The Scary Movie franchise has officially become a rampaging, out-of-control monster.  The film's originators – the Wayans brothers – have nothing to do with this third installment, which has taken the idea of spoofing a film that spoofed the horror genre (Scream) and modified it to the point where basic tenets like sticking to horror satire and maintaining a cohesive story are an afterthought.  Actually, they're probably not even an afterthought.  And just to warn you, they start filming the fourth installment in a few months.  Can't this be considered a weapon of mass destruction?

Scary Movie 3 includes half-assed parodies of The Ring, Signs and 8 Mile, along with so many other films you're guaranteed not to catch all of them (but not in the cool vein of, say, Kill Bill).  Wait a minute.  8 Mile?  The only thing scary about that was the undue praise heaped on both the film and its star.  If you want to see a bad spoof of that, watch Malibu's Most Wanted.  Or hang out at the mall and laugh at the suburban wiggers there.

Worse yet, this is the first of the Scary films to pussy out and succumb to the PG-13 rating, which means, obviously, the humor won't be quite as graphic and the language will be less severe.  Does the idea of a watered-down, Wayans-free version of Scary Movie 2 sound like your cup of tea?  If so, your knuckles must be raw from scraping the ground.

David Zucker replaces Keenen Ivory Wayans behind the camera with very mixed results, proving his directing talent is only as strong as the material with which he's provided.  Zucker co-wrote funny films like Airplane! and the Naked Gun films, but he didn't have any input on screenplays to Scary 3, or this year's runaway hit, My Boss's Daughter (and when I say "runaway hit," I mean people wanted to run away from the theatre and hit somebody).

Still, one can't help but appreciate scenes depicting the violent ends of Simon Cowell and most of Wu-Tang Clan.

1:30 -

for pervasive crude and sexual humor, language, comic violence and drug references