Sometimes films can make you feel guilty and empty.

Once in a while, whatever your creed or colour, you may find yourself unified, with one voice against something you have seen or heard in a movie, or maybe the entire movie itself. This is a perfectly normal reaction; Hollywood consistently and unashamedly make films which it knows - knows - are awful but are pretty much expected to make enough money to render audience reaction, at best, irrelevant and at worst, a mockery of any sense of empirical justice existing in the world.

I am talking, of course, about films like Scary Movie 2. The first Scary Movie, uh, movie inexplicably managed to garner a handful or positive reviews. It came out at a time when the late-nineties slasher movie resurgence had become smug and way too clever for its own good. Maybe people were tired of the self-satisfied, post-modern bullshit which these movies were so quick to dress up in. It was getting old and boring.

The making of Scary Movie was like the moment when, you're sitting in a library and a learning-disabled kid walks in, singing to himself loudly. Everyone watches in a tense silence and when someone does laugh, although it seems wrong, it's such a fucking relief. Everyone chuckles and the child should be quickly and firmly escorted back to his minder, who should be told never to let the child off his leash in the library again.

But Scary Movie 2? The sequel? No.

No, that movie was like seeing the same learning-disabled kid start having a fit on the floor of the library and everyone being too shocked to help or call an ambulance. The kid was briefly amusing, about a minute ago, but now... watching him spasm and jerk around on the floor, his protective helmet clattering off the floor tiles, that's just strange and disturbing.

After you've seen something like that you'll feel guilty and empty; that you just stood there and watched and didn't do anything. And you'll ask yourself: how is the world a better place since I just watched that retarded kid have a fit on the floor? And the answer will be: it isn't.

And Scary Movie 3? Scary Movie 4? (Is there a fifth one? There probably is.)

That's like the rest of the class of the kid who's having a fit on the floor suddenly come running in. And start misbehaving. Some start copying him, jerking around on the floor pretending to fit. Others just start crying or laughing; it's not their fault. It's not their fault; they didn't ask to be retarded and no-one's done anything to help the kid who's actually having the fit. But now that they're here, it is our responsiblity to deal with them.

Scary Movie 2 is like a retarded child having a fit. That is why I hate it.