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There were four films in the Scary Movie spoof franchise within a six-year span between 2000 and 2006, but nothing in the seven years since. However, with a slew of horror movie hits in recent years to poke fun at -- most notably the influx of "found footage" fare, it's no surprise that voila, we have Scary Movie 5.

The Plot

When Charlie Sheen (playing himself) dies, his three young children (apparently he has these) go missing for months and are found in a feral state in a cabin in the woods.

They're sent to live with Charlie's brother Emilio -- er, Dan (Simon Rex) -- and his ballerina-turned-rocker wife Jody (Ashley Tisdale) in a house rigged with cameras by researchers interested in monitoring the kids. But accompanying the children is a possessive spirit whom they refer to as Mama who wants to take the kids back. Fart jokes ensue.

The End Result

Watching Scary Movie 5 made me want to go back and re-watch the previous four entries in the series to figure out if they really are that much better (well, maybe not the second one) or if I'm suddenly just that old and crotchety. The Scary Movie films often get confused with the similarly themed but decidedly inferior cinematic spoofs from reviled duo Jason Friedberg and Adam Seltzer, but this latest sequel actually does stoop to the low quality of dreck like Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Meet the Spartans and Vampires Suck. This fact is all the sadder considering Scary Movie 5 was written by parody legend David Zucker (Airplane!

, The Naked Gun, Top Secret!) and directed by Malcolm D. Lee, who's had a solid comedic track record with the likes of Undercover Brother, Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins, Soul Men, The Best Man and Roll Bounce.

Even the best spoof movies are dumb and full of low-brow humor, but the worst do so with reckless, lazy abandon. Scary Movie 5, like A Haunted House from earlier this year, trots out one tired comedic cliché after another, from poop jokes to prat falls and sexual innuendo, targeting low-hanging fruit like the obese, the mentally deficient and the drug-addled. Seemingly every scene struggles to find a humorous "button" to top it off and instead resorts to having someone fall down or get hit in the face. The opening two scenes are easily the worst in the movie, thanks in no small part to the wooden acting of Snoop Dogg, an overly plastic Lindsay Lohan and an "underly" plastic Charlie Sheen. Only when the likable and comedically gifted stars Rex and Tisdale show up does Scary Movie 5 become at least bearable. Unfortunately, they aren't given much to work with. Still, with the rapid-fire format of this type of film, even the worst script can stumble upon a gag that elicits a chuckle -- although whether viewers are laughing with the movie or at the movie is debatable.

Perhaps the most impressive thing, frankly, is how quickly the filmmakers turned around parodies of movies that are still in theaters -- from Evil Dead to Mama -- although that makes spoofs of Inception and Rise of the Planet of the Apes feel all the more dated.

The Skinny

• Acting: D+ (Rex and Tisdale give it their all, but other than a funny cameo from Katt Williams, the rest of the cast falls flat.)
• Direction: C- (Competent for the genre.)
• Script: F (Predictable and unfunny.)
• Gore/Effects: D (Cheap special effects, though perhaps intentionally so.)
• Overall: D- (Hopefully, this will put the franchise out of its misery.)

Scary Movie 5 is directed by Malcolm Lee and is rated R by the MPAA for crude and sexual content throughout, language, some drug material, partial nudity, comic violence and gore. Release date: April 12, 2013.