Scary Movie 5 (2013) Review

Scary Movie 5 (2013) Review

 

I need to be direct: Scary Movie 5 is bad. Not kind of bad, not really bad, it is purely bad. I could use a number of synonyms and/or expletives to further emphasize just how bad, but instead I’ll get to why I thought this. I did not laugh once for the entire runtime. At the 20 minute mark I started working on this review, unsure if I could sit through the whole thing. It’s not even a case of bad comedic timing. There is no comedic timing. Every “joke” completely misses the mark or lands flat on its face. It’s one chaotic, humourless scene after another. The actors completely phone it in, and the opening scene follows the usual formula, featuring two celebrities in an over-the-top recreation of the most famous horror movie of the moment. Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen hook up to make a sex tape, and some paranormal activity occurs. If you’ve been keeping up with the series thus far, it makes for a rather confusing intro. Let me explain.

Charlie Sheen was in Scary Movie 3 and 4, and he played a character named Tom Logan who was a spoof of Mel Gibson’s character from Signs. This time, though, Charlie is playing a fictional version of himself. Let’s not forget that his reputation in 2013 was a lot different than in the mid-2000’s (remember the whole “tiger blood” and “winning” thing?), as was Lindsay Lohan’s, who also plays herself. Both of them look unwell. Like, for real. They play themselves in a bit of a self-deprecating way, but mostly it just makes you realize how desperate they both were when this movie was made and comes off as incredibly cringe-worthy.

It gets more confusing after the intro, though, when Simon Rex shows up as Dan, a different character from Tom’s brother George who he played in Scary Movie 3 and 4, but his character is still the brother of Charlie Sheen. So now he’s a fictional brother of a fictional version of a real actor? It’s stupidly convoluted, and confirms that the reason this movie was branded as Scary Movie 5 was purely to trick fans of the previous ones to watch it. There is no continuity with anything that happened before. It’s not like there was much continuity to begin with, but this is really deplorable, and I’m glad I skipped seeing this fifth one when it first came out, because it is a far cry from the other sequels, and this is coming from someone who actually likes the majority of them.  

As I said, everyone phones it in, with perhaps the one exception being Ashely Tisdale, who had the impossible task of trying to replace Anna Faris/Cindy Campbell and be the film’s new funny female lead. Her comedic timing is nothing like that of Faris’ but no comedian could have salvaged this garbage anyway. Faris and Regina Hall (who played Brenda in all four movies before this) were smart to stay away from this fifth entry. A few other celebrities embarrass themselves by making appearances, including Snoop Dogg, Terry Crews, and Jerry O’Connell, but most embarrassing of all? David Zucker and Pat Proft were credited as the screenwriters. They wrote Scary Movie 3 and 4, so I don’t know if they just dumped all their rejected jokes and worst ideas into this script and called it a day or if the new director and/or actors just mishandled their material—or both, most likely.

One of the worst fads of the horror genre in the 2000’s and early 2010’s was the boom in found footage films, and that serves as one of the main sources of—yikes, I almost said sources of inspiration, that isn’t right, there is nothing inspired about this thing. Paranormal Activity is one of the main sources for Scary Movie 5 to rip off and exploit with its attempted humour, and it is instantly off-putting, whether you liked Paranormal Activity or not (I did not, for the record). It's really strange to see scenes throughout the movie that harken back to funny moments from previous Scary Movie sequels, only they are not funny this time. The price tag on this one was half that of Scary Movie 4’s, so it makes sense that it looks comparatively cheaper, but it looks and feels cheaper than any of the movies before it, and not just because of the crappy found footage aspect. The effects have no charm, even when they’re supposed to look bad on purpose to be funny.

What are the movies being spoofed this time? Well, I already mentioned Paranormal Activity, and as we saw in the previous Scary Movie sequels, they like to pile on more and more spoofing sources with each new one, so it’s no surprise that this time they once again go for quantity over quality in this regard. Insidious, Mama, Cabin in the Woods, Evil Dead, and Black Swan are some of the main horror ones. You probably won’t even remember half of the movies they reference, even if you’ve seen them and you’re a big horror fan. The horror genre was in too sad of a state in the early 2010’s to even be worth spoofing in the first place, and yet they did it anyway just to try to make an easy buck.

But then, like the non-Scary Movie spoof movies of this era, they reference every pop culture thing imaginable, including stuff outside of the horror genre. There’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Inception, Fifty Shades of Grey, and even Tyler Perry’s Madea films. This premise had everything going against it because it was already so worn out, so it really didn’t matter what movies they picked to spoof, but with the glut of movies and TV shows and pop culture phenomenon’s they could have picked from, some of these make it feel the most dated of all five films in the franchise, and that’s an accidental feat I didn’t expect Scary Movie 5 to achieve. You would have thought the original would be the most dated by this point because it’s the oldest, but it at least had some focus by mainly sticking to the Scream formula. Scary Movie 5 comes off like a bizarre, scatterbrained experiment, or like some collection of YouTube shorts, or some Frankenstein’s monster of a spoof film that should not exist.

The racist, sexist, and homophobic jokes in the previous films were already outdated and unfunny, but somehow the ones in 5 come off as even more dated, more ill-timed, and more pathetic than ever before. It’s like when a little kid keeps screaming something annoying after having been told to stop and they think it’s even funnier to keep doing it and be more provocative in the most aggravating way possible. I actually did stick it out to the end, and I discovered the ending happens well before the 80 minute mark, so why is the runtime 86 minutes? Because of all the bloopers and outtakes during the credits! Of course, they couldn’t resist padding out the runtime with that old trick. The post-credit scene confirms that the whole movie was a dream, which would normally undermine any other movie, but in this case, it doesn’t even matter.

Scary Movie 5 is intolerably obnoxious, aggressively unfunny, and a pathetic end to a five-part-franchise that should have remained a trilogy (oh God, please don’t let there be a Scary Movie 6…). I don’t think I would have even enjoyed it as a kid. It makes Scary Movie 2 look like The Naked Gun. There is not a single redeeming factor about it, not one iota of intelligence or creativity in it, and not one funny joke. It probably isn’t the worst movie made in the 2010’s, but it is definitely in the top three worst movies I’ve seen from that decade. Do not even entertain the idea of watching it.