Starring Marlon Wayans, Jaime Pressly and Gabriel Iglesias. Rated 18A. Now playing.

After cocreating the Scary Movie series that has so far spawned five witless gross-out horror spoofs, Marlon Wayans branched out to the exact same thing last year with A Haunted House. Though critically reviled, it somehow earned enough box-office to justify this bottom-feeder sequel.

The movie centres on the supernatural buffoonery that befalls Malcolm (Wayans) when he moves into a house with his new girlfriend (Jaime Pressly) and her two kids (Ashley Rickards and Steele Stebbins). His next-door neighbour is played by Latin comic Gabriel Iglesias, so there's an endless stream of jokes about Mexican stereotypes to accompany those on interracial dating, police violence, poo, pedophile priests, prison rape, and—more often than expected—loose vaginas.

Taking the unnerving Ethan Hawke film Sinister as its plot base, AHH2 sees Malcolm donning a cardigan like Hawke did to view the mysterious film reels he finds in the house. "That's an ugly motherfucker!" he declares when he first spies the pinched-faced demon-thing from Sinister. "Is that Steven Tyler?"

That's about as funny as things get, although I almost laughed when Wayans pulled out a pair of nunchucks to stupidly battle a swarm of dark moths and nunchucked himself in the nuts.

And I guess you gotta give the guy some credit for the extreme lack of shame he displays during some of the crudest scenes, like when he's frantically screwing the creepy porcelain doll from The Conjuring and doing all kinds of kinky shit to it. His extended fight-to-the-death with a possessed chicken (The Last Exorcism Part II) also sees Wayans go beyond the call of duty as far as selfless commitment to the cause is concerned.

Kinda makes you wonder how he might perform in a movie that isn't embarrassing crap.