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Scary Movie V
In a post-credits scene, Sheen wakes up, with Dom Kolb sitting beside him, from a dream extraction, i.e. the whole movie was a dream. After Kolb informs that Sheen will be sleeping with Lohan, a car crashes into the room, killing Sheen. Lohan is revealed as the driver; she gets out of the car, says to Kolb, "You were driving," and throws him the keys, blaming the accident on him.
Scary Movie V
Parents need to know that Scary Movie 5 is the latest in the increasingly tired series of horror movie spoofs begun in 2000 by the Wayans brothers (and now continued by others). Like the others, it's filled with vulgar, rude humor and relies on slapstick, stereotypes, crude bodily jokes, and sexual innuendo for laughs. It also includes some horror violence, notably a scene of dismemberment (out of Evil Dead) that's filled with blood. There are also meant-to-be comical scenes of parents punching and smacking children (both accidentally and on purpose). Though there's no graphic nudity or sex, innuendo is very strong, and there's plenty of racy stuff. In the opening sequence, Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan make a sex tape, there's a lesbian sex scene, and a pool party sequence shows haunted pool vacuum cleaners drinking and doing drugs. Language includes one "f--k" and many uses of "s--t." Some teens may be interested, but otherwise, this series has run out of steam.
If SCARY MOVIE 5 isn't busy lazily riffing on specific shots from its source movies, it fills in the gaps with the expected bodily fluid jokes, sexual innuendo, and stereotypes. It also throws in several cameos, including Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan in the opening scene. Only Snoop Dogg seems to be relaxed enough to get some laughs in. This is a big waste of time, drawing one more gasp out of a series that should have given up the ghost long ago.
The fifth installment in the Scary Movie franchise has been taken over by Malcolm D. Lee -- Spike's cousin and the director of the very funny Undercover Brother. The writers are David Zucker and Pat Proft, who were responsible for the very funny Naked Gun movies. None of that former humor comes through in this lazy effort, which smacks of a routine attempt to replicate those wonderful old MAD magazine movie spoofs.
In a sentence, Ashley Tisdale, Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen and Snoop Dogg (or is it Snoop Lion now?) poke flimsy, filthy fun at movies like Mama, Paranormal Activity 4, Evil Dead, Black Swan, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Inception, along with the popular sleaze-read Fifty Shades of Grey.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
Scary Movie 5 is considered by many as one of the worst movies ever made, so much so that it even earned a minuscule 4 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. However, this goofy parody has aged shockingly well, and while it may not be for everyone, it's certainly not the trash fire it was originally made out to be.
The Scary Movie franchise has always been a staple in the parody movie sub-genre, but the idea to reboot the franchise entirely for the fifth installment was never something fans necessarily wanted. So, when the film was released in 2013, the series had already lost its momentum, and people were going in expecting it to be awful.
The fact that Scary Movie 5 didn't feature any of the original cast members and its existence almost felt pointless led any random cameo or bizarre gag to be overlooked. But now, seven years later, aspects of the low-brow comedy that once seemed meaningless now offer a strange sense of nostalgia that provides a reason to watch the movie, something that many didn't believe it had initially.
From the way the critics ravaged this campy sequel, it would seem as though the movie was just a rehash of other films and had no originality at all. However, that's far from the truth, as Scary Movie 5 features a segment that depicts vacuums coming alive and throwing a party. The vacuums look as though they were made via stop-motion animation, and it appeared as though this took a lot of time and effort to achieve. A film as abysmal and poorly-made as the one described by critics normally wouldn't feature something so involved and well-crafted.
Obviously, Scary Movie 5 is far from great cinema, but it has that so-bad-it's-good quality that is worth a second look, especially for fans of the franchise. Movies such as Sharknado and Zombeavers capture a similar essence that only certain films can; movies that are unashamed to go as far as they want to and have fun doing it, no matter how technically bad they may be considered.
The movie is also ridiculously watchable, starting with a meta opening gag featuring Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan having an intimate encounter where literally anything goes. Some parodies will lure you in with a star-studded opening and then bore you for the rest of the runtime. Scary Movie 5 immediately cuts to Snoop Dogg and Mac Miller after the opening, proving to the audience that if they just lose their inhibitions and forget any preconceived notions, they will be in for a raunchy, cameo-filled comedy that is worth the watch.
