Scary Movie 5 (2013)

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that settles over the professional viewer around the forty-minute mark of Scary Movie 5, a film that arrives seven years after its predecessor and behaves as though nothing at all has happened in the culture during the interim. The plot, such as it is, concerns a couple who adopt three feral children and are then haunted by a demonic mother while also, for reasons the screenplay never troubles to justify, parodying Black Swan, Inception, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes in the same breath. The enterprise has no thesis, no target, and no discernible point of view. It simply points at things that were popular and waits.

On the matter of social consciousness, the cupboard is bare. The cast includes a handful of Black performers, Snoop Dogg and Terry Crews and Katt Williams among them, and a Hispanic housekeeper who performs folk rituals at the paranormal disturbances. These are stock spoof fixtures, not an inclusive-casting statement, and the characters built around them lean on hoary types: the cannabis-seeking stoners in the woods, the superstitious maid shouting in Spanish. No racial commentary is offered. No LGBTQ characters appear. The treatment of women runs to crude gags and culminates in a Swan Lake solo performed in the manner of a strip tease, which is presented as the film's comic summit. There is no feminist argument here, only a punchline.

One searches in vain for environmental concern, for class critique, for body acceptance, for neurodivergent representation, for any revision of the historical record. None is present. The film has no message and no moral, which would be a mercy if it had jokes instead. It does not. The director has since disowned it publicly, and this critic finds no grounds to disagree with him.