OH how I cringed, snoozed, yawned and grimaced - but didn't laugh. The experience of Scary Movie 3 is, in fact, everything else except funny.

Despite the fact that the tagline of the first film was "No mercy. No shame. No sequel", here we are again for yet another instalment of bad jokes, breasts and banality. Only difference is, the reins this time have been taken from the Wayans brothers by David Zucker, one of the trio behind the legendary Airplane! and producer of The Naked Gun series.

His changes are immediately evident - there's not a pot joke or soft-porn shot to be found, all due to Zucker's determination to reduce the franchise's rating from an 18 to a 15. But this doesn't prevent him from featuring Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy dressed as schoolgirls having a pillow fight in the opener.

Anna Faris - soon to be seen giving up her baby for Chandler and Monica to adopt in the final series of Friends - is back as newly-blonde Cindy Campbell, working as a newsreader on a local station.

Not only does she discover a mysterious video which kills you if you watch it, but then a story comes in about farmer Tom (Charlie Sheen), who has discovered mysterious crop marks in his field. She decides to investigate both, and finds out that Tom's brother George (Simon Rex - incidentally an ex-porn star) is an old flame of hers.

Clearly the targets are The Ring and Signs, and there are also prolonged digs at 8 Mile, The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix, with Simon Cowell and Queen Latifa popping up.

So it's obviously not really about scary movies anymore.

One of the problems is that the characters that made the first film so watchable - Marlon Wayans' Shorty and Deputy Doofy - haven't been adequately replaced, and series stalwart Regina Hall, whose nasal histrionics are consistently amusing, is completely wasted here. Not only that, but the "jokes" are strangely tasteless - about a young boy being molested by a priest and Mother Theresa.

In short, a tacky waste.