Marisa (she/her) has covered all things parenting, from the postpartum period through the empty nest, for Good Housekeeping since 2018; she previously wrote about parents and families at Parents and Working Mother. She lives with her husband and daughter in Brooklyn, where she can be found dominating the audio round at her local bar trivia night or tweeting about movies.
42, writer/director Brian Helgeland's dramatization of three years in the life of baseball trailblazer Jackie Robsinson, is an earnest, deliberately old-fashioned entertainment, an inspirational bio-pic made with professionalism and care but little in the way of emotional or thematic nuance - it's the very definition of what-you-see-is-what-you-get filmmaking. In three specific scenes, though, this seemingly prototypical triumph-of-the-underdog sports flick also achieves a legitimate, rousing greatness, and it's the sort of expansive and lingering greatness that makes you leave the picture feeling, with few reservations, that the movie as a whole was truly great.
Happily, though, the third of 42's priceless segments is as soul-satisfyingly uplifting as the aforementioned one is soul-crushingly wrenching. It climaxes with the much-documented (and factually disputed) gesture that found, during a Dodgers game played in Cincinnati, shortstop Pee Wee Reese (Lucas Black, hugely deserving of a Reese bio-pic of his own) walking over to Robinson and putting his arm around the man's shoulders - a previously unprecedented public display of racial solidarity and empathy. Whether historically accurate or not, it makes for a glorious movie moment - Helgeland's consistently touching work finally becomes bawl-your-eyes-out wonderful - and one that's sentimental without being the least bit manipulative; the tears that fall are honest ones.
There are plenty of reasons to catch 42: the sensationally enjoyable, lived-in portrayals by Nicole Beharie (spirited, forceful, and lovely as Robinson's wife Rachel), Christopher Meloni, T.R. Knight, John C. McGinley, Andre Holland, Hamish Linklater, and Harrison Ford (offering a juicy, character-actor turn as general manager Branch Rickey); the images of forced segregation presented with laudably unforced horror and heartbreak; the magnificently rendered sights and sounds of baseballs whizzing toward home plate with almost alarming velocity. (You jump in your seat when they land.) But 42 would be more-than-worthwhile viewing even if its pluses were wholly confined to its three finest sequences. It's to the audience's enormous benefit - and, for those of us expecting little more than a blandly traditional and serviceable bio-pic, enormous relief - that the movie gives us so many pluses beyond them.
As usual with grab-bag comedies of this sort, the jokes and references are hit-or-miss and a few celebrity cameos (Mike Tyson's especially) just wind up embarrassing, and the movie boasts some of the most atrocious vocal looping I've heard-slash-witnessed since Tommy Wiseau's peerlessly terrible The Room. But when the jokes do land, they land big-time; Lee's movie boasts more than a dozen cackle-worthy sight gags (plus one, featuring the game Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan, scored to the Benny Hill theme) mocking Paranormal Activity's high-speed-video re-creations, and the overall pacing is so tight that even the weaker bits don't have time to sully the movie's lightly delirious mood. And here's something I literally never expected from the fourth sequel in what I presumed was a waning franchise: Scary Movie 5 is, without question, the freshest movie parody I've ever seen. The satirical nods to Black Swan and Inception and Rise of the Planet of the Apes may, by this point, come off as slightly stale (even though Lee's replications of Darren Aronofsy's images, complete with hand-held photography and cameras following closely behind the back of his leading ballerina's head, are madly inspired). But Mama isn't even available on video yet, at one point there's a quick swipe at Zero Dark Thirty, and so help me, one entire, grandly satisfying scene is a comically gory salute to Evil Dead ... not the Sam Raimi version, but the version that debuted at cineplexes last weekend. (Modern Family's Sarah Hyland is the lucky lady who gets to slit her own tongue here.) Whatever its flaws, Scary Movie 5 feels like the first genre parody made expressly for the Twitter generation, and it's oftentimes a wickedly funny one, to boot. 041b061a72