Startup.com
****
Dir: Chris Hegedus, Jehane Noujaim
107 mins, cert 15
www.startupdotcom-themovie.com

This horribly fascinating film might just be a Treasure of the Sierra Madre for the 21st century. Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim's fly-on-the-wall documentary traces the real-life dizzying rise and fall of govWorks.com, an internet startup pioneered by two twentysomethings who had been buddies since high school - but who were destined to fall out in a very big way as the project crashed and burned.

They are Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, a bullish young guy full of energy and charisma, indisputably the leader, and his colleague, Tom Herman, sweet, bespectacled, and destined to get shoved aside as the stakes get vertiginously high. Their big idea was a website which would allow people to pay their parking fines, get fishing licences and generally deal with town hall business without having to take a day off and wait in a queue in a horrible building in an insalubrious part of town. It was an idea which hit all the right buttons in the late 1990s: re-inventing government, empowering the citizen - and, of course, anything to do with the internet just had to be thrillingly profitable.

Kaleil leads his employees in a special psyching-up shouting session involving waving clenched fists, but not above their heads "because that would be like the Nazis". Incredibly, Kaleil and Tom actually buy out a recalcitrant co-founder for $700,000 in cash, so certain are they of the fabulous payday awaiting them at the end of the rainbow.

Kaleil begins to believe his own publicity as an internet mogul and at the height of his hubris actually offers President Bill Clinton a job - a position on the board in NYC for when Hillary gets elected as senator! A truly extraordinary moment among many.

But a competitor starts making all the running, and inevitably, Kaleil and Tom fall out and there is an unforgettable scene when Kaleil icily suggests Tom take a "vacation" and Tom's lower lip trembles with the uncool real-life emotion that you never see in the movies. The tension as Tom hires a lawyer and is finally escorted from the building is extraordinary. And Kaleil and Tom end up with no money, no friendship, no nothing. It's a stunning tale of internet vanity to which Hegedus and Noujaim appear to have had extraordinarily intimate access. This is a South Sea Bubble tale for our time.

Scary Movie 2
*
Dir: Keenen Ivory Wayans With: Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Faris, Regina Hall, James DeBello, Chris Elliott, James Woods, David Cross, Tim Curry, Tori Spelling
82 mins, cert 18

Andrew Pulver adds: With the first teen horror spoof scaring up a frankly terrifying $150m at the American box office, a sequel was gruesomely inevitable. Indeed, the general astonishment that greeted the original Scary Movie's figures is evident in this second helping, so thoroughly rudimentary is the collection of references and slung-together storyline that graces number two. You simply know from the outset that the film-makers have already exhausted their tiny bag of tricks, and there's nothing left to go round.

Occasionally, too, it's hard to get the original players reunited for a sequel; not this time, though, as you can't imagine that the Wayans brothers had too much else to claim their attention. In fact, Scary Movie improbably made oldest sibling Keenen Ivory the most successful African-American director in box office history. Marlon and Shawn are back too, exactly replicating their roles as, respectively, dope-addled Shorty and sexually confused footballer Ray. (In all honesty, Marlon, who's actually not a bad actor as Requiem for a Dream showed, is terminally unfunny in both movies, while Shawn - no great shakes as a performer - was one of the best things in the first one.)

To fill up screen time, the Wayanses have opted for sledgehammer smash-and-grab raids on a bunch of horror classics, and - with the exception of a few giggles in the opening head-spinning, green-vomit-filled segment dedicated to The Exorcist - the result is never less than pitiful. No doubt tempted by the prospect of appearing in a "cult" hit, a respectable gallery of medium-name cameos also show up: all, apart from James Woods, pretty much disgrace themselves. Top of this list is the hapless Tori Spelling who, having put in a pleasantly self-mocking appearance in Scream 2, really makes an idiot of herself here.

By the time the movie drags itself to its conclusion, there's not a laugh left in it. You can understand the commercial imperatives for making this sequel, but since Scream, the movie that originally inspired its progenitor was a far better, funnier and more agile satire on teen horror movies, this micro-franchise really wants putting out its misery.

The Forsaken
**
Dir: JS Cardone With: Kerr Smith, Brendan Fehr, Izabella Miko, Phina Oruche, Simon Rex, Carrie Snodgress, Johnathon Schaech
91 mins, cert 18
www.spe.sony.com/movies/forsaken

Stripped to its essentials, this could have been an intriguing vampire movie, with a backstory about curse-laden immortals roaming the planet, transmitting bloodlust like a virus. Unfortunately, director JS Cardone is so concerned with recording the dusty Arizona landscape and picturesque motel America that has been chosen as the movie's seemingly arbitrary backdrop, that its narrative and character become an increasingly perfunctory add-on.

The Forsaken follows a Mercedes-driving teen (Dawson's Creek's Kerr Smith) who picks up another, slightly greasier, teen (Roswell's Brendan Fehr) who turns out to be a vampire hunter, tracking down the bloodsuckers who infected him. This prey is a really greasy bunch of teens, headed by Johnathon Schaech, running around the desert in a Near Dark-style convoy, picking off truculent campers, barflies, et al.

What this movie would really like to be is something resembling an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer if Larry Clark had directed it. Unfortunately, it gets nowhere near Buffy's adroit meshing of teen neuroses and supernatural paranoia, and its attempt at a metaphoric overlay - vampires as serial killers - is only superficially examined. Furthermore, Clark's louche, sweaty camerawork is a lot harder to imitate than it looks, and he would never have put up with such a slick, gory patina. One of the actors cited, in interview, a book she read for research about a gang of Florida teens who thought they were vampires: that story would have made a much better movie, and one for which Clark's fleshy stylings would have made a much better fit.