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Scary Movie was a guilty pleasure.

Scary Movie 2 is just guilty.

Guilty of stupidity.

Guilty of compromise.

Guilty of boredom.

And, most and worst of all, guilty of refusing to be funny, even for a split second, much less the interminable 83 minutes it takes to disgorge itself on screen. The Exorcist clean-up crew had more laughs.

Speaking of Linda Blair, Scary Movie 2 opens with a pre-credits, Exorcist-style puke-a-thon featuring James Woods in the Max Von Sydow role and Natasha Lyonne in the devil-may-care Blair bit in the bedroom.

This supposed 'humourous' regurgitation of the famous exorcism scene from the William Friedkin flick earns the whole half-star rating I'm giving the new movie. It's not great -- not even good -- but everything else gets nothing. So you take what you get, even if it's green gobs of goo.

The original Scary Movie, a summer of 2000 comedy which was directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans with his younger borther Shawn and Marlon Wayons in lead roles, was a tasteless, balls-out send-up of slasher flicks, including the Scream series of films, which were satires themselves.

Satires of satires don't usually work so well but Scary Movie went to such gob-smacking extremes (like the infamous gusher climax scene that is reprised in the sequel) that you either had to exit in disgust or howl with laughter. It tapped into our primal selves and let us laugh our guts out.

So it's not news to suggest that Scary Movie 2 is brainless. Of course it is. That's the point of this kind of comedy.

The crime is that, flush with the box-office success of the original and lacking any kind of creative impulse that shows on screen, the filmmakers involved in the sequel produced something so lame, so degenerate and so void of even politically incorrect jokes that it self-destructs.

Nothing is funny here. NOTHING IS FUNNY!

The credits of Scary Movie 2 -- and I'm using the words "credits" loosely -- list seven screenwriters, including three of the Wayans Bros. -- Shawn, Marlon and Craig. So blame them and big brother Keenen Ivory, who is back as director. Blame Miramax's Dimension Films. Blame them all.

This time around, the weak target is the ghost flick, like The Exorcist, Poltergeist and The House On Haunted Hill, as well as horror fare such as this year's grisly Hannibal. Tangents take us into Charlie's Angels and other pop culture references, none of them edgy, original, cool, clever, amusing, urgent, eye-popping or even remotely interesting.

The cast is as awful as the material. The Wayans clan clunks along, Anna Faris and Regina Hall fail to spark any of the energy they had in the original and newcomers such as Tim Curry, Chris Elliott, Richard Moll and even Tori Spelling (a living self-parody) look dazed and confused, desperate characters in search of a sketch, or a paycheque.

The advertising tag-line for Scary Movie 2 is simple: "More merciless! More shameless!" No such luck.

There is less of everything here, even bad taste and especially laughs.

Review: Scary Movie 2 falls flat