David Zucker’s horror spoof is intermittently funny and too unreliable to recommend. There is skill in the slapstick, but familiar scenes and a quick pace cannot make enough of the jokes work.
Scary Movie 3 is a comedy with enough working jokes to make its failures irritating. David Zucker knows how to keep a run of slapstick moving, and for a few minutes at a time that is sufficient. Then another weak joke goes by and the speed begins to feel like an excuse for not improving the material. It lasts 84 minutes, which is manageable, though the gaps between laughs make it feel longer.
The screenplay by Pat Proft and Craig Mazin relies heavily on the pleasure of recognising scenes from other films. That gives each joke a head start, but spotting a reference takes less time than watching it play out. Too often, there is little left to enjoy once the source has been recognised. The physical comedy fares better, because at least a movement or a collision can catch us by surprise.
We laughed at the early news-autocue gag. It has a clear comic idea and does not require much goodwill to make it work. Jon Poll and Malcolm Campbell’s editing keeps the joke moving without making a ceremony of it. Their brisk pace also gets the weaker material off screen reasonably quickly, although that is not much consolation when the next joke disappoints too. After a while, we began to notice how often the film was trying again.
Mark Irwin’s cinematography and William A. Elliott’s production design give the slapstick enough space to be read. That matters: a physical joke loses its point if we cannot see what has happened, and the film’s better passages remain clear despite the rush. The camera and sets are not the chief problem here. James L. Venable’s music contributes to the bustle, though it sometimes makes an unsuccessful gag feel more insistently presented. A little less encouragement would help.
Anna Faris gives Cindy a steadiness that helps when the surrounding material becomes frantic. Regina Hall brings welcome force to Brenda Meeks, and Charlie Sheen’s Tom benefits from a delivery that does not ask too eagerly for approval. Leslie Nielsen is well suited to the absurd authority of President Harris. But the performers get more opportunities to participate in jokes than to establish people we enjoy spending time with. A spoof need not give everyone a complicated inner life; it does need something to sustain the intervals between pratfalls.
The jokes involving children in danger are a more serious miscalculation. Repetition makes them increasingly unpleasant, and the film does not keep finding new comic reasons to return to them. This is where Pat Proft and Craig Mazin’s preference for another jolt over a better developed scene becomes tiring. We are not asking a horror parody to behave itself, but it ought to make its bad behaviour funnier than this.
The better spoof comedies give their characters something amusing to do even when the references are missed. That is a useful test for anyone approaching this without a working memory of its targets. Knowing the source material will help, but it cannot guarantee that the borrowed situations will be funny. We would choose something else for an evening that depends on sustained laughter.
