I’m always a bit concerned when I see something emerge from Tyler Perry. I haven’t had a lot of good experiences with him, but I know how quickly anything can change. I’ve seen movie franchises go completely into the toilet only to recover and bring good times right along side them. Saw IV was terrible, but Saw V kicked off a wonderful three years for me in which I, and the rest of Team Hoffman, could wait for his inevitable victory over the reality-denying punks over on Team Tuck. Friday the 13th didn’t get good until after The Final Chapter. So when the crew out at Lions Gate sent over a copy of Tyler Perry’s House Of Payne Volume Seven to review, I took the offer, and hoped for the best.

Tyler Perry’s House of Payne Volume Seven takes us back to the Payne household, where, as is generally the case, a lot is going on. And most of it isn’t good. The first five minutes, in fact, are a recap of the misery journey Calvin and his new wife ran through at the end of the previous series of episodes. So just in case it didn’t suck enough to see it then, you’ll get to see it all over again. And then it will go on from there, through the rest of the Payne clan, C.J and his family, Pops and Ella, and all the rest.

I have to admit, I was astonished. This may well be the first time I’ve actually laughed, and genuinely laughed, at a Tyler Perry product. More, it may be the first time I’ve enjoyed a Tyler Perry product. Sure, most of the problems of a Tyler Perry product are still in attendance–piles and piles of melodrama, for example. Everything horrible that can happen to these people does, and despite the fact that Perry’s actually put a little more funny into this one, he’s also jacked it up with so much horrible screeching melodrama it’s just downright preposterous. And the funny is almost a little uncomfortable–it feels like I’m laughing at the guy who just got his arm cut off by a chainsaw. The dialogue is still stilted and in many places poorly conceived, and the performances do nothing but underscore the melodrama. If they were chewing on the scenery any harder we wouldn’t have another season as they’d have digested all the sets by now.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives House of Payne Volume Seven  a six out of ten for doing better than the previous seasons, but not fixing many of the problems of said seasons. It’s better than a sharp stick in the eye, but only slightly.