What do you get when you combine “The Grudge,” “War of the Worlds,” “Saw,” and “The Village” with the comedy stylings of “The Naked Gun” series? You get “Scary Movie 4,” only it’s not nearly as appealing as it sounds.

Anna Faris, thankfully, is back as Cindy Campbell, the heroine of these sophomoric comedies, but she isn’t given a very good script to work with, and she only shines in short bursts throughout the film. The same can be said for Craig Bierko, who is a satisfying male lead spoofing Tom Cruise’s character from “War of the Worlds,” but is stuck with some very unfunny bits in the film.

The plot....is there a plot? Well, aliens are attacking the Earth, the answer to save humanity might be tucked away in a village somewhere and the aliens look like the weird tricycle riding puppet from the “Saw” series. Add to this some really bad spoofing of “The Grudge” with some very demeaning work for Cloris Leachman and a quasi-performance from Leslie Nielsen as the president and you get “Scary Movie 4.”

Don’t get me wrong, there are funny parts and there were times that I laughed quite a bit. Unfortunately, most of the funny parts came early in the film and by the end I found myself bored and unamused. Among the things that this film got right were the establishing scenes of Faris and Bierko’s characters. I thought the scene where Cindy went to get a home health care job and saw the last lady that worked at the scary house was very funny and I also enjoyed the “Brokeback Mountain” gag and the first few minutes of “The Village” spoof. The casting of the film was great too as Charlie Sheen had a good cameo and Bill Pullman did a good job as leader of the village.

Where “Scary Movie 4” fails and ultimately falls well short of “The Naked Gun” or “Airplane” is that it relies too heavily on spoofing specific films instead of genres. It may be spot on in appearance, but is that the gag? See, we can create the basement scene from “War of the Worlds,” too? The humor in “The Naked Gun” and other David Zucker films came from actual jokes (funny word play, deadpan delivery) and specific characters but “Scary Movie 4” only succeeds in the same way part of the time. It isn’t the worst of the series - that honor goes to “Scary Movie 2,” but this isn’t worth that much of your time or money.

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