Scary Movie 5 (2013)

[Flack]

If Scary Movie 4 was one film too many, Scary Movie 5 is... something far removed.

The film's opening parody features Charlie Sheen and Lindsey Lohan in a Paranormal Activity parody. Both actors make reference to their legal issues and sex tapes. While being attacked by a ghost, Sheen receives a call from his dealer, and when Lohan threatens to blow Sheen from across the room, he admits that sounds awesome. With each film the parodies seem to get shorter and shorter. The Exorcist parody in SM2 almost seemed like a mini-movie in and of itself. Here we get an extended joke that's not great and not long. It feels tacked on and unfinished.

The good news is Simon Rex is back, not as George, but this time as Dan. The bad news is his wife is Jody, played by Ashley Tisdale. In the films opening they adopt Charlie Sheen's lost feral children which are discovered hiding in a cabin in the woods by Snoop Dogg and Mac Miller. (This sounds like the beginning to a joke.) More comedians like Jerry O'Connell, Molly Shannon, Darrell Hammond, Jasmine Guy, Terry Crew and others join the cast in an attempt to make something happen here. What's missing, however, are Cindy (Faris) and Brenda (Hall). While SM5 features a few returning actors, there are no returning characters and this film is a stand alone in the series.

The film largely parodies Paranormal Activity intertwined with Black Swan and Planet of the Apes and short detours along the way into 50 Shades of Gray and Evil Dead. The film features a narrator (Josh Robert Thompson doing a Morgan Freeman impersonation), mostly, I assume, to make sense of the patched together, confusing plot.

I have the least to say about this one because, quite frankly, it's fairly unwatchable. It's possible a Paranormal Activity parody might work, but the Planet of the Apes stuff is weird and the Black Swan stuff is terrible and way too long. Ashley Tisdale is downright awful, as is most of the cast. The film's 75-minute running time feels like hours, maybe even days. It's bad, bad, bad. I spent most of the movie wishing Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan were back and the movie was about them.

This is listed as one of the funniest scenes in the movie. I'll put it here because I need something.



On Rotten Tomatoes, this film has a 4% approval rating. The Washington Post gave it 0 stars. My favorite quote I found regarding the film was: "It was just a bad movie. Believe me. Don’t bother going to see that movie. Or renting it, or anything. It’s not worth your time." That was by the director, Malcolm D. Lee.

The problem with discussing Scary Movie as a franchise it that it's literally three separate things crammed into five films. Films one and two are Wayans brother productions (starring and directed by). They're full of R-rated gags, and are good but not great films. Then you have movies three and four, directed by David Zucker that take the parodies and mix them with Airplane-style humor that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. All of these films are uneven and imperfect, but manage to bring big laughs in at least a few scenes. The series (mercifully) ends with Scary Movie 5, a film that takes all the worst ideas from the previous movies and drops the only two characters that held things together. It's a failure of a film and, unsurprisingly, the last in the franchise.

OR IS IT? (Yes, it is.)

[AArdvark]

I believe I saw the first half of Scary Movie 1. Since I never saw Scream I didn't get some (most) of the references. I didn't know there were five movies in the franchise and thanks to these reviews I don't need to actually watch them. I know a movie buff at work who might bring these up in conversation and I'll be able to fake it instead of telling him I don't watch movies or tv