Parody without plot in 'Scary Movie 4'

When aliens take over the planet and attempt to decipher our culture, what on earth will they make of "Scary Movie 4"? Will they find it a disconcerting masterpiece of the avant-garde? An inexplicable fantasia of multiple realities, grotesquerie and flagrant bowel dysfunction?

If they get to it having first absorbed the various movies and celebrity scandals that the parasitic franchise feeds on — this year's checklist includes "Saw," "The Village," "The Grudge," "War of the Worlds," "Brokeback Mountain," "Million Dollar Baby" and Tom Cruise freaking out on Oprah's couch — well, they'll still think we're out of our minds.

In either case, I welcome them with open arms so long as they arrive, as they do here, in the form of giant iPods blasting "Karma Chameleon" — minus the "Destroy Humanity" playlist, please.

The fun of "Scary Movie 4" is that it isn't a movie at all. Organized on the principle of parody, not plot, driven by gags and cultural feedback, it's an exercise in lowbrow postmodernism, a movie-movie contraption more nuts than Charlie Kaufman's gnarliest fever dream. It's cleverly stupid.

Hit or miss, complete nonsense, the very definition of disposable: this is the price one pays to watch the exposition from Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" mashed up with Sir Mix-a-Lot's "I Like Big Butts," Shaquille O'Neal trapped in "Saw" and the funniest Viagra overdose in the history of meta-cinema.

"Scary Movie 4" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Naughty jokes and rough language are spoken. Bodies are much abused and loudly emptied of their waste.