Scary Movie (2000)

Film: Scary Movie (2000)

Stars: Anna Faris, Jon Abrahams, Marlon Wayans, Regina Hall, Shawn Wayans, Shannon Elizabeth, Dave Sheridan, Cheri Oteri, Carmen Electra

Director: Keenan Ivory Wayans

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-90's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

We are nearly coming to the end of the month, and throughout our horror movie marathon in October, we've encountered family-friendly horror movies, body horror movies, horror remakes, & new takes on horror slashers.  Hell, we even got multiple Christmas movies in the bunch.  But in our last two seasons of exploring post-Hays Code horror, we haven't gotten to a horror spoof.  To modern filmgoers, the most famous horror movie spoof is undoubtedly the Scary Movie franchise.  Starting in 2000 in the wake of the slasher horror film craze, the Wayans family, noted for their 1990's TV series In Living Color, struck gold here and started their own movie spoof empire.  With five films in the series, the Scary Movie franchise has made almost $900 million globally, which means that up until the latest Scream film, the series had actually out-earned the original Scream franchise itself.  Most of that was due to this one, a monster hit in 2000 (making nearly $300 million on a $20 million budget), and while this isn't remotely my type of humor, I figured I needed to understand where the hype was coming from.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie does, kind of, have a plot, but it's mostly a series of vignettes loosely brought together by a thin story.  The movie starts with Drew (Electra) parodying the opening to the original Scream movie by getting killed by the Ghostface killer while giving us a number of titillating nods to Electra's real life persona (including her multiple appearances on the cover of Playboy).  We then go to a group of teenagers, all played by actors who are purposefully too old to actually be teenagers.  They start to die, one-by-one, at the hand of a Ghostface-like killer, who also carries around a hooked hand, and with most of the teens assuming the murderer is a man they killed in a car accident a year before.  Before the film is over, most of the characters are dead, and we get to understand who the real killer is.

The movie's biggest inspirations are the Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer franchises, which is why I waited to watch this until after I'd seen those movies.  The sketches, in almost all cases, take from the first two Screams and I Know What You Did Last Summer almost verbatim, borrowing from actual killing scenes in each, and then spoofing them for comic effect.  This generally doesn't work.  The movies do have some successful setups, the best being Regina Hall (who steals every scene she has in the movie) doing a sendup of the opening to Scream 2, but instead of being killed by Ghostface as Jada Pinkett Smith is in the movie, she's killed by the audience as she keeps talking over the "scary movie" she's watching, Shakespeare in Love.  Hall sells the hell out of every line, landing every punchline, and it's easily the best scene in the movie.

The rest of the film doesn't work though.  It's not just that the film's humor is dated (you wouldn't expect a film from 2000 to have a lot of sensitivity toward racial and queer stereotypes, but it's still worth pointing out), it's that it's not really funny.  The spoofs are spot-on, particularly the homosexual undertones between Jon Abrahams' Bobby and Shawn Wayans' Ray (a closeted teenage John would've lost his mind rewatching the scene where the insanely cute Abrahams confesses to being gay), but they don't have enough actual humor.  The random nods to other films of the era (The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project, and bizarrely enough, The Usual Suspects) feel tacked on and not worth the time.  With the exception of Hall's scene, most of this reads like a series of "we're almost done for the night" SNL sketches that can't land.

Past Horror Month Reviews

1920's: The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera

1930's: The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dracula's Daughter, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Invisible Man, Mad Love, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Raven, Son of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London

1940's: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Cat People, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Invisible Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Ghost, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, Phantom of the Opera, She-Wolf of London, Son of Dracula, The Uninvited, The Wolf Man

1950's: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, Revenge of the Creature

1960's: The Devil Rides Out, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead,Village of the Damned

1970's: The Amityville Horror, Black Christmas, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Don't Look Now, Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man

1980's: Child's Play, The Evil Dead, The Fly, Friday the 13th, Gremlins, Hellraiser, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, The Thing

1990's-Present: Arachnophobia, The Blair Witch Project, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Candyman, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream