With "Scary Movie 3," the latest addition to the ridiculously successful "Scary Movie" entities, anything and everything is fair game in the quest to get a laugh. Forget about the sacrosanct, forget about taste, forget about taboos. Innocent kids are thrown out windows, crushed by speeding buses and seduced by pedophile priests bearing candles and wine.
It's outrageous. It's obnoxious. It's offensive. And yes, it's also really, really, really funny. Or, at least, it is for the first 40 minutes or so, until it starts to wear out its welcome. Right about the time when the movie's heroes crash a wake and start inflicting all kinds of abuse on a corpse in the coffin. Flying body parts! Are! Funny!
Anna Farris, left, Eddie Griffin and Queen Latifah spoof horror flicks in "Scary Movie 3."
(Rob Mcewan -- Reuters)
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Like its progenitors, "Scary Movie" and "Scary Movie 2," "3" is all about the parody, sending up horror flicks and their contrivances. This time around, the Wayans brothers, who originated the franchise, have stepped down. Taking over was director David Zucker, who did "Airplane!" and the "Naked Gun" series. The result is a film that's a little more mainstream, more suburban than urban in sensibility. (Except, that is, for a sendup of "8 Mile," where rap fans at a concert are urged, "I know ya'll want to bust a cap for your favorite rapper, but please, hold your gunfire until after the show." But Ja Rule playing a bland Secret Service agent? What a waste.)
The plot, if you care about such things, goes something like this: Cindy Campbell (Anna Farris), the earnest blond heroine from "Scary Movie" 1 and 2, is back, done with college and now working as a ditsy TV anchor who longs to do something more meaningful than hurricane stories and breathless exposes on silicone breast implants.
She ends up investigating mysterious crop circles à la M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" on a farm run by Charlie Sheen (who seems to be making a career of spoofing himself and others), a former man of the cloth who has serious problems: a daughter who sees things that go bump in the night; a cornfield that has been plowed into a message that reads, "Attack here," with an arrow pointing to his house; and, perhaps worst of all, a wife who made him pledge a vow of abstinence right before she died a horrible death.
Meanwhile, as Cindy is desperately trying to prevent an impending alien invasion, she has to contend with a mysterious videotape that killed her best friend, Brenda, (played by Regina King, the seriously funny and seriously underused actress from the previous "Scary Movie" installments) and keep track of an irritatingly precocious nephew who thinks he sees dead people but can't see oncoming cars. She also has to keep a poker face while playing the straight woman to a host of over-the-top cameos from the likes of Pamela Anderson (there's no way that woman can sleep on her stomach), Leslie Nielsen, Eddie Griffin, Camryn Manheim and George Carlin.
But none of that really matters. With "Scary Movie 3," the fun is in playing guess-the-reference, which is both the movie's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Which is to say, if you like your humor served up sophomoric and have seen "Signs," "The Ring," "8 Mile" and "The Matrix: Reloaded," watched "American Idol" and all the "Girls Gone Wild" boobfest videos and can spot rap royalty such as Queen Latifah, Fat Joe, RZA, Raekwon, Redman and Method Man, then, well, you're in for a good time.
If you haven't been a regular fixture at the multiplex, or don't spend all your time in front of the tube surfing hip-hop videos on MTV2, then you're not in on the joke, and if you're not in on the joke, you might want to skip this one.
Scary Movie 3 (Pg-13, 90 minutes) -- Contains crude, sexual humor, obscenity, comic violence and drug references.
