Scary Movie

An often astonishingly inept piece of work, Scary Movie follows socially-awkward teenager Warren (John Hawkes) as he finds himself pursued by a psychotic stalker during a trip through a small-town haunted house. Filmmaker Daniel Erickson kicks Scary Movie off with a confoundingly deliberate opening stretch that contains little in the way of compelling elements, with the arms-length vibe compounded by an emphasis on the one-dimensional characters’ line-based exploits (ie it legitimately does feel like the entirety of the picture’s first half takes place in the queue for that aforementioned haunted house). It doesn’t help, certainly, that Erickson has infused the proceedings with a low-rent, hopelessly amateurish feel that’s reflected in its various attributes, with Scary Movie unable to make a positive impact at even the most basic and obvious level (ie the kill sequences, often the saving grace in shoestring horror endeavors, are as underwhelming and incompetently-handled as everything else in this trainwreck). By the time the infuriatingly repetitive and tedious final act, which consists entirely of sequence after sequence of Warren stumbling around the haunted house, rolls around, Scary Movie has undoubtedly cemented its place as a seriously (and aggressively) unwatchable bit of low-budget filmmaking.

no stars out of ****