Scary Movie
In a way, “Scary Movie” was the beginning of the end for parody movies of this sort. Initially conceived by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (who had previously done “Spy Hard”), they would spin off into doing “Date Movie,” “Epic Movie,” “Disaster Movie” and other parodies that were nothing but sight gags, and lost what the genre could be at its best. Meanwhile, the “Scary Movie” franchise would progress to do basically the same thing, but within the framework of the horror genre. Keenan Ivory Wayans’s initial film in the franchise would be the high water mark for the series; that it wouldn’t be nearly this good again (even in the Wayans-directed sequel from 2001) is an example of how little imagination the genre has had in it recently.
One of the things that makes “Scary Movie” work is how closely it hues to “Scream,” and one of the funniest parts in the movie is when Shorty (Marlon Wayans) flat-out acknowledges it in the film. This is very much parody in the vein of “Airplane!” and “Young Frankenstein,” where the framework of the parody starts with poking fun at a particular film, then layering more comedy on top of it. What separates “Scary Movie” from those films, though, is that this film also deals with modern pop culture. It was an idea that started to take hold in the genre in the 1980s, but it feels like “Scary Movie” is the tipping point where these movies stop trying to be timeless, and move more into throwing references into the film every few minutes.
“Scary Movie” is another tipping point, as well, and it’s where vulgarity really starts to inhabit these films in a significant way. Of course, “Blazing Saddles” and “Airplane!” have vulgarity, as well, but this was made post-“There’s Something About Mary,” and so, the bar had been raised for what was “acceptable” vulgarity in comedy, and Wayans and co. push it to the limits here. As such, a lot of the jokes don’t really hold up well. This is never more accurate than it is with Miss Man (Jayne Trcka), Cindy’s physical education teacher which is one of the most absurd, and horrifying transgender jokes anyone has ever put into a major film. By comparison, the glory hole joke involving Ray (Shawn Wayans)- who always seems to present himself as gay- is tame, even when a dick impales him. Oh, and then there’s the pubic hair joke with Cindy (Anna Faris), and later, when she’s blasted all the way to the ceiling when her boyfriend has an orgasm. And what about how, when Carmen Electra’s Drew is being chased down in the opening sequence one of her breast implants is removed? How this film managed to get away with an R rating boggles the mind.
All that being said, there’s still a lot I enjoy about “Scary Movie,” and it’s where Wayans isn’t trying to be vulgar, but real is playing to how stupid some of these conventions are. Regina Hall’s death in the movie theatres slays every time, with how it subverts our expectations of how that scene is going to go. Shannon Elizabeth’s Buffy seeing her boyfriend get murdered while on stage during a “dramatic reading” is one of those scenes you can point to and say, “Hollywood- by and large- had no clue what to do with her”; Wayans does, and she’s terrific. Anna Faris is a terrific heroine, and that she got her own comedic franchise to work with is the only good thing that can be said about this film. The pot humor is this film is stupid but also hilarious. And this film’s Ghost Face is as iconic a spoof on a villain as Ghost Face was in “Scream” as a legitimate villain. It’s a shame that this type of parody just devolved from here, though, but good on Wayans for giving us one more pretty great one before the downward spiral.
