

The horror ... Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy in Scary Movie 3

Be afraid... be very, very afraid. Spoof films just won't go away. The 300 parody Meet the Spartans has just cleaned up in the States. Judd Apatow felt the need to do a number on Walk the Line with Dewey Cox - though admittedly with less than earth-shattering results. And horrible though this may be to contemplate, a fifth Scary Movie is in development over at Dimension Films. Last year we were treated to Brit-spoof Hot Fuzz and Pirates/Tolkien/Narnia skewerer Epic Movie. And you don't have to cast your mind back very far to recall the barely-halcyon days of the early part of this very decade, when you couldn't move for assorted Scary Movies, various Austin Powers sequels, Not Another Teen Movie and Johnny English, to name but a few.

It's a truism to say that the spoof is the lowest form of the cinematic art. These films are essentially parasitic, recycling ideas from other movies that, when they first emerged, may have seemed clever or frightening or funny - but, when run into the ground by lesser talents, have merely become stupid. I know this because, for reasons I don't want to go into, I had to sit through all four Scary Movies. Not something anyone should do on a full stomach. The Scary Movies are a potent warning about how liberally cinema can reward people for such terrible work. If we disinter its nefarious origins, we realise the first Scary Movie was a spoof of a film - Scream - that was itself a bit of a spoof (or at least a satire) on a previous generation of horror films, and which had had itself quite a bit of fun parodying and spoofing the already worn-out genre tricks. Scary Movie itself had no such claims to smart-arse acuity, being simply a ragbag of lame jokes and low-rent cameos, recycled from the still-warm corpse of a much cleverer movie, only four years old. But here's the thing: Scary Movie made lots and lots of money - almost half as much again ($150m) as Scream. So, as a spoof of a spoof, Scary Movie may be the most pathetically reductive film in the history of cinema; but you can't argue with the figures. People loved it, damn them. And this was even before Scream had finished cranking out its clever-clever, postmodern sequels.

Hence the continuing presence of spoof films in our cinemas. Inevitably, when discussing the subject, filmgoers' thoughts turn to the golden days of Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Airplane! and The Naked Gun ... but the 1970s and 80s are almost paleolithic in cinema terms. That comedy magic is long gone. (Though that didn't stop Jim Abrahams getting involved in Scary Movie 4, thereby proving it.) I'm not saying it's impossible for there ever to be a good spoof movie again; it's just that they're much, much harder than film-makers seem to think. Creatively speaking, spoofs attract the lazy, the inept, the self-loving, and the rip-off artist; but to make them watchable they have to keep the joke count at least ten times higher than any normal non-spoof comedy. (That, at least, is how Mel Brooks and the Zuckers managed to get away with it.) The new generation of spoofers have got nowhere near this; that's why no one will be watching Scary Movie 4 in 20 years time, and why everyone has forgotten that Epic Movie ever even existed.