by MARK SLUTSKY

What's the point of the Scary Movie franchise again? The first was a comic send-up of the Scream movies, which themselves were comic send-ups of '80s horror movies. Even the first Scary Movie seemed pretty pointless, and now that there's a third opening (with a fourth apparently in production as you read this), the whole enterprise has come to seem like a cruel joke, a horrible exercise in diminishing returns and total comedy entropy.

The Wayans brothers, responsible for the first two films, are now out of the picture, with David Zucker taking the director's reins. You might remember Zucker as being the director of Airplane!, Top Secret, Ruthless People and other hilarious movies. Well, maybe it's best if you remember him for those comedies, and not as the director of the most tiresome, boring piece of crap to come out of 2003.

Not diverging too much from the series' style of joke-a-minute parodies of recent supernatural thrillers, Scary Movie 3 puts the screws to such recent blockbusters as Signs, The Ring and 8 Mile. Wait, didn't those movies come out last year? Or two years ago? Who is supposed to care about this? It's not like Ring mania is exactly sweeping the nation at this point.

Unbelievably, the filmmakers actually try to laboriously squeeze a plot out of this mish-mash, as if that's really necessary with this kind of movie. It's something about aliens and videotapes and rap battles, you know, basically a combo of the three movies it spends the most time parodying. Anna Faris, from the first two movies, is back as Cindy Campbell, a TV reporter, and joining her is a veritable hall of fame of has-beens, slumming musicians, and minor comics: Pamela Anderson, Charlie Sheen, "The Coors Twins," Macy Gray, Jenny McCarthy, Ja Rule and a million other grimly familiar faces.

None of this would matter if the movie was funny; comedies can get away with anything if they make you laugh. Scary Movie 3 is more likely to make you cry.

Scary Movie 3 opens Friday, Oct. 24

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