Scary Movie V Reviews

With little care put into its coherence, the fifth Scary Movie is a rotten mess that trades in legitimate laughs for poorly executed lampoons of modern culture. With major plot points based on Mama, a movie released just three months previous, and Evil Dead, released just one week before, Scary Movie V isn’t a film so much as an art piece cobbled together from scores of reshoots. The fact that somehow a plot survived through it all is a miracle. Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan start off the film with a punishingly bad round of jokes about themselves as they’re about to get it on. Just when they get under the covers, the movie cuts to an alternate take in which Lohan is walking to the bed and Charlie is humping the cushions alone. Yes, there’s a joke in there, but the confused editing throws things off. Thankfully, there’s a Benny Hill-style gag right afterwards that is kind of funny, and it sets the tone for the many sped-up gags throughout the movie. Needless to say, Charlie’s cameo runs its course and his brother (Simon Rex) and his wife (Ashley Tisdale) are forced to adopt Charlie’s three children, who are haunted by a demonic spirit. The couple’s idyllic suburban home is soon overrun with falling pots, poop gags, and a vacuum cleaner that throws raging parties at night. The madness that erupts from cutting from one half-cooked joke to another has a curious effect that’s not unlike staring at a traffic accident. The thing is, for every 20 jokes that Scary Movie V misses on, one ridiculous gag will shine through. This makes for a dreadful batting average for the film, but at the very least, it might provide a challenge for someone to make a three-minute supercut of only the funny parts. Though comedic heavyweights David Zucker and Pat Proft (The Naked Gun, Hot Shots!) are credited as the writers, one has to wonder how involved they were given the schizophrenic nature of the production. Director Malcolm D. Lee doesn’t help things too much behind the camera -- with the exception of his parody of Evil Dead, which features more of that series’ style than the bloody and misguided reboot. That, at least, deserves a round of applause.