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75About five times as funny as "Scary Movie 3."
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70The sort of movie you like in spite of yourself, Scary Movie 4 is obvious and dumb, but it possesses such a giddy, good-hearted spirit that even its terrible jokes (and there are tons) get by on something resembling charm.
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67This a rapid-fire romp through "War of the Worlds," "Saw," "The Grudge" and "The Village," cut up into skits and pieced back together in some mutant jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing, delivers a barrage of low-minded gags with high-spirited energy.
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67Anna Faris, her deadpan comic timing still a joy to watch, returns as Cindy Campbell, one of two main holdovers from the first three movies.
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63There are plenty of chuckles at the expense of Dr. Phil, Shaquille O'Neal, Carmen Electra, Charlie Sheen and series stalwart Leslie Nielsen. But with no comic carryover from one skit to the next, true belly laughs are few and far between.
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63Writing, casting and pacing are vital. Scary Movie 4 doesn't let any gag get stale. It's rapid-fire, hit-and-miss and hit-and-strike comedy.
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58And as ever, the jokes are a jumble of the gross, the baggy, the raunchy, the mistimed, and - every once in a while - the refreshingly incorrect.
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50The humor emphasizes quantity over quality, but the batting average isn't too bad. And where else can you witness Leslie Nielsen do a nude scene?
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50Shaquille O'Neal and Dr. Phil open Scary Movie 4 with an achingly unfunny couple of minutes of severed limbs and errant hoop shots.
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50But for those jonesing for a loosely connected string of comedy sketches, heavy on the scatological humor, this is the fix.
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50To go with the good, there's plenty of bad, and it comes in the form of countless gags that misfire, far too much flatulence and urine, and (God help us) a buck naked Leslie Nielsen. Admittedly, that scene certainly puts the "scary" in Scary Movie 4.
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The jokes miss more than they hit, but there are a lot of them, and when they work, it's gold.
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The fun of Scary Movie 4 is that it isn't a movie at all. Organized on the principle of parody, not plot, driven by gags and cultural feedback, it's an exercise in lowbrow postmodernism, a movie-movie contraption more nuts than Charlie Kaufman's gnarliest fever dream. It's cleverly stupid.
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50The best parts come in the rare moments when the film decides to break from formula, as when old Zucker-team warhorse Leslie Nielsen returns as the U.S. President.
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40The series has turned into the cinematic equivalent of a flat bicycle tyre – it starts off with lots of air in it, but can quickly go flat when punctured.
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40Scary Movie 4 finds horror parody overshadowed by ho-hum groin blows, C-list celebrity cameos, slapstick child abuse, soon-to-be-forgotten hip-hop personalities, plus scatalogical and gay jokes; real laughs are few.
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40The fourth installment in the horror-parody franchise combines plot elements from "The Grudge," "The Village," and "War of the Worlds," with abbreviated spoofs of "Saw," "Brokeback Mountain," and "Million Dollar Baby." The amount of screen time allotted to each movie is roughly proportional to its box office take, suggesting that the first draft of the screenplay was written on a calculator.
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30Isn't it amazing to see just how low some people will stoop if you pay them enough?
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30Jokes from Scary Movie 3 are recycled ad nauseam.
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25Scary Movie 4 concludes by satirizing Cruise's couch-jumping orgy on "Oprah." Funny, but nowhere near as hilarious as the real thing.
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25Part sketch-comedy cartoon, part Cracked magazine spoof, installment four is the most scornfully made yet.
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20Worse than Scary Movies 1 through 3… And they were terrible.
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0So lazy it's downright boring, something not even a naked Leslie Nielson (!) can salvage.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 32 out of 62
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Mixed: 9 out of 62
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Negative: 21 out of 62
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Holy ****
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GavinC5Unfortunately, this installment is simply less funny than all the other films.