Marlon Wayans' 'A Haunted House' trailer riffs on "found footage" horrors

Although the rather extensive Wayans family created the Scary Movie franchise twelve years ago, they actually left after the second film, with David Zucker picking up the slack from that point on. The Wayans' have stuck pretty close together throughout their careers, but it's been Marlon who has ventured out more than the rest and done his own thing, most notably Requiem for a Dream and 2009's GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Now he's looking to continue the family's long history of spoof films with A Haunted House.

After a bunch of new photos were released a few days ago, we're now getting the first official trailer for the film, which is a send-up of the horror genre in the Scary Movie vein. Directed by newcomer Michael Tiddes with a script co-written by Wayans and Rick Alvarez, the film centers on a couple(Wayans and Essence Atkins) who move into a new home only to discover it's possessed by a demon feeding off her relationship baggage. Short of Wayans' intro where he channels Randy "Macho Man" Savage, this looks pretty terrible, and like somebody trying really hard to do a Scary Movie knock off. The gags are the same, like smokin' weed with the spirit who is terrorizing them, and the characters are all the same archetypes we saw previously.

Maybe expecting ingenuity out of something like this is too much to ask, but you'd think that Wayans would want to do something to separate it from Scary Movie 5, which opens three months later. Simply targeting found footage films like Paranormal Activity isn't enough. Co-starring Nick Swardson, David Koechner, and Cedric the Entertainer, A Haunted House opens on January 11th....