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Scary Movie
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| Rated:
R |
2000 |
Color |
88
minutes |
Awards |
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| Starring:
Jon Abrahams, Rick Ducommun, Carmen Electra, Shannon Elizabeth, Anna Faris, Kurt Fuller, Regina Hall, Lochlyn Munro, Cheri Oteri, Dave Sheridan, Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Kelly Coffield, David L. Lander |
| Director:
Keenen Ivory Wayans |
| Screen
Writer: Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Buddy Johnson, Phil Beauman, Jason Friedberg, Aaron Seltzer |
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| Music:
Chuck D., Flavor Flav, David Kitay, Dee Dee Ramone, Joey Ramone, Johnny Ramone, Tommy Ramone |
| Movie
Co.: Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, Dimension Films, Gold/Miller Productions, Wayans Bros. Entertainment |
| Critique
Section |
Trivia |
HugeReviews.com's
Official Rating System:
Pathetic
Wimpy
Solid Super
HUGE |
| HugeReviews
Critics: |
|
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Mike
Flanagan
Solid |
Christian
De Matteo
Solid |
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| Store
- Relevant Sites:
Official
Site, |
|
 |
The Scary Movie Store

Photo © Copyright Dimension Films |

Photo © Copyright Dimension Films |

Photo © Copyright Dimension Films |

Photo © Copyright Dimension Films |
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| HugeReviews.com
Reviews:
Scary
Movie: A (possibly unintentional) Tribute Film
by Michael
Flanagan
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 |
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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 13th”
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.
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