Oh, how the mighty has fallen. In 1980, director David Zucker brought us Airplane - a hilarious spoof of 70s disaster movies that helped usher in the modern parody film. Today, the man is stuck following the path of Keenan Ivory Wayans who directed the original Scary Movie back in 2000. The latest installment, Scary Movie 4, has arrived to the jubilation of just about no one. Even though I thought the last film (also under the direction of Zucker) was a step up from the first two in the horror parody franchise, that's kind of like saying getting one leg amputated is a step up from getting both. Scary Movie 4 is a step backward in just about every way. The movie is tired, beyond lame, repetitive, and even at a running time that barely passes 75 minutes, seemingly interminable. From overused physical humor to "topical" jokes that went out of style five years ago (Do people still laugh at jokes about Mike Tyson biting people's ears off?), Scary Movie 4 is a movie so pathetic I almost wanted to put it out of its misery before it hit the 15 minute mark.

Taking its main source of inspiration from The Grudge, Spielberg's War of the Worlds, The Village, and the Saw films, Scary Movie 4 finds its bubble-headed heroine Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) taking a new job after the death of her close friend, Tom Logan (Charlie Sheen in a cameo). The job revolves around her looking after a comatose old woman (Cloris Leachman) who lives in a house cursed by the spirit of a pale-skinned Japanese boy that haunts its halls. The house also just happens to be conveniently located next door to handsome, simple-minded divorced dad Tom Ryan (Craig Bierko) who is struggling to look after his two children who obviously don't respect him in the least, and whom he barely even seems to notice. The situation turns grim when an alien invasion, signaled by giant IPods rising up out of the ground that play cheesy 80s music before sending out massive death machines, hits Earth. The ghostly boy that haunts Cindy's home drops a cryptic hint that she holds the key to not only lifting the curse that keeps his spirit behind on Earth, but also to end the alien invasion.

As Tom and his children struggle to survive the alien menace, Cindy and her best friend Brenda (Regina Hall) make their way to an old-style village in the woods where the people live in fear of monsters that roam the forest on the outskirts. They believe that the Elder of the village (Bill Pullman) is connected to the spirit of the boy back home, and may hold all the answers. Only with his help can Earth be saved, so our heroes can discover the identity behind the mysterious masked man who kidnaps people and tortures them with twisted death games for his own amusement. Throw forced and lame parodies of Brokeback Mountain and Million Dollar Baby into the plot, toilet humor that no one in their right mind would find funny, and the first (and hopefully last) full frontal nude shot of Zucker regular Leslie Nielsen, and you've got the makings for pure endurance test filmmaking.

Before I begin my critical skewering, I will give Scary Movie 4 this - Unlike the last parody movie to hit screens (Date Movie), this one at least manages to fit a working plot out of the movies it makes fun of, instead of just randomly throwing scenes from movies up at the screen. The filmmakers also did a good job in capturing the look and feel of the films being parodied, from the costumes to the way scenes are shot. In every other category, however, this is just yet another excuse to throw crude bathroom humor into scenes from other movies, and hoping people will laugh. A urine-soaked sponge bath, dark ominous clouds that resemble butts that "fart" lightning, and a blind woman mistaking a public meeting area for an outhouse are just some of the "highlights" you have to look forward to with your ticket purchase. Instead of finding anything funny to do with the overly serious horror films it tackles, the screenplay is content to simply rely on crude visual humor and predictable pratfalls. I'm serious when I say that this movie probably has the most amount of jokes built around people getting hit on the head since the days of The Three Stooges. It's not funny the first time, and it's even less funny the 50th time one of the characters gets knocked on the noggin.

The saddest thing about Scary Movie 4 is that it almost seems to know how lame it is. The actors look like deers caught in headlights as they drudge their way through scene after dreary scene. Anna Faris (who has been with the series since the beginning) gives it her all, but really, she's reduced to nothing more than getting hit in the head numerous times and other forms of forced slapstick. There are some potentially funny ideas, such as the opening scene that finds basketball player Shaq and TV personality Dr. Phil trapped in the opening from the original Saw film, but let's face it, neither of them are actors (anyone who has seen Shaq's starring roles can surely agree), and they don't know how to make the scene work. Poor James Earl Jones is wasted in a cameo that parodies Morgan Freeman's narration in War of the Worlds, which once again gives him nothing funny to do. The movie is just one long unfunny slog of wasted potential. Not even the usually reliable Leslie Nielsen can salvage any form of comedic dignity in a throwaway role that has very little to do with the story itself.

Not since Rebound (the failed family comedy with Martin Lawrence from last summer) have I literally felt sorry for the actors up there on the screen. They don't seem to be having any fun, and they seem to know they're stuck in a worthless turkey. The fact that this movie is playing on over 2,000 screens makes it all the more sad. Scary Movie 4 contains not one single moment that made me even crack a smile. This is a big surprise considering this is from the man who literally helped create the genre over 20 years ago. Maybe Zucker and his writers need to take a look back at their earlier films to remind themselves of what humor really is. Maybe it's time for them to move on. Maybe it's time Hollywood itself move on from the parody genre before it's too late to save itself. I don't hate Scary Movie 4. I pity it.

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