SCARY Movie brings to mind those Russian dolls that fit one inside the other. A spoof of the Nineties slasher flick, a genre that already had a healthy sense of irony, it parodies many recent films, including The Matrix and The Blair Witch Project, but most of its scenes are lifted directly from the Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer series, with punchlines replacing plotlines.

The film cheerfully aims for new comedic lows. There are the usual gags about teen sex and flatulence, with some stomach-churning special effects thrown in (or rather up), all of which certainly succeeds in raising immature laughs.

This movie will probably be enjoyed most by a younger, perhaps slightly drunken audience who can giggle at the ultra-dappy cheerleader who, having been beheaded, mocks her killer: "Oh, what - and now I'm supposed to bleed?".

There is also plenty of slapstick humour of the kind pioneered by those masters of the spoof, the Zucker brothers (Airplane! and Naked Gun). People walking into trees, old ladies being flattened by pianos, you know the sort of thing. Some jokes, however, go too far, not least a scene involving a gay man whose head is impaled on the killer's erection. That's not funny, that is offensive.

Scary Movie is written and directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans and stars two of his brothers, Marlon and Shawn, as well as the inevitably under-dressed Playboy pin-ups Carmen Electra and Shannon Elizabeth.

The Wayans are famous in the US for creating and starring in the show In Living Color, which features predominantly black comedians (although it also launched the career of Jim Carrey). So it is no surprise the jokes that cut deepest concern racial issues.

In one scene teams of journalists mass around the high school attended by the unfortunate victims; the camera pans around the group of gabbling anchor people and comes to rest on the Black News van.

"A white woman's dead," the correspondent says nervously. "let's get out of here". Top marks for social comment.

The best turn is given by the scrawny Shawn Wayans whose dope-smoking dropout seems to have all the best lines. When asked how he always seems to know what will happen next, he replies: "I saw that movie Scream, it had the same dialogue and everything".

If you like your humour strong, keep your brow low and aren't easily shocked this is one for you. Just don't take your gran.