Scary Movie 2

After opening with a brilliant, blasphemous send-up of The Exorcist featuring James Woods, Andy Richter, and a lot of pea soup, Keenen Ivory Wayans's follow-up to last year's sleeper hit runs out of gas. Not literally, of course -- there are plenty of fart jokes to come. But now there seems little point to all the scatology. Gross-out movies like Scary Movie have long since replaced the teen slasher flick as the dominant summer genre, so where's the satire? Nonetheless, there's money to be made, and so the lunkheads played by Tori Spelling, Anna Faris, and Wayans siblings Shawn and Marlon attend a haunting of "Hell House" run by a lecherous Tim Curry. The funnier take-offs of such clunkers as What Lies Beneath have always screened in the film's trailers, though the Hannibal riposte is worth seeing. In the end the film trails off into half-hearted rehashes of Mission: Impossible 2 and Charlie's Angels, with running gags about one man in a wheelchair and another (Chris Elliott) with a deformed hand. Talk about lame humor. At the Apple Valley, Entertainment, Hoyts Providence 16, Opera House, and Showcase cinemas.
-- Peter Keough