Scary Movie - Film Review

Starring: Jon Abrahams, Carmen Elecra, Shannon Elizabeth, Anna Faris, Kurt Fuller, Regina Hall, Karen Kruper, Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans
Directed by: Keenan Ivory Wayans
Scary Movie belongs to a venerable tradition of pop-culture spoofing that includes Mad magazine's gag-driven farce parodies, the song stylings of Weird Al Yankovich, Forbidden Broadway and the great Airplane movies of the late '70's and early '80s. But these are hard times for satirists, given the pervasiveness of knowing self-mockery in everything from television commercials to campaign speeches.

Keenen Ivory Wayans has made a specialty of sending up the conventions of genre movies blaxploitation in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1989) and hip-hop ghetto melodrama in Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood (1996). But in Scary Movie – which was going to be called something like Scream If You Still Know What I Did Last Halloween, Mr. Wayans faces a new challenge. How do you make fun of something that's already a parody of itself?

Mr. Wayans, directing from a script by a half dozen people including his brothers Marlon and Shawn, who also star, doesn't so much lampoon the Scream movies as offer the latest remake, this time as gross-out comedy. Scary Movie has the feel of a very long sketch on Mad TV or on one of the later episodes of In Living Color, after Damon Wayans and Jim Carrey had moved on, taking with them the show's ingenuity and comic spark.

Like most gag-driven farces, it's a hit or miss affair. If you're amused by jokes involving male and femalebody parts, flatulence and dismemberment, it should be a big hit. If you're not, and you haven't seen the half-dozen or so blockbusters it alludes to ( The Blair Witch Project, The Matrix, The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects in addition to the Scream and What You Did Last Summer movies), then by all means miss it.
Like the three installments of Scream, Scary Movie assembles a crew of overage teenagers ("In the movie we'd be played by actors in their late 20's and early 30's," one of them notes) and sets a robed, masked maniac after them. Anna Faris takes the Neve Campbell/Jennifer Love Hewitt role; Lochlyn Munro plays the boyfriend driven mad by her chastity, and Dave Sheridan cruelly spoofs David Arquette in the role of Officer Doofy. The on-screen Wayans brothers, with time on their hands since WB canceled their sitcom, appear as Ray (Shawn), a quarterback with sexual-identity issues, and Shorty (Marlon), a gangly pothead who gives his life to save the movie from complete idiocy.

But the plot, as you would expect, is a slapdash piece of scaffolding on which to hang bits of humor that are annoying less for their vulgarity than for their tiredness. Couch-bound smokers, mannish female gym teachers, those "Whassssup" beverage commercials – hasn't it all been done to death?

O.K., there are some funny moments of the sort you may look back on with embarrassment. I'll admit to laughing at the gym teacher routine, and at an utterly tasteless moment involving a cheerleader's severed head being deposited in a Lost and Found bin, but no more. And a few other scenes convey a sense of squandered possibility: for example, a fake movie trailer for Amistad II and a scene of fried chicken eating and mayhem at a showing of Shakespeare in Love. ("Brad Pitt's ex-girlfriend is a freak!")

Perhaps Mr. Wayans has aimed at the wrong target. Why not poke fun at the movies that ask for it by taking themselves seriously? How about Saving Erin Brockovich From the Cider House Gladiator?

Scary Movie is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).
It consists almost entirely of vulgar references, gory violence, depictions of narcotics useage and references to nasal, genital and lower-intestinal bodily functions.