thunder strikes from War of the Worlds? (Probably not.) Now it’s the clouds farting! The alien ships’ (or triPods –uh hyuh hyuh har!) openings? Anuses! Their mechanical probe? It humps a vacuum cleaner! And that Billy puppet from Saw now has sex, while Jigsaw shoves things up the butt. It took middle-aged men to write this stuff.
It used to be that skewed anti-logic was the name of the ZAZ game. Just select your favorite Airplane! quote as an example. The closest Scary Movie 4 gets to that apex is as follows:
“Last night I saw a face.”
“Did it have a nose?”
“Yes.”
Would you like me to delve into why that exchange is comedically deficient? Neither would I. Though it comes early in the movie, while a little cleverness and energy still remain. As we reach the back half, dialogue reverts into genuine vulgarity, of the most juvenile sort possible:
“Pee pee! Pee pee vagina!”
Actually, one minute after that nadir, we get a moment which suggests Zucker is still capable of delivering wit. In The Village, a tribunal debates the merits of contractions. “I’m for that.” “I am against it.” What’s telling is that on the DVD commentary (yeah, I’m listening to that now), the writers cite that as the joke no one gets – funny, it’s the one I laughed hardest at. This is why we don’t get more genuine efforts at cleverness, because audiences are no longer conditioned to expect it. Instead, to apologize for that uncharacteristic flash of intelligence, we get Carmen Electra entering a church and shitting in, on and around a pew, for at least a minute. I’m starting to hate the MPAA.
There are a couple more egregious flaws. One of those is endemic to the whole of mainstream spoofery today, so I shan’t dwell upon it for long: Popular movies are referenced as if by a checklist, with no pertinence to the context. Hence a mockery of the popular horror movies Brokeback Mountain and Million Dollar Baby.
The Brokeback buffoonery in particular highlights another semi-flaw (not one of the major ones): Time, topicality, and the shrinking window of parody. Thanks to TV and the deathless scourge that is the Internet, Brokeback parodies were old hat under a month after its release. Pity poor cinema-limited Scary Movie 4, which then has to try doing something of value with the remaining pickings several months later, under a regimented parody formula.
No, the other major flaw gets us back to my original assertion, that Scary Movie 4 is a spoof sequel in a very specific, bizarre way. Would you believe continuity is an issue here?…But only with Scary Movie 3, which itself never cared a whit for its forebears. So in answer to questions nobody asked, one-off scenes tell us what happened to characters from last time, like George and Cody and Tom (a different Tom, not Bierko’s Tom). They’ve died, mostly. And Anthony Anderson and Kevin Hart are back reprising their roles and gags from 3, not because there’s any point in it, but just because it was effective once. This is a common sequel malady, slavishly copying the past. It’s disconcerting to see it in a spoof, though.
At least the return of Brenda Meeks (the invaluable Regina Hall) is dismissed in a jokey bit of anti-narrative – recall that she died in Part Three, then ignore it because they flat out don’t need an excuse. This is Scary Movie S.O.P., like the movie-ending gags about automotive assault, and it’s welcome simply as a consistent meta element.
Meanwhile, it’s now 2011, last I checked, and we’ve somehow lasted five whole years without a Scary Movie 5 to remind us that people fart, defecate and go wee-wee. There’s still occasional talk of a 5 coming about, with nothing evidently coming of it – though if it should happen, it’ll be a fast enough turnaround we’ll barely even realize what’s happened. (Some arguments have it Mazin’s Superhero Movie was conceived as 5, before they realized they were straying just too far from “scary movies.”) Image search reveals a whole lot of awful poster ideas, which is about par for the course. And what to mock? Well, Paranormal Activity, obviously, alongside something called horror in only the most tenuous way – say, Avatar. Also something wholly inappropriate, like The King’s Speech. Too bad the highly deserving Twilight films are already damaged goods, having been movie-raped by those nogoodniks Seltzer and Friedberg in Vampires Suck.
Ugh, Seltzer and Friedberg! That’s my next stop in this continuum (after a brief Fast Five stopover, because I cannot control release dates). And in the absence of any Scary Movies, that surely indicates we’re in a parched No Man’s Land devoid of good parody today. Favoring optimism, I’ll say that’s not entirely true. It’s just that most movies utilizing the Airplane! approach are lousy – that is, mainstream efforts marketed to tweenagers. For anyone wanting more satisfying pastiche, there’s smaller spoofs of more obscure flicks – things like Black Dynamite and The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. Then there’s Edgar Wright’s homages, like Hot Fuzz and the afore-linked Shaun, which are so beyond Airplane! they’re actually functional movies on their own. Yes, I gotta keep these “happy places” in my mind as I prepare for the comic self-sodomy that shall be Date Movie and all those other travesties it engendered…
RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 Scary Movie (2000)
• No. 2 Scary Movie 2 (2001)
• No. 3 Scary Movie 3 (2003)
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