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Acting
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Directing
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Story
Starring: Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Craig Bierko
Director: David Zucker
Running Time: 83 mins
Scary Movie 4 is an American film and the fourth in the Scary Movie series. With an army of supertall aliens ravaging the planet, Cindy, Brenda and their new friend Tom Ryan try to stay alive through the apocalypse.
The Scary Movie films are always a weird mixed bag of passably funny parody and messy, terrible comedy. I don’t hate any of these movies, but they’re a far cry from some of the best Hollywood parodies out there.
For the fourth time, Anna Faris stars with a likably ditzy performance at the heart of an occasionally enjoyably silly movie, but there’s not much else to it. If you’ve seen the first three Scary Movies, then this is pretty much the same all over again, albeit with a slightly higher production budget.
For the most part, Scary Movie 4 is a little less horror-focused in its parody than the past three movies. With the exception of Saw and The Ring, its main targets are War Of The Worlds and The Village, along with a variety of other references to pop culture from the mid-00s.
If you know the mid-00s like the back of your hand, then there are a good bunch of laughs here for you to enjoy, but 15 years on, Scary Movie 4 unfortunately feels just as outdated as many other parody films of the era.
As for the laughs, Scary Movie 4 has a couple, but the hit rate of its jokes is so low that it proves a really tiresome watch. Once you’ve pegged whichever movie they’re making fun, there’s not much else to laugh at, and the film really struggles to bring in any of its own jokes to fully entertain.
While the original Scary Movie kind of had its own story, this is a rather dull carbon copy of bits of different Hollywood movies, with little clever satire or parody to be seen anywhere. Again, it’s more of the same from a series that didn’t change much over time, and that’s why I’m giving Scary Movie 4 a 5.6 overall.
