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I generally have a pretty good memory for the movies I’ve seen, but when it comes to Scary Movie 5, I honestly couldn’t tell you whether I’ve watched it before. By the time this movie was released, I had largely grown tired of the spoof genre and stopped seeking these films out. I know for a fact that I never got around to later Wayans-produced efforts like A Haunted House and Fifty Shades of Black, so it’s entirely possible that Scary Movie 5 slipped through the cracks as well. Either way, there is a first time for everything, and since I’m working my way through the Scary Movie franchise, the time has finally come to experience what is widely regarded as the series’ low point.
After adopting three mysterious children found alone in a remote cabin, dance instructor Jody and her boyfriend Dan begin experiencing a series of increasingly strange events in their home. As supernatural forces seem determined to torment their family, the couple investigates the source of the haunting while encountering possessed children, paranormal experts, and a string of absurd situations inspired by films such as Paranormal Activity, Mama, Black Swan, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
Scary Movie 5 arrived seven years after Scary Movie 4, and by that point very little remained of the team that made the franchise a success. Director David Zucker, who helmed the third and fourth films, is reduced to a writing credit, with directing duties handed over to Malcolm D. Lee. Also absent are Anna Faris and Regina Hall, the duo who had effectively become the heart and soul of the series. Their absence is definitely felt, although Ashley Tisdale and Simon Rex do their best to fill the void and turn in respectable performances. Rex had previously appeared in Scary Movie 3 as an entirely different character, while one of the few returning faces is Charlie Sheen, who shows up for yet another cameo. This time he shares the opening scene with fellow 2000s and early 2010s tabloid magnet Lindsay Lohan. Their sequence is genuinely funny and raises hopes that the movie might have more to offer than its reputation suggests. Unfortunately, those hopes prove to be somewhat misplaced.
The movie uses the Paranormal Activity films as a framing device for a story primarily based on Mama, the 2013 horror movie starring Jessica Chastain. Much like the films spoofed in Scary Movie 2, 3, and 4, Mama never quite became the enduring horror classic the filmmakers probably hoped it would. It is another example of the franchise building itself around a movie that was popular in the moment but failed to leave much of a lasting cultural footprint. The other major targets fare better. Paranormal Activity remains one of the defining horror franchises of the found-footage boom, Black Swan is still widely discussed and acclaimed, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes successfully launched a trilogy that remains highly regarded today.
Because Scary Movie 5 is generally regarded as the worst entry in the franchise, I went in with very low expectations. What I got instead was more or less the same experience I had with the previous sequels. Perhaps it was the cast change, or perhaps it was the absence of Leslie Nielsen, a man capable of improving virtually anything he appeared in, that caused audiences to turn on the film, but I certainly didn’t find it dramatically worse than its predecessors. In fact, it managed to hold my attention for at least the first hour, which is about as much as I can ask from this type of spoof comedy.
That’s usually how these spoof movies work for me. The rapid-fire jokes and references are amusing enough at first, but after about an hour the formula starts to wear thin. Scary Movie 5 is no exception. Fortunately, these films tend to keep their runtimes between 80 and 90 minutes. Officially, this one clocks in at 89 minutes, although the final fifteen minutes consist largely of bloopers and end credits.
It’s also worth remembering the context in which Scary Movie 5 was released. By 2013, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer had spent years flooding theaters with dreadful parody movies, churning out one lazy spoof after another and effectively helping to kill the genre. Those films often felt as though they were written entirely around trailers, stitching together random pop culture references and gross-out gags with little rhyme or reason. Almost none of it worked. Scary Movie 5, for all its faults, is a far more traditional parody. It sticks to the franchise’s established formula of mashing together two or three popular movies and using that framework to deliver a steady stream of jokes.
While I never laughed out loud, that’s true of every Scary Movie film for me. What I did get were a handful of genuine chuckles, and at this point that’s really all I expect from the series. In that sense, Scary Movie 5 delivers exactly what it promises. That’s hardly a glowing endorsement, and it’s certainly not a movie I’m going to actively recommend, but considering its abysmal IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes scores, I do think people have been a little too harsh on it. It’s not good, but it’s nowhere near the cinematic disaster its reputation suggests.
Scary Movie 5 isn’t a good movie, but it never reaches the depths of the Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer productions. In fact, it’s really just an average Scary Movie installment. The movie never comes close to matching the original’s cultural impact, but it still delivers the same rapid-fire barrage of movie references and silly gags that defined the series. If you’ve enjoyed the sequels up to this point, there’s little reason to single this one out as some kind of disaster. It’s a mediocre parody that occasionally raises a chuckle, and while that may not be high praise, it’s enough to make its overwhelmingly negative reputation feel undeserved.
