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Back Shelf Beauties
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Scary Movie 4 I am a huge fan of Dr. Phil, who appears in the movie, all of the commercials, the trailers and every publicity photo I have seen, so I have some advice for fellow Dr. Phil fans who want to see the movie because of our baldheaded guru. He appears in the movie's opening sequence with Shaquille O'Neal (a semi-decent parody of Saw). After the sequence is over, you can get up out of your seat and leave because you won't be missing much else. Scary Movie 4 proves it's time to bury the Scary Movie franchise. Craig Bierko stars as Tom - a working class dock worker with a killer, vintage Ford Mustang, two kids, and an ex-wife (Molly "I used to be cool" Shannon). Much like in War of the Worlds, aliens have started an assault on Earth, and he must try to escape while protecting his two, emotionally estranged children. Next door to his home, much like in The Grudge, Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) has been hired to take care of a catatonic elderly patient in a home that is haunted by a strange looking ghost child, who claims he knows the key to defeating the aliens. Will Cindy be able to find the answers needed to save Earth? Will Tom be able to keep his kids safe? Will Cindy and Tom be able to survive this whole ordeal and find true love? Scary Movie 4's biggest challenge is trying to stay relevant and original. In this day and age, something like Tom Cruise's couch jumping incident (a joke in the movie) has been parodied to death by the internet, Saturday Night Live, South Park, Mad TV, late night TV, morning radio programs and many other gag writers by the time Scary Movie 4 gets its chance to make us laugh, which means we usually gag at the same jokes we have seen and heard before when they appear in this movie. Unless these writers have come up with some amazing, original twist, the jokes feel old and stale, and these writers could never be accused of being original in this movie. Writer/director David Zucker and co-writers Jim Abrahams and Craig Mazin greatly falter when trying to parody recent movies, but find some laughs with sight gags that are just pure jokes not aimed at any particular film or pop culture moment. Unfortunately, that means you are likely to laugh only three or four times during the entire movie. The rest of Scary Movie 4 is unoriginal, uninspired and unfunny as the team relies on gross out humor and some obvious jokes about movies like The Village, Brokeback Mountain, and Million Dollar Baby. It's scary alright, but scary bad, scary boring and scary irrelevant. The rest of the cast is fine, but doesn't have the material needed to get us to laugh. Faris is doing her typical dumb blonde routine, which is starting to lose its luster as the franchise grows older, and Bierko only finds a few moments to make us laugh, but comes through when the jokes are good enough. Particularly, I was saddened to see Bill Pullman show up in Scary Movie 4. Maybe he has some horrible gambling debts to pay off. I hope not. Scary Movie 4 needs double the jokes and double the pace. Previous movies like it, such as Naked Gun and Airplane (both directed by Zucker) were much funnier because something was always going on whether it be a joke, something funny in the background or some subtle physical gag by the actors. Scary Movie 4 is just a series of build ups to lame jokes. 1 Waffle (Out Of 4) Copyright 2006 - WaffleMovies.com
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