Scary Movie 5

Increasingly becoming the most difficult genre in Hollywood, the opinionated world of comedy will never please everyone, and whilst the Scary Movie franchise has never been famous for highbrow humour it certainly divides audiences in its popularity. With new comer director Malcom D. Lee at the helm, comedy legend David Zucker is in the writing seat making a change to the previous two instalments that he directed. Despite these changes, Scary Movie 5 shows to be just as humorously awful as its predecessors depending solely on pop culture references to carry each waffling gag.

  

With its poignant feature of horror parody being this year’s disappointing ‘Mama’, the fifth instalment of this debatably dying series

had a fair amount of potential with seven years since the previous instalment to make of. Instead however it prefers to bow down to pop culture, inserting countless references to irrelevant films, music and even books with an extremely unfunny reference to ‘Fifty Shades Of Grey’ as well as dismal cameos from a number of musicians; proceeding to prove that they can’t act, with musician ‘Mac Miller’ providing a diabolical performance with no redeeming qualities. The narrative is as loose as ever, allowing for a handful of nonsensical yet hilarious jokes to be slotted in, as we follow Jody (Ashley Tisdale) and Dan (Simon Rex) who adopt the children of a deceased relative and take them back to their house of paranormal activity whilst Jody continues her aspirations to be the black swan. The amount of references is certainly overwhelming and unnecessary as funnier jokes could’ve been made had there been more focus, however this isn’t to say that they all flop with the reference to the, now dated, inception being one of notable hilarity.  The crutch of pop culture is annoyingly shoehorned into sequences that would have been funnier without its presence, with ultimately the funniest scenes appearing out of nowhere in the form of a bizarre occurrence or a simple inappropriate outburst.

With a knowingly immature fan base the jokes appeal to the slim demographic that find a ‘punch in the face’ to be comedy gold with jokes similar to this being repeated throughout to varying degrees of success. Fans of this humour will bathe in its utter ridiculousness with the knowing of its dampened quality in comparison to its predecessors however lovers of high-brow comedy will recoil in horror, with this film being as scarily bad as some of the best horror films, most notably in the field of acting.

Never has this franchise prized itself on its ‘fantastic performances’, however a certain expectancy of at least a GCSE pass in the subject of Drama is constantly desired and with the lead actress Ashley Tisdale at the helm of course this quality is never delivered, with her performance being as lazy and unimpressive as a bed with no mattress. Her comedic timing is utterly useless, picking up on features of the film that the franchise ‘prides itself on’ (i.e- Random, nonsensical occurrences), constantly putting a downer on the already partially deflated film. The comedy prowess of Anna Farris was desperately missed, with her dippy screen caricature being a source of comedy in itself in the previous 4 instalments.

With an unbalanced ratio of infrequent moments of hilarity to frequent moments of tumbleweed, Scary Movie 5 shows to be by far the weakest film of the dying franchise. Once showing genuine intelligence and humour this franchise is in danger of cinematic death relying too heavily on highly irrelevant pop culture references as well as puerile sight gags to aid its way through the film. Moments of comedy are scarce but are undoubtedly funny when they eventually emerge from the depths of pop culture that consumes this film in smoke.

3/10- Lovers of nonsensical parodies will enjoy occasional laughs, but inconsistent references delivered with awful performances leave for a low-brow slap in the face.

Calum Russell