Last night, a girlfriend of mine and I decided to rent a movie. We were originally going to see The Perfect Storm, but decided we were in the mood to laugh instead. So, we looked up the movies and decided on seeing Scary Movie. Another friend of mine had highly recommended the movie, and I was stoked about seeing it. After all, I thought I had a great sense of humor and I was totally in the mood to laugh.
Notice I used the word ’’thought’’. Before heading to the video store, I was cracking jokes and laughing with my friend about this stupid spider that wouldn’t die on my car. You see, every morning, I would wake up, and there would be a spider web attached to my car. I would park in different positions every night, but this dang spider web would be there every morning. We found the culprit - this disgusting, hairy spider - spinning a web as we got into my car. The thing was whipping around in the wind, but wouldn’t die. I sprayed it with car freshener, and it still wouldn’t die. It hung on until my friend smashed it with her shoe once at the parking lot.
That was the funniest thing that happened all night.
Now, I can totally appreciate a good parody. I loved the movies spoofing The Brady Bunch. I’m Gonna Get You Sucka and Naked Gun are some of my favorites. But, Scary Movie just completely fell flat.
Unfortunately, many of the jokes in the movie depend on drugs, farts, and dick-jokes. (Excuse the terminology.) They made fun of this one character, played by one of the Wayans brothers, because they thought him to be gay. What’s so funny about that? I just wasn’t amused. The fact that the characters based a lot of their actions around dope really bothered me. Why did they have to resort to this kind of humor for laughs?
There were three times that I found myself genuinely laughing. The first was when James Van der Beek made a cameo appearance. The second was when they advertised Amistad II during the movie scene. The final was the ending, where they parodied The Usual Suspects, which salvaged the movie for me.
I’d love to write about the plot of this movie. Only, the one I can find is very thin. Cindy and her friends are being chased by a killer and try to figure out who it is. I think. I don’t know, as I was lost throughout the entire movie with the parodies to all of the other movies in there.
I’m very disappointed that Keenan Ivory Wayans would be involved with something like this. I loved him so much on In Living Color, as well as in a plethora of other films. It’s clear that he just shot this movie to help his younger and lesser-known brothers out. I was surprised that Kim (the Wayans sister) wasn’t anywhere to be found in this film. If you have to break it down to basic directing, I’d say that the direction was relatively good. All of the necessary angles were there, and the scene set-ups were pretty good.
There were a bunch of continuity flaws, too. My friends told me to let them go, as this was supposed to be a parody. Okay, great. Fine. It’s a parody, but it’s poorly done. For example, Gail Hailstorm (Cheri Oteri) has a line about trouble in a small college town, as though the characters are all in college. I found myself incredibly confused when they turned out to be in high school. Stupid stuff like that bothered me.