Get your own Free Home Page
Hoping the parody motif hasn’t killed itself with forgettable entries such as Spy Hard, Mafia, and Wrongfully Accused, the Wayans Brothers follow their own entry into the field (Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood) with this send-up of the latest round of dead-teenager movies, specifically the Scream trilogy. It combines scripts for two separate but similar projects, Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween and Last Summer I Screamed Because Friday the 13th Fell on Halloween, which both sat on the shelf almost too long to be timely anymore since one of the prerequisites for a good parody is that the thing it lampoons still register in short-term pop-culture memory. Luckily for the writers, the Scream and I Know What You Did folks kept churning out sequels (there’s Scream 4 talk floating around at Miramax), so with Keenen Ivory W. directing and Shawn and Marlon W. starring, Scary Movie found new life.
There’s not much to say about something that’s no more than a string of riffs on other films except to comment on the quality of the gags. And this thing’s got a pretty high gag-factor. The way body fluids and danglier parts of the male anatomy get proudly displayed, prompting at least three people at the showing I saw to walk out, escaping an NC-17 rating was its most noteworthy accomplishment; it’s also safe to say White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey won’t be very pleased with all the cannabis humor. It’s got energy in places, drawing on spirited turns by Carmen Electra, Shannon Elizabeth (American Pie), Cheri Oteri, relative newcomer Anna Faris as the Neve Campbell clone, Lochlyn Munro (Dead Man on Campus), Regina Hall (Love & Basketball), Jon Abrahams (Outside Providence), and Dave Sheridan (MTV’s “Buzzkill”), in addition to the Wayans guys. But some of their targets, such as Titanic, Riverdance, and the Budweiser commercials, have already been well-mined, leaving such bits as a funny Usual Suspects scene to try and redeem an almost exclusively low, lowbrow endeavor.
Since I had to go see it as part of my job, the nicest compliment I can pay Scary Movie is to say that it was just 85 minutes long. D+
Get your own Free Home Page