‘Scary Movie’ frighteningly unfunny

‘Simon Killer’ generates fair amount of suspense

LOS ANGELES, April 13, (Agencies): You have to at least give “Scary Movie 5” points for timeliness. This latest installment of the horror movie spoof franchise manages to deliver parodies of movies as recent as last week’s “Evil Dead” remake, not to mention one that hasn’t even been made yet (“Fifty Shades of Gray”). But those points are immediately subtracted by the fact that this Wayans-less installment doesn’t manage to wrest a single laugh from any one of them.

Directed by Malcolm D. Lee and co-written and produced by the venerable David Zucker (“Airplane,” ‘’The Naked Gun”), it demonstrates that the latter has definitely lost his comic mojo. The film, which opened without being press-screened, unspooled to an opening day audience that produced a deafening silence.

If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve already seen the most notorious segment, in which Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan enthusiastically — if sadly — make fun of their naughty personas in a clownish opening sex sequence riffing on the “Paranormal Activity” series. It’s pretty much all downhill from there. The filmmakers’ desperation is evident from the fact that a good chunk of the running time is devoted to spoofing the recent Jessica Chastain-starrer “Mama.” While that film was indeed a sleeper hit, it hardly seems memorable enough to warrant such sustained treatment, and indeed the comic pay-offs are nil.

Sketches

Otherwise, it’s mostly a jumbled-together collection of sketches riffing on a disparate group of films including “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” ‘“Inception,” “Cabin in the Woods,” “Paranormal Activity” and its sequels and even “Black Swan.” Resembling the sort of lame bits relegated to the closing minutes of “Saturday Night Live” when airtime must be filled and featuring narration by a Morgan Freeman sound-alike, their collective lameness is numbing.

Ashley Tisdale and Simon Rex anchor the film’s loose plotline mashing together parodies of “Mama” and “Black Swan,” and while both performers are certainly game, neither possesses the comic chops necessary to keep the proceedings afloat. The rest of the cast consists largely of major and minor celebrities popping in for silly cameos, including Heather Locklear, Terry Crews, Mike Tyson, Snoop Dogg, Katt Williams, Jerry O’Connell, Usher and others too numerous to mention. Only Molly Shannon — playing a demented, accident-prone ballerina — manages to impress with her sheer determination to be funny, even if she never quite succeeds.

Director Lee periodically speeds up the film to produce a comic effect, although sadly not enough to reduce its seemingly interminable 85-minute running time. The inevitable outtakes during the closing credits indicate that the performers, at least, managed to get some laughs out of the experience. “Scary Movie 5,” a Dimension release, is rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content throughout, language, some drug material, partial nudity, comic violence and gore. Running time: 85 minutes.

There’s an implied contract between artist and audience, whereby the creatives can take us to the deepest, darkest places of bad behavior and personal misery so long as they have something to say about the human condition, or the society that creates such miscreants, or any number of other notions that can be explored this way. In return, viewers expect something at the end besides, “Boy! This guy’s really awful, isn’t he?”

It’s that lack of a payoff after a long slog that makes “Simon Killer” a disappointing follow-up to director Antonio Campos’ “Afterschool”; that movie also made us wade through some amoral youngsters perpetrating horrible offenses, but at least there was some cogent commentary about online voyeurism and how media saturation can desensitize young people to real-life sex and violence.

This time out, we get another terrific performance from Brady Corbet (“Martha Marcy May Marlene,” “Mysterious Skin”), but it’s in the service of a parade of horrors that never leads anywhere interesting.

Corbet stars as Simon, a recent college graduate still recovering from a bad breakup. He’s taken his misery to Paris, where he’s crashing in an apartment of a family friend, and it’s quickly apparent that he’s not as blameless as he lets on about the end of his last relationship; whether it’s his awkward encounters with strangers in the street or the increasingly pathetic e-mails (“I know we promised not to communicate, but”) that he keeps composing and re-composing to his ex, Simon is clearly a more twisted soul than his outward appearance would suggest. (Not for nothing does he mention at several points that his course of study in college was about the relationship between the brain and the eye.)

He pays nightclub prostitute Victoria ( Mati Diop) for some companionship, and when he’s supposed to leave Paris a day or

Recovering

so later, he deliberately gets into a fight with some street toughs so that he can return to her all bruised up so that she will take him in. After a few days, Simon comes up with a blackmail scheme whereby he and Victoria can lean on her married clients, but the moment the idea comes out of his mouth, you can already imagine how doomed the enterprise will be.

The more we learn about Simon’s past misdeeds, the more we begin to worry about his behavior in the present, and while the film generates a fair amount of suspense, Simon remains an outline who’s never sufficiently filled in. Not that the movie should have to “explain” him, but there needs to be a little context for his sociopathy. Otherwise, he’s just a boogeyman with a bachelor’s degree.

“Simon Killer” may wind up being a somewhat pointless wallow, but that doesn’t mean its creators didn’t put a lot into it: cinematographer Joe Anderson gives the film a tawdry sheen, rendering one of the world’s most beautiful cities into a place full of secrets and danger.

Corbet (who co-wrote with Campos and Diop) gives another compellingly unsettling performance; we may want to avert our eyes from who Simon is and what he does, but we can’t stop watching him. Here’s an actor who could have parlayed his looks into any number of leading roles on The CW, but he’s instead gone out of his way to play complicated characters for directors like Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke.

It’s too bad that all of this isn’t in the service of a more successful film, but Campos clearly has a fascination with the dark side. Even if “Simon Killer” doesn’t completely work, he remains a filmmaker who’s going places.