Solid

Scary Movie, the Wayans Brothers comedic satire of, well, scary movies, is enjoyable comedic fun. Well worth the $3.75 for a rental, it’s a laugh a minute (on average) that leaves you clapping at the end. They mock. It’s what they do. And they do it well. You may recognized shamed embarrassed carcasses of films like Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream 2, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream 3 . . . well, you get the picture. They know their source material and they mock it, and in most cases, deservedly so. Of course, there are some moments that make you turn your head, like the gym teacher scene, or the bathroom stall scene, or some other scene involving male genitalia. All in all, a pretty good rental, not for kids under 4 . . . feet tall. Use discretion, which translates to: If you don’t like scary movies, Sidney, you won’t get it.

Now, the tribute. In watching Scary Movie I couldn’t help but remember the good ole days of satirical mockery comedy. The days of Airplane, The Naked Gun, Airplane 2: The Sequel, Naked Gun 2 & a half – The Smell of Fear, well, you get the idea. These films brought similar styles of comedy but at such a rapid pace you’d have to watch them twice, three times, sometimes a gagillion times just to get all the jokes. Leslie Nielson’s dangerous wall-crawl across naked statues, Mrs. Cleaver speaking jive, O.J. Simpson getting beat up . . . a lot—these are moments of genius. The source of Scary Movie does not lie so much in the Scream films as these workings of comedy. Case in point: a cop asks a girl to look over some photographs, presumably of the suspects. Then he pulls out almost naked pictures of himself and asks, “What about this one? Or this one?” All the while, the girl plays it straight, saying “No,” “No,” and “No.” There’s even a salute to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Think I Know What You Did Last Summer and “I’m not quite dead.” Comic brilliance, and borrowed (it’s an homage) from Python, the Airplane and the Naked Gun eras. With a little practice, those times can come back.

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Scream if you catch all the movie references: Scary Movie
by Christian De Matteo

Solid

If you haven’t seen the Wayans’ other brilliant spoof, Don’t be a Menace to South Central While You’re Drinking Your Juice in the ‘Hood (breath) rent this when you rent Scary Movie. The Wayans owe a lot to the likes of Zucker, Zucker and Abrams (not a law firm but the guys responsible for The Naked Gun and all its sequels, the underrated Top Secret, the Airplane! movies and all the copycats that followed) and that’s more than obvious in this very on-target spoof of modern teenie-bopper horror flicks. Mocking their way through the Scream series, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Halloween H2O, and all the others of the last few years, the Wayans manage to up the ante on their own brand of perverse, gross-out humor, to a point where I was wondering why they weren’t slapped with an NC-17. (Exhibit A: A head impaled through the ears by genitalia.)

None of the humor in this is truly original, honestly; few jokes in the movie can’t be found with very little variation in any of the Naked Gun/Police Squad tapes. What makes the movie stand out is how the Wayans brothers put their own spin on the humor and how they cleverly apply it so correctly to the teen Horror genre. These guys have watched the movies they are spoofing carefully and know all the weak points and how to hit them. They are so well versed that they can even mock Kevin Williamson’s own mocking of the horror genre (look for Marlon’s great delivery of the Scream joke line “I’ll be right back”). There’s actually no where to hide for Kevin Williamson since the Wayans even take a moment out of mocking horror to take a blatant shot at Dawson’s Creek. (And a well-deserved one.)

As a whole, the movie actually even holds together well enough to complete an exact replica of a Scream story arc, and mocks all the holes in the teen horror plots by not only verbally bashing them but by leaving purposeful holes in their own.

Scary Movie is a very funny movie. There are certainly slow spots and a good number of jokes that try too hard, but the movie is well worth the viewing and maybe even a few after that. Much like the first Scream, the beginning is one of the very best parts of the movie. Actually, come to think about it, the Wayans got one up on Wes Craven… the beginning of the first Scream movie was the best part of the movie.

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Awards: IMdb

Full Cast & Crew: IMdb

Trivia: IMdb

Scary Movie was the working title of Scream.

The script for Scary Movie is actually a combination of two scripts Dimension Films bought in 1998: “Last Summer I Screamed Because Halloween Fell On Friday The 13^th” written by the Wayans brothers and Phil Beauman (the co-writer of Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood), and “Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween” by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (story writers for Spy Hard and co-writers of the upcoming Liberace). The latter was the working title for this project.

The tagline for the film was: “No mercy. No shame. No sequel”. In 2001, Dimension Films will release Scary Movie II (working title.) Hollywood. Emphasis on the “No shame!”

Budget: $19 million. Gross: $156.9 million.

Scary Movie

The Scary Movie Store

Solid

Trivia: IMdb