Scary Movie 4

I was not a fan of the first two Scary Movie installments. I like Keenen Ivory Wayans every now and then, but he got a little too sick with those films, and the jokes were worn out. David Zucker, master of Airplane! and The Naked Gun, took over the franchise with Scary Movie 3, and does so again with the latest chapter, Scary Movie 4. The results are more of the same: some dud jokes sprinkled with decent gutbusters. Somebody gave Zucker pretty big bank to make his spoofs of The Village, The Grudge and especially War of the Worlds look authentic, and the screenwriters mine those films for some good chuckles. Anna Faris returns in the lead, and she gets plenty of laughs as the clueless heroine. The spoofs of War of the Worlds look especially good, with some nice work going into the special effects. (Writer’s note: In my long review for this film, I said Cloris Leachman spoofed the elderly woman from The Ring. It was actually The Grudge. I got my Japanese horror remakes mixed up.)