Martin Luther was one of the few who could make the whole list thing work

Question of the day: Was America really crying out for Scary Movie 4 to be made?

Sub-question: When did Hollywood completely lose the ability to make a quality spoof?

Somewhere in between Airplane and Scary Movie A Billion, things just went awry. My main problem with the genre as it's represented today? A disease that I have coined "Laundry-list Spoof Syndrome."

(Okay, so I think I got the laundry list phrase from a critic, but I was the first to make it a syndrome.)

What made movies like Airplane and Young Frankenstein so good was that their creators fully understood the elements of the genre they were spoofing and played with them for comedic effect. The result was a movie that seemed entirely familiar as part of that genre and yet subverted it without resorting to mocking specific movies.

Contrast this with today's efforts, where it seems screenwriters make a list of the films they'd like to poke fun at and proceed to write basically a series of mocking vignettes with only the most threadbare of plot connecting them.

Take Date Movie, for example. You can just see the thought process of the creators as you watch it (which, by the way, you should not). "Okay guys, we're going to start out with a little bit of Bridget Jones' Diary, then into The Notebook, and we'll end with Hitch and The Wedding Planner."

The result is pretty much a laundry list of movie references and is about as exciting as reading someone's actual laundry list.

To make things worse, Scary Movie 4 apparently ran out of scary movies to mock and has to look elsewhere for source material, including Brokeback Mountain and Tom Cruise going crazy on Oprah. Also, apparently Shaq and Dr. Phil are in a scene? Finally, in one TV spot, there is not one, but two nuts/balls double entendres.

If that's your thing, enjoy. It opens everywhere today.

But it's probably best if you and I stayed not-friends.