As far as critics are concerned, the Scary Movie franchise has run its course with number four dubbed "a bore". However, paying moviegoers have a different take on the matter. This latest instalment raked in around $90m in ticket sales and a fifth film has been given the green light. That's good news for Anna Faris who's fast becoming Hollywood's go-to funny girl - the noughties' answer to Goldie Hawn.

Scaring Up The Extras

An extra three minutes on the original running time are mostly devoted to bouncing collagen implants, originally deemed too risqué by the puritanical US censors. In a half-hour conversation with the filmmakers, director David Zucker, producer Robert Weiss and writer Craig Mazin bemoan how things have changed since Zucker directed Airplane! in 1980, when you could have bountiful close-ups of jiggling flesh and still get a PG-13 rating.

The trio point out the extra rude bits in a shared commentary, but mostly the track is just a lot of laughing at things that really have very little to do with what's going on onscreen. They make the usual jokes about how arduous it was to find just the right Playboy bunnies to take on the smaller roles and skate quickly over the technical trivia. Apparently their biggest challenge was replicating big set-pieces from more expensive films on a lower budget. You won't be surprised that the answer is "making it look cheap", which supposedly helps get bigger laughs.

The FX bods who worked on the film might take exception to that. In a brief featurette, they show us all the intricacies of designing a CG duck feather and a butt-shaped lightning cloud for the War Of The Worlds attack send-up. Let's just say this won't be keeping the WETA wizards up late at night...

Slash And Hack

Leslie Nielsen and Anna Faris are among those who pay tribute to David Zucker in The Man Behind The Laugh while Craig Bierko (Tom) talks briefly about how he created a new sub-genre of comedy in the Zany Spoof Humour. Other featurettes introduce rappers like Chingy, YoungBloodz and Fabolous who appear in the film. They reckon "the hardest s***" in making the transition to acting was not being able to swear at will. At barely three minutes each, these featurettes contain about as much substance as the bra of a pre-op Playboy bunny.

15 deleted scenes are probably the big draw for Scary Movie fans. However, most of these are actually extended versions of what already exists in the film. For instance, the War Of The Words riff with giant iPods for alien ships includes a so-called 'Attack of the Earbuds'. In an optional commentary, the filmmakers explain that this was cut because it was just "mindless action without comedic [value]". Unfortunately they could say the same for most of these off-cuts. The full version of Bierko lampooning Tom Cruise's sofa-jumping turn on Oprah is perhaps the funniest extended scene (presented separately).

A blooper reel where Anna Faris has trouble walking through a door rounds off the bonus menu. It's mostly just padding (insert your own boob joke here), but fans of the movie will probably get at least a couple of hours of fun out of this DVD. The rest of us will hide behind the sofa, living in fear of a franchise that just won't die.

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