As Scary Movie 4 makes all too clear, David Zucker is losing his touch.
The man who gave us Airplane! and the Naked Gun movies flounders in his attempts to wring major laughs by poking fun at such flicks as War of the Worlds, The Grudge, Saw, The Village, Million Dollar Baby and Brokeback Mountain.
Where once his parodies were consistently clever and witty, they now are often simply silly and juvenile.
He gets some laughs, but not nearly as many as he should, so that even at just 83 minutes, Scary Movie 4 seems long.
Zucker and screenwriter Craig Mazin use Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds as the centrepiece for Scary Movie 4, committing a few of the same sins they set out to mock.
At the height of the alien invasion, a distraught Tom Ryan (Craig Bierko) has just seen his teenage son run off to fight the invaders, so he and daughter Rachel (Conchita Campbell) hide out in a cellar with a crazed farmer (Michael Madsen).
This sequence in the film, with Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning and Tim Robbins, was so creepy and unsettling, it deserved to be parodied, but Zucker does nothing with it.
There isn't a single laugh and it doesn't even attempt to comment on how Robbins made this character's motives suspect.
Casting Madsen certainly gave Zucker the opportunity, but then he wasted it.
He redeems himself somewhat with his hilarious tribute to Cruise's couch-hopping sequence on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Anthony Anderson and Kevin Hart get to spoof Brokeback Mountain. It's not the romping in the tent that gets the biggest laughs, but the men's continued protest that they are not gay.
Scary Movie 4 opens with Dr. Phil and Shaquille O'Neal recreating a scene from Saw, which falls flat because both men are so wooden and humourless.
You feel sorry for Cloris Leachman, who gets bathed in fake urine as the demented mute from The Grudge, and Carmen Electra as the blind girl from The Village, who enters a packed assembly hall thinking she's in the privacy of her own bathroom.
Laughs don't come much cheaper or at the expense of the actors.
Zucker has admitted Electra didn't know what kind of disgusting soundtrack he was going to add to her bathroom sequence.
Anna Faris returns as the dim-witted, accident-prone Cindy Campbell. This is her fourth Scary Movie, so it's no wonder she looks as if she's sleepwalking through the role.
At least Regina Hall makes the raunchy Brenda an even more outrageous sexual predator.
Zucker is at his most subversive with Leslie Nielsen's President Baxter Harris character. When Harris is informed of the alien invasion, he is sitting in on a children's reading class listening to a story about a duck.
The scene is a rather chilling, but very funny reference to President Bush and his now-infamous reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Scary Movie 4 has the feel of a film thrown together for a deadline, rather than conceived to poke fun at haunted house, ghost, alien and pop culture movies.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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