Scary Movie V (2013)
Directed by: Malcolm D. Lee
Premise: A parody of recent horror films, primarily Paranormal Activity and Evil Dead.
What Works: It’s short.
What Doesn’t: The parody genre has been in trouble for a long time and its troubles trace back to 2000’s Scary Movie. That picture was a fun parody but the franchise and its knock offs deteriorated very quickly and resulted in disasters like Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, and Dance Flick. These movies were unfunny and incredibly lazy, often jamming as many cultural references as possible into the picture but without making any kind of sense. Scary Movie V does the same, making endless cultural references with no imagination. Like a lot of these films, the whole joke is built upon recognition but that’s as far as it goes. There’s no set up and no punch line, just a recreation of recognizable scenes from popular movies. Where this film is a bit worse than other spoof movies is in its utter disjointedness. Scary Movie V is barely a movie at all; it’s just a collection of random scenes. There is nothing holding the picture together—not a story, not consistent characters, not even a coherent motif—and every attempt at humor falls flat. The haphazardness of the movie reveals itself in the running time. Scary Movie V officially clocks in at eighty-six minutes but the end credits start rolling after just over an hour and are packed with bloopers and outtakes intended to inflate the running time of the movie to a feature length.
Bottom Line: The Scary Movie series and the spoof genre have been on the decline for some years but Scary Movie V represents a total collapse of this franchise and, along with A Haunted House, a new low for the genre.
Episode: #475 (January 26, 2014)