To whom does A Haunted House 2 appeal? This is a genuine question. You hear this sort of thing a lot from people who get off on smugly slandering the modern-day spoof movie (to be fair, pop quiz: name one not called Black Dynamite from the past decade that’s even passably decent), but it’s worth consideration on a more objective level. Assuming that you eliminate anybody with high-minded comic tastes right off the bat, this being a movie that thinks graphic sex with creepy dolls and loud pooping are comic gems, you’re left with an audience that’s inherently going to be receptive to this sort of thing. But when the Internet exists, ensuring that parody films are already well behind the curve by the time they get around to release, you eliminate from the potential pool anybody with a computer who might seek this sort of thing out on their own. That just leaves people who think that 1999-2002 was the apex of mainstream film comedy, and even they’ve probably seen the many iterations of this movie that have already happened. So, perhaps A Haunted House 2 isn’t actually for anybody. Maybe it’s just some kind of weird thought exercise that unsuspecting audiences can be suckered into.

This, at least, would make sense of a film that’s inexplicable in a lot of different ways. A Haunted House, last year’s surprisingly successful Marlon Wayans production, was at least pretty harmlessly stupid most of the time. Aside from the gay panic bits and pretty much everything about Cedric The Entertainer’s preacher-man character, it wasn’t even the worst parody film of last year (‘sup, Scary Movie 5), and was good for two or three chuckles if you’re the sort of viewer willing to dramatically suspend definitions of quality comedy. That’s not to say it was good by any stretch; between the amateur-hour production quality and Wayans’ insufferable mugging, it was actually pretty awful. Apparently the first film’s $40 million made in the dead of winter was incentive enough for Wayans to rally the troops anew and put out a second film that’s the very definition of a waste of time, effort, and resources.

You know, the demographic makeup of A Haunted House 2 is actually clearer upon further review. This is a great comedy for functional to severe sociopaths. Where the first film just flailed through its litany of poop, sex, and weed gags, A Haunted House 2 gets into way darker territory. The film’s send-ups (if we can stretch that phrase to its farthest limits) of The Conjuring, The Possession, Paranormal Activities 3 and 4 and others are really just loose, intermittently addressed vessels for Wayans’ best material, material which concerns (among many other things) step-parent incest, domestic violence of various kinds leading all the way into homicide, and a running gag in which Wayans’ adoptive son’s “gay” tendencies are mined with the comic grace of two shitty suburban dads pointing out the homos in a high school parking lot.

Getting worked up over A Haunted House 2 is probably a fool’s errand, given that nobody involved seems to care much more than most audiences (or critics) should. Jamie Pressly looks actively exasperated with everything onscreen, to such an extent that her apoplectic frustration stops seeming like a character trait after a while. Gabriel Iglesias, whose entire comic persona is that of the relatable, soft-throwing everyman, works rather blue here in a role that asks nothing more of him than to reprise the “I’m just keeding” gags from Jack & Jill with more four-letter words. But they and the rest of the motley crew assembled to bring this film to its shrill conclusion are mere window dressing for Wayans, whose go-for-broke overcooking of every single scene at both the script and performance levels is funny for about three minutes and intolerable for the next 84.

Wayans’ hamming also isn’t helped by the embarrassingly apparent formula used to pad out the film’s meager material to legal feature length. In virtually every scene involving Wayans reacting to whatever half-assed shock gag just transpired, he works through any and every conceivable progression, hitting on whatever punchlines may roughly fit the setup. After a while A Haunted House 2 starts to feel less like a finished movie than a demo reel of possible jokes being workshopped for the final cut. But it’s not. Wayans truly seems to believe that his stuffed animal sex scene from the first film was of sufficient laugh riot-inducing quality to reprise it here, this time with the doll from The Conjuring. But then she gets over-attached (because WOMEN, AMIRITE?!?) and he’s left to kill her with a chainsaw for trying to mess with his day-to-day. A Haunted House 2 has not one joke that you haven’t seen a hundred times before, and most of them will be jokes you may have hoped to never see again at one point or another. And the whole film ends in nu-metal, a fitting completion to Wayans’ loving throwback to movies that time mercifully abandoned.

(Side note: You see that face at the top of the page? He basically makes that the entire time.)