Scary Movie 4 (2006) Review

Scary Movie 4 (2006) Review

 

The same creative team from Scary Movie 3 returned for the next entry in the series, but I have to warn you right off the bat, this one is not as good as the last one. Is it any good at all, though? Well, let’s look at it for what it is. Even back when I was a kid and watched the first, second, third, and fourth movies back-to-back-to-back-to-back all in one night, all for the first time, I was pretty exhausted by the time I got to number four. For those of you who have made it this far, you might also feel Scary Movie fatigue by this point, but let’s dive into this spoof that’s just brimming with—well, it’s brimming with a lot.

The opening features two celebrities stuck in a Saw trap: Dr. Phil and Shaq (playing themselves). Somehow, Scary Movie 4 has even more celebrities and cameos than the last one. Cindy is back, of course, but Simon Rex didn’t want to come back for a big role, I guess, because he’s killed off, as is Charlie Sheen pretty early on, but Charlie’s demise is a super over-the-top sequence incited by an accidental overdose of Viagra. You know who is back, despite dying last time? Brenda! Who cares, nothing makes sense at this point. Cindy starts caring for an old woman in a haunted house and investigates a mystery surrounding a Japanese ghost child, while her neighbor, Tom, deals with alien invaders, and he becomes Cindy’s new love interest. Also returning is Leslie Nielsen as the President, who gets more great, hilarious scenes, including what might be the funniest part of the whole movie: when he uses a piece of alien technology incorrectly and evaporates the clothes off everyone in the United Nations.   

It’s worth considering how much the horror genre had changed since the late 90’s when the Scary Movie franchise had just started. The first movie was mainly a spoof of Scream, which itself was already taking meta-jabs at the horror genre (the slasher sub-genre in particular), but by 2006 horror movies were mainly all remakes and/or cheap garbage. There were some standouts, like the original Saw, though the majority of the material Scary Movie had to work with was not that great to begin with, and that’s a bit of a slippery slope. The jokes and humour don’t really hit the same when what’s being made fun of is already not very scary or entertaining.

Scary Movie 4 is stuffed to the gills with references, jokes, gags, and bits derived from the most popular genre movies of the day, but it tries to fit in too much. Interwoven are the plots of the first two Saw movies, War of the Worlds, The Grudge, The Village, and that’s just the horror stuff. They pile on scenes spoofing Million Dollar Baby, Brokeback Mountain, and even President Bush’s reaction to finding out about the 9/11 attacks. Unlike Scary Movie 2, a much larger portion of the jokes work, but it is similarly tiring after a point because there is just so much and it’s all taken so far—and yet, it seems they still cut out big chunks in editing, because King Kong was on the posters smoking a cigar, and you better believe that was the character on the poster who jumped out at me the most. I always wondered whatever happened to the lost Kong scenes. Forget the #Snydercut of Justice League, I want the #Kongcut of Scary Movie 4! The Unrated DVD cut is also funnier than the theatrical cut, but not as much of an improvement compared to the unrated cut for the third movie.

I’m not too sure what else to say at this point. Scary Movie 4 is still better and more watchable than the second movie, it’s debatably better than the original, but it’s just not as good as the third one. Still, if you have liked them so far, and enjoyed the third one especially, I recommend checking it out. It’s almost irrelevant to say it’s highly entertaining if you just want lots of dumb humour, because that’s what all of them are like, but there’s something about the volume of this one that makes it the dumbest in a specific way that's hard to describe. It was supposed to be the last one, but what ended up happening was it became so successful that the parody genre evolved into the “movie” genre, and a new abomination was born. There was Date Movie, Epic Movie, Superhero Movie, and Disaster Movie, which all aimed to spoof everything and anything from pop culture within the confines of different overarching genres, like Family Guy injected with Compound V (a little reference to The Boys for you there), and it became worn out real fast. Was Scary Movie 5 the final nail in the “movie” coffin? We’ll find out tomorrow.