Nothing summarizes pop culture history quite like a nice omnibus movie parody. If only because their jokes demand that the audience recognizes the movies cliches being skewered, parodies like Blazing Saddles are little time capsules rigged with joy buzzers. Whoopie cushions and squirting flowers: caches of the movies everyone loves (or hates) enough to mock.
High time then for Scary movie, a send-up/wrap-up of the past five years of teen-centric slasher flicks that’s equal parts vulgarity and cleverness and surprisingly often, also somewhat funny.
The ostensible bull’s eye is Scream and its sequels-movies with such a high degree of awareness of themselves as genre flicks that they seem to come self-inoculated against parody. For all their so called hipness, though, they really still rely on pretty victims who act dumb and venomous killers who run slowly and fall down a lot, two of the tidbits Scary Movie snacks.
Scary Movie, by the way, was the working title of Scream whose distributors also brings you Scary Movie in a tidy display of media efficiency. It’s not the sole instance here of having your cake and eating it too. Happily from a box office point of view, the only way to effectively mock gratuitous jiggling and teen exploitation is to depict it. And so when tv tart Carmen Electra, as the first victim of the rubber masked slasher, flees across a lawn, she is conveniently stripped to her lacies, then pauses in the spray of a sprinkler. Tacky!
But while the fine distinction between parodic intent and ogling opportunity might be lost on some audience members, this R rated movie frequently uses vulgarity to get a laugh. The characters depicted are flimsy and superficial. The Wayans brothers are the minds behind this movie. Between them they have the mind of a snotty 14 year old and the vulgarity shows!