REVIEWED - DATE MOVIE: THIS unspeakably squalid parody of the contemporary romantic comedy is written by some percentage of the team that brought us the Scary Movie franchise.

Unlike those films, whose metaphorical knuckles scraped the ground so abrasively they left troughs wherever they ventured, Date Movie is trying to extract comedy from comedy. As a result, it frequently ends up dealing in marginally less cerebral, significantly more sordid versions of the same jokes that drive its target material.There's a noisy faked orgasm in a restaurant. A single woman named Jones faces up to life with too many fags and not enough men. A scatty blonde disrupts her best friend's wedding.

To be fair, hippie parents Fred Willard and Jennifer Coolidge, possessors of the funniest bones in Christendom, generate more laughs than Streisand and Hoffman did in Meet the Fockers. But, for the most part, what we get are stupider variations of routines that weren't that amusing in the first place.

That said, there is something gleefully, charmingly unpretentious about the Scary/Date franchise. Watching them is like watching a poorly trained chimp ride a tricycle or a not particularly gifted child saw her way through Frère Jacques on the violin. Date Movie is truly awful, but you wouldn't wish it out of existence. None of which is to suggest that any sane person should pay to see it.