What is scary about "Scary Movie 5" is that people actually thought it would be a good idea to make it. Though a satire of horror movies, the film is hardly ever funny. In fact, its most effective jokes are at best capable of drawing mildly irritated smirks from audience members, but certainly not laughs. While the "Scary Movie" franchise could never be considered exemplary filmmaking, its fifth installment is by far the worst.
As with the other entries in the series, "Scary Movie 5" features parodies of multiple films weaved together within a convoluted storyline populated by idiotic characters. This time, the plot deals with a couple adopting Charlie Sheen's kids who are being haunted by "Mama." The problem is that the makers of this fifth outing for the franchise apparently forgot what the concept of satire truly means. Instead of cleverly incorporating film references into the story and putting their own twist on familiar situations, they thought it would be funny to simply include characters and ideas from other movies at random points in their own film.
One would think that writers Pat Proft and David Zucker, who were behind the "Naked Gun" films and numerous other classic comedies, would do better than this dreck. One would also assume director Malcolm D. Lee, who's no stranger to helming box office smashes, would actually know how to make a good movie. This effort is utterly deplorable, featuring absurd physical comedy and lowbrow humor, neither of which was humorous.
The quality of the movie was so poor that the audio often didn't match the actors' lip movements. Maybe there was a last-minute decision to get a PG-13 rating by cleaning up the language, or maybe the filmmakers just stopped caring.
There's absolutely no reason to see this movie. Even fans of the previous "Scary Movie" films would get nothing positive out of the experience of watching it. It's so bad that the franchise could very well be dead because of its release, and perhaps it should be. What would really be scary is if another film like "Scary Movie 5" is produced.
The Setonian gives this 1 out of 5 stars.
Sean Quinn can be reached at sean.quinn@student.shu.edu.
