Horrors

My thoughts on Scary Movie

Released in 2000, the original Scary Movie was a slapdash enterprise designed to allow various members of the Wayans family to skewer the then-current rise in meta-slasher films inspired by the mammoth success of the 1996 game-changer Scream and to allow Miramax, who produced both, to profit mightily off of said skewering. It wasn’t much of a movie to be sure—all it really did was prove just how hard it was to properly spoof a film that was already serving as a knowing subversion of its genre and lacked the genuine wit and affection that the Wayans brought to their delightful blaxploitation goof I’m Gonna Git You, Sucka!—but the sheer outrageousness of some of the humor (which seemed to be more of a reaction to the previous summer’s American Pie) was occasionally bracing and it did offer viewers a first glimpse of an inspired new comedienne in newcomer Anna Faris. Over the next few years, there were four sequels (only the first of which was done by the Wayans, who were pushed aside by the good folks at Miramax), each one more dire than the last, and when the last one disappeared from the collective memory after popping up in theaters, I suspect that few mourned their passing.

Of course, after laying fallow for a few years itself after its own series of increasingly uninspired sequels, the actual Scream franchise came roaring back to life a few years ago with a combination legacy sequel/reboot that brought back familiar faces like Neve Campbell (except for when Paramount didn’t want to pay her quote) and Courtney Cox for the old fans along with a group of hot young performers like Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barerra (except for when Paramount elected to fire her for making pro-Palestinian statements online, inspiring Ortega to bail as well) to attract a target audience that was not even conceived when Scream 3 hit theaters, making a ton of money and inspiring a wave of similar hybrids. As a result, it probably should come as no surprise that the franchise that made tons of money making sophomoric sport of those films should come back as well with its own revival goofing on the new Scream movies as well as other key horror titles of the last few years. It should probably also come as no surprise that the gulf in quality between the new iteration, inevitably called Scary Movie, and the original (which was hardly anyone’s idea of a classic) is at least as wide, if not more so, than the gap between the new Scream films and the one that started it all.

What passes for a plot here is basically a piss-take (among other fluids) of the storyline of 2022’s Scream and the recent Halloween trilogy that kicks off with Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif)—get it?—getting attacked by Ghostface, prompting the return of her pill-popping older sister Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan), along with her not-at-all-suspicious boyfriend Jack (Cameron Scott Robert). It turns out that Tuesday and Sara are the daughters of franchise stalwart Cindy Campbell (Faris), who has transformed into a heavily armed recluse awaiting the return of her old nemesis. Before long, Ghostface does indeed show up to chop their way through a cast that includes both the familiar likes of Brenda (Regina Hall), who has essentially turned into Octavia Spencer’s character in Ma (which the film cheerfully namechecks in case you forgot about it), stoner Shorty (Marlon Wayans), still-closeted Ray (Shawn Wayans), ambitious reporter Gail Hailstorm (Cheri Oteri) and mentally challenged Deputy Doofy (Dave Sheridan) and newer younger characters, including one young woman who really enjoys butt plugs and another who is so strident in her political correctness that even while being stabbed, she is correcting a bystander about her pronouns.

As was the case with the previous Scary Movie films, this one is little more than a laundry list of gags that mostly revolve around recent horror films—besides the aforementioned Scream and Halloween reboots, there are also gags inspired by the likes of Sinners, MEGAN, Get Out, Nosferatu, The Substance, Final Destination, Weapons and the proverbial many many more. As was also the case, none of the numerous contributors to the screenplay seem to have any real thoughts about these films and their current popularity or much of anything else. Essentially, the film has a single comedic concept that it repeats for 90 minutes—replicate a key moment from a familiar film and then add a scatological twist that will send the 13-year-old boys who have managed to sneak into the multiplex auditorium into giggle fits. As lazy as this sounds, there are times when the film can’t even be bothered to do that—there is a bit involving Art the Clown from the hyperviolent Terrifier films that would be practically indistinguishable from the source were it not for the fact that those movies, as crudely low-budget as they are, are done with slightly more style and flair than director Michael Tiddes can muster up here.

There are roughly 900 jokes or so on display in this film and of them, maybe five brought something resembling a smile to my face and one of those was the end credit revelation that this was shot at Tyler Perry’s studio complex in Atlanta. The vast majority of the rest are either uninspired goofs on the movies that inspired it—one of the kids in the Weapons spoof is running around in the dark and gets hit by a car—or jokes disgusting enough to once again demonstrate that the MPAA is little more than a joke. In promoting the film, the Wayans have proclaimed that with this film, they aim to take on the whole “woke” mindset and kill off cancel culture with the power of laughter. Based on the available evidence, this appears to be more of a cover to allow them to trot out the same tired bits of homophobic humor that came across as ugly and insensitive 25 years ago and which has not exactly aged well in the ensuing years. (You get the feeling that the Wayans family elected to return to the fold solely so they could finally get around to making a Brokeback Mountain joke.) The cast flails about but t not even they can do much with a narrative that lacks the dramatic spine and biting humor of a skit in a latter-day Bob Hope special and while Faris is still a welcome sight for comedy fans, she can’t help things much because the film keeps her off the screen for far too long.

As someone who has never found this franchise to be particularly amusing—even at its best, it was always a couple of horsehead bookends shy of reaching the heights of Student Bodies—my dislike of Scary Movie should probably not come as much of a surprise. However, even those with a taste for defiantly lowbrow humor are likely to find this film more desperate in its attempts to schlock and amuse/appall than anything else, particularly since you can almost certainly find stuff more wild and outrageous online than is on display here, and those looking for a jape on current horror trends will probably be more bewildered that things like the super-pretentious offerings of Ari Aster and Osgood Perkins (save for a blink-and-you-miss-it riff on Longlegs with Chris Elliot aping Nicolas Cage, which sounds funnier in theory than it proves to be here) have been pushed to the side for lame variations on jokes that you have already heard before along with enough padding (such an extended takeoff of that notable horror favorite John Wick and a parade of cameos, all but one of which fail to do much of anything) to stretch things out to feature length and even that is thanks in no small part to a very extended end credits sequence. Even thought no sane person could have held out much hope that this film was going to somehow prove to be a modern comedy classic, the sheer laziness on display in every frame is so overt that anyone foolish enough to go see it will come away from it feeling as much contempt for the filmmakers as they clearly had for them.