film | The spoof hurts

Length of SCARY MOVIE 4 in minutes, not counting the end credits: 83.
Number of gags where a character gets conked on the noggin: 27.
Approximate occurrence of noggin-conking gags: once per 3.07 minutes.

Here's the thing about comedic trauma to the head: It can be amusing if it leads to the punchline of a joke — see Naked Gun 2½, where some poor schmo's cranium is besieged by horseshoes, a bowling ball, tar, a bag of feathers and an anvil, only to inspire one of the best lines in the movie — but as the punchline of a joke, well, it's beyond lame. In scary movie 4, the slapstick abuse is both the tired set-up and the unfortunate payoff. But hey, on the plus side, there are only three bits involving fart humor, although one of them does go on for what feels like an eternity.

Because Scary Movies 1-3 left at least a few scatological stones unturned, Scary Movie 4 plops intrepid series heroine Anna Faris into yet another hodgepodge of spooky-flick spoofs, this time tossing the most mockery at The Grudge, The Village, Saw, War of the Worlds and Brokeback Mountain, which probably only qualifies as a "scary movie" if you read a lot of Ann Coulter. In a particularly long sequence, it also clumsily lampoons Tom Cruise's infamous Oprah freakout, which reveals that this kind of film is less preoccupied with cooking up any genuine amusement than making its audience feel savvy by half-assedly referencing as many identifiable noteable pop topics from the years since the last Scary Movie's release as possible — Dr. Phil! Lil John! Million Dollar Baby! The iPod! Russell Crowe's telephone tantrum! R. Kelly's pee fetish! MySpace! "My Humps"! — and, usually, dousing them in excreta. In his parody of War of the Worlds' alien invasion, director David Zucker goes to great lengths to reproduce certain Spielbergian camera angles and special effects, and even Dakota Fanning's Candyland-colored wardrobe, but he forgets the hilarity.

Zucker's previous cinematic caricatures — the classic Airplane! and the first two Naked Guns — were clever, dimensional and so crammed with funny stuff you risked missing something good just by blinking. in Scary Movie 4, you can rest your eyes for entire scenes, and you'll hopefully skip the saggy butt-double for Leslie Nielsen (as the bumbling U.S. prez) and the wheezy testicle entendres of the Brokeback montage, but not the the cute riff on the Americanization of Japan's horror genre ("Buddha! Shitake kimono!") and the swift jab at the pompous colonial-speak of The Village ("This is some shit up with which we will not put!"), which are among the film's scanty legitimate guffaws. Faris, a supremely talented comedienne, deserves bigger and better material than this franchise offers, but then again, after you wash Cloris Leachman's face with a sponge soaked in a used bedpan, I suppose there's nowhere to go but up. D+