Scary Movie 4

The Scary Movie franchise has grown fresher and more interesting since the departure of the Wayans Brothers but it continues to bumble along providing lowbrow physical humor and implied off color jokes. David Zucker has been providing more or less consistent broad slapstick humor since 1980’s Airplane!, and he and Leslie Nielsen don’t seem to be slowing down yet. The problem is not that Scary Movie was not silly or funny or rude, it was all of these things. It is that this is a Sunday afternoon four dollar movie that exists in a time when you can’t go to the movies for less than 8 or 9 dollars. Thus even when the actors and directors deliver a comedy that takes little concentration but provides an enjoyably schlocky ride the audience feels jipped.

Box office receipts have been suffering mightily for the past few years and Scary Movie 4 is a perfect example of why. Though Scary Movie 4 is eminently watch-able for the kind of film it is, there is no room for it to do well in theatrical release. Why spend $9.50 to see Scary Movie 4 the day it comes out and be mildly entertained when you can wait two months and but it on DVD for $14 or less than the price to see it with your best friend. Then you and all of your pals can sit and hoot and enjoy the film without feeling ripped off. Or you can wait another month or two and rent it on pay-per-view for only $5.

Especially with films that are geared towards the younger generation the current film distribution system just doesn’t get it. Just because a film may be filled with stupid humor doesn’t mean that its audience is stupid. Teens know how far their dollars will go and they are just as willing as adults to hold onto them until something worthwhile comes along. Until this current model is rectified fewer and fewer films are going to attain blockbuster status and turn a profit at the box office. And smaller films, even ones with built-in audiences like Scary Movie 4 will suffer for it. The exorbitant prices of films nowadays and the subsequent cost of movie tickets are changing the face of the box office. Perhaps this begs the biggest question: Why does a movie that costs 180 million dollars to make cost the same amount to see as a 30 million dollar film?

The biggest joke The Scary movie franchise has always offered is that they are PG-13 films, which are geared towards individuals right near that target age. But though they contain a significant amount of humor geared toward a teenage crowd they draw the bulk of their material from a number of horror films with R ratings that its target audience can’t legitimately see. Where Scary Movie 3 drew from Signs and The Ring, Scary Movie 4 concentrates on combining the major plot elements from Saw, The Grudge, War of the Worlds, and The Village.

The premise of the film is slight. Anna Farris is a girl who loses her friend and her boyfriend and goes to take care of an elderly woman in a scary haunted house ala The Grudge. It just happens to be next to a home owned by Craig Bierko’s loser dock worker and his two estranged kids circa War of the Worlds. When the Tr-iPods appear and start disintegrating people the two stories come together as they work to save the world. The film features many cameos most notable of which is a Saw related scene of Dr. Phil and Shaquille O’Neil chained in a creepy room. Perhaps the stories in Scary Movie 3 worked together a little better but there is sufficient visual material to work with between these films.

All of the Scary Movie franchisees have relied heavily on M Night Shyamalan films which I can only suppose is because though the films have not all been widely watched, they contain significant visual elements which are easy to broadly lampoon. Here we get the ugly scary monsters, the quaint throwback community, Chris Elliot as the mentally handicapped troublemaker, and surprisingly Carmen Elektra as the wandering blind girl. Everything from the period dress to the yellow capes presented a vivid but surreal fantasy land in The Village and it serves Zucker here as a simple framework to play with.

Overall there was nothing wrong with this film though Scary Movie 3 worked the material a little better. The actors are again overzealous and eager to schill for laughs. By now the material is well known. Even if you haven’t seen War of the Worlds or Saw or The Grudge the genres and the major scenes and actors are well enough known to get most of these broad jokes. The question is: Is there room at the theater for B films when there is only a big budget ticket price? See this one as a matinee if at all. Amusing, but it can wait for video.