Ouch. Looking back on Scary Movie is like savoring the lingering threads of vomit in the corners of your mouth after a particularly wrenching upchuck. Forget about great spoofs like Airplane or This is Spinal Tap--even dumb spoofs can be good for some cheap laughs. But Scary Movie makes CB4 look like Blazing Saddles. The best send-up of dumb formulaic horror movies is of course Scream, a clever idea that was subsequently milked dry with sequels and imitators. The Wayans' notion of satirizing Scream and its recent knock-offs was therefore a bad idea from the get-go, but the unbelievable crappiness of their finished result is truly shocking, and, yes, a litle scary. The only possible explanations for its huge box-office success are the unprecedented idiocy of the American citizenry (see President Bush, Jr.) and the fact that theaters were charging $9.50 a head to get in, and $25 a head to anyone trying to escape within the first 30 minutes--with lots of takers. Since I, like the vast majority of Scary Movie viewers, didn't make it to the final credits, I can't give an exact count of the number of laughs, but extrapolating from what I did see I would set the count at between 1.6 and 1.9. Meanwhile the count of moments of gut-thuddingly offensive and witless stupidity is in the range of 175-200. A crime has been committed in movie theaters that is now spreading to certain unfortunate vcrs and dvd players. Don't try to "investigate" it yourself like the stereotypically clueless teens heading into the woods or the basement with a flickering flashlight to sniff out an axe-murderer--just run away, far away, and stay there.