Not Exactly Scream

As I have often noted in my horror movie reviews, I like slasher films. A lot. They are probably my favorite sub-genre of horror, which is in turn my favorite genre of film. I think there’s a lot to love about slashers, with the formula providing the opportunity to build real tension, get people invested in the characters, feel shock and sadness when a beloved character gets axed. When done right, and not all slashers do it right, a good slasher can make you feel, and fear, and get invested in a way that not all genres are capable of.

This isn’t exclusive to standard slashers, either. A good slasher parody can invoke all these feelings while also using comedy to relieve some of the tension. Certainly the most famous of films that is considered a parody, Scream, does such a good job at being a meta-commentary on the whole genre that it finds ways to be truly funny while still also being a solid horror film. But there are others that can flirt with one side of the line or the other – The Blackening, Cabin in the Woods, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil – while still finding ways to lovingly be part of the genre they’re subverting.

Scary Movie is not that kind of parody. Created by the Wayans Brothers (directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans, written by Marlon and Shawn Wayans), the film is a parody of two modern slasher hits – Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. You would think mashing those two films together would provide plenty of fodder for good parodic situations, but apparently the part of the equation that the Wayans forgot to include was the “good” part. This is an obnoxious, loud, and stupidly offensive parody film that doesn’t actually have anything to say about slasher films, horror movies, or comedy in general. It’s a complete waste of time when it isn’t purposely punching down to mock anyone the creators think is “beneath” them.

One night, a popular high school girl, Drew Decker (Carmen Electra), is killed by a masked man in her own home. Soon after, another girl from the same high school, Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris), gets a call from a man threatening to kill her. That masked man shows up in her house and she has to fight him off, and flee, to save her life. She thinks it’s the fault of her boyfriend, Bobby Prinze (Jon Abrahams), who showed up at her house right after, too close for it to be coincidence… except, seemingly, it is as Bobby has an alibi when she gets another call from the man while Bobby is in jail.

She and her friends – Marlon Wayans as Shorty Meeks, Regina Hall as Brenda Meeks, Shawn Wayans as Ray Wilkins, Shannon Elizabeth as Buffy Gilmore, Lochlyn Munro as Greg Philippe – begin to suspect that the current killings might be related to an incident a year earlier when they accidentally ran over and killed a man. They covered up the crime, but someone starts sending them notes saying, “I know what you did last Halloween”, which scares them. But as one by one the friends begin to get killed off, the pool of potential killers leads Cindy to doubt everyone, suspect it could be anyone, and be prepared if someone she knows is the violent sociopath at the center of it all.

I honestly think trying to parody Scream (which much of the meat of this film follows) is a hard thing to do. Scream already rides that line of being a parody to begin with, sitting in conversation with slashers that came before to poke fun of the genre while riding directly within it. Parodying a parody feels too much like making a copy of a copy, as all the good material was already used up the first time, leaving you to strain to come up with any new material to set your jokes against. And, yes, Scary Movie feels like it’s straining constantly.

This really shouldn’t be a surprise as the script that was developed had at least some content taken from a Scream parody written by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the duo famously behind some of the worst parody films ever made. Their films, including Spy Hard, which came before Scary Movie, and then Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, Vampires Suck, The Starving Games, and Superfast!, all of which came out after, are considered so tragically bad that they effectively put the whole of the parody genre on ice for years. And it’s their brand of “humor” that very frequently shows up in this film, added to by a seeming kind of anti-comedy injected by the Wayans team.

To go over many of the not funny things in this film, we see a preponderance of jokes based on other films, like The Blair Witch Project, The Usual Suspects, and The Matrix, as well as Budweiser commercials of the era, and you should easily be able to know the exact scenes or moments these parodies pick because parodies during this time period always went for the laziest, easiest references. Bear in mind there aren’t really “jokes” for these scenes, they just inject a similar sequence to what you already know and consider that the whole of the punchline. And it’s not done with subtlety or a knowing deadpan wink for the camera; the film goes broad and loud, as if mugging to say, “wasn’t that funny?” It was not.

Additionally, the film absolutely loves to punch down. It thinks gay people are funny just for existing, and it really likes the idea that gay people are also molesters that love forcing themselves on other people. It also thinks trans people are hilarious, especially when it’s a man pretending to be a woman just so he can perv on young girls. Finally, the film really thinks that making fun of a mentally handicapped man is the absolute height of comedy. Whether or not there’s a line cast off at the end of the film to justify any of these characters maybe faking being gay or mentally handicapped (it doesn’t even try to make up for its anti-trans humor) that doesn’t change the fact that you just watched nearly an hour and a half of horrible, cringe-worthy humor that prefers to be mean instead of finding things to actually be funny about.

Oh, and the film hates fat people, too, although that should have been obvious already. Picking on fat people is a time honored tradition for any “comedy” movie that likes to punch down, so naturally they would be a target as well.

To be clear, you can do a parody without any of this kind of humor. The ZAZ team (who were smart enough to come nowhere near these films… right up until David Zucker directed Scary Movie 3 through 5 while Jim Abrahams also wrote Scary Movie 4) managed to make a lot of very funny works that didn’t punch down like this (such as Airplane!, Top Secret!, and Police Squad!). You can make a great parody just working over the material and inserting a ton of subtle, deadpan jokes, but that’s just not the style of writers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer nor of the Wayans Brothers, either.

And it’s weird because sometimes the film does get it. For instance, the creative team cast Anna Faris in the lead role of Cindy Campbell, and Faris is perfect for the role. She has this innocence to her performance, giving a subtle, often deadpan reaction, to everything that happens around her. She’s just as good playing an actual character in a slasher film, when this movie requires it, as she is playing the comedic straight-woman to all the wackiness happening around her. If the film could have focused on comedy like this, it would have been better. Not great, but better.

Instead, most of the humor can be exemplified by characters like Marlon Wayans’s Shorty Meeks. Marlon doesn’t act in this film, he mugs and screams and says everything as loud and stupidly as he can. His performance grates on the nerves, in large part because Marlon mistakes “being loud” for “being funny. He’s not funny in the slightest, at any point in this film, and his kind of performance and humor is most of what this movie has to offer. This is ninety-nine percent of the film, terrible comedy said as loud as possible, and by the end of it I was already so tired of the schtick I could even bear watching any more of these… of which there are four to go.

I’d say this film squandered a good premise, but in reality we already got a good parody of a slasher film. It’s called Scream. That film does everything right, providing horror and comedy and making it all blend together into a perfectly enjoyable film. Scary Movie just does all that again with less subtlety, less grace, and a much meander spirit. And, in doing so, it forgets to bring the comedy to this comedic film. Scary Movie is just awful, an opinion I had when I watched it back in 2000 and one that wasn’t shaken when I finally came to see this film again. I gave it a chance, as I do for everything I watch for this sight, but Scary Movie failed me. Twice.

And yet somehow this film made $278 Mil on a $19 Mil budget, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. Did people just want to watch a soul-sucking void of anti-comedy? Because that’s the only reason that would make sense why this film was so successful it spawned four sequels and an entire awful version of the parody genre. I will probably never understand why people liked this movie because I just hate it. This film is anti-comedy garbage, start to finish.