Scary Movie

SCARY MOVIE

Rating: B+
Let's make it clear right from the start - a lot of the humor in this film is crude. But much of it also happens to be funny, as popular films from recent years become the targets for some wicked satire.

Taking the brunt of the spoofing are Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Personally, I liked both of those films to varying degrees, but when one character rhetorically asks,"Did Scream have a plot? Did I Know What You Did Last Summer make any sense at all?", I have to concede he has a point. Along the way, the filmmakers also hurl barbs at The Blair Witch Project, The Matrix, Titanic, and even manage to work in a clever reference to The Usual Suspects.

You might ask why, since I slammed Me, Myself & Irene for its gutter humor, I liked Scary Movie. I can only reply that the jokes in this movie were funny, while the ones in the other film weren't. I think it has something to do with the fact that Scary Movie is a parody - the crudity is often just taking the implications of the spoofed films to their outrageous extremes. For example, having the Scream-like killer tear off the clothes of the female victim he's chasing would simply be silly and gratuitous if the film was playing things straight. But as a satire, it's a sly commentary on the peekaboo sexuality those other films wallow in to attract their teenage audiences. Similarly, any film school graduate will tell you the killer's long-bladed knife is decidedly phallic in its symbolism. Scary Movie responds with a takeoff on the opening of Scream 2 where this phallic symbolism becomes literal. You'll either laugh or be disgusted, but you sure won't see it on television.

One of the key reasons the gags in this film work is that the filmmakers truly understand their subject; the jokes they make often reveal a keen insight into what made the original films popular with their audiences. It's also apparent they worked hard to match the lighting, camera angles, and moods of the scenes they were lampooning. As a result, the gags don't seem like cheap shots but instead like good-natured teasing.

That's not to say that all the jokes work. Whenever director Keenen Ivory Wayans strays from riffing on other movies, he tends to get into trouble. One pothead character becomes tiresome about a minute after he debuts onscreen. A scene with a strange phys ed teacher in the girls' locker room goes too far and is entirely predictable. Another scene between the killer and his victim plays its goriness for laughs, but comes awfully close to turning your stomach instead of splitting your sides. Fortunately, for every joke that misfires, there are plenty which hit their mark dead-on.

If you stay past the end credits, you'll see a final scene tacked onto the end of the film.