From 2000 to 2006, the slapstick-heavy "Scary Movie" franchise was mighty lucrative for Dimension Films and Bob & Harvey Weinstein, tapping into a youth-targeted zeitgeist that appreciated the comic skewering of some of the most popular recent films (the majority of them in the horror genre). Seven years have passed since the weak-sauce "Scary Movie 4" was unleashed, and in that time director David Zucker has been replaced by Malcolm D. Lee (2008's "Soul Men"), with Zucker (2008's "An American Carol") and Pat Proft (2006's "Scary Movie 4") picking up the writing slack of patchworking together a scattershot plot referencing everything from "Paranormal Activity" to "Black Swan" to "Mama" to "Inception" to "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" to "Insidious" to "Evil Dead." More noticeably, "Scary Movie 5" is the first entry without the participation of invaluable lead Anna Faris as the upbeat, eternally put-upon Cindy Campbell and Regina Hall as tell-it-like-it-is best friend Brenda Meeks. Without them, should the project even carry the "Scary Movie" moniker? Faris and Hall are missed, to be sure, but it's just as well that they sat this one out. A bullet, as they say, was most definitely dodged.
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