Scary? Funny! (Scary Movie (DVD))

Member Name: roger_smith

Product:	Scary Movie (DVD)
Date:	20/10/00 (17 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Damn funny

Disadvantages: Too crude

My first reaction to Scary Movie, before seeing it, was: why? Surely the Scream films were already enough of a parody of the slasher genre. How do you make a parody of a parody?

Scary Movie plunges right ahead, and finds plenty of spoof-worthy clichés and conventions. Quite a few of these are amusing, many of them are obvious, but all are overshadowed by the film's outrageous tendency toward raunch. Director Keenen Ivory Wayans, who made his career with this kind of genre send-up (I'm Gonna Get You Sucka and the TV series "In Living Color" having launched the cottage industry of Wayans brothers), is determined to out-gross the Farrelly brothers, in every sense of the word. Thus a take-off on a particularly bloody moment from A Nightmare on Elm Street swamps the hair-gel scene from There's Something About Mary.

Even more prominent is male genitalia, both of the hanging and rampant variety. In a locker room scene, an ultra-butch girls' gym teacher (transvestite? transgender? not quite sure) inadvertently lets something slip out of the bottom of his/her shorts - a special effect that had a preview audience howling with grossed-out hilarity.

But the film's wildest moment comes when a man sits in a public bathroom next to a glory hole, and -- no, I won't spoil it, if that's the right word. This sequence does raise the question of what you have to do today to get an NC-17 rating; one of the old standards was surely the appearance, however fleeting, of an erect male member. That's been put by the wayside in this movie, which arrives with an R (thus giving new meaning to the descriptive term "a hard R"). Or does the ratings board think that broad comedy somehow defuses the sexual quotient of a movie?

Newcomer Anna Faris, in her first film role, is unexpectedly smart and ingratiating, in the normal-yet-tormented part associated with Neve Campbell and Jennifer Love Hewitt. Most of the chee
secake comes courtesy of a dumb jock's idea of beautiful women: Carmen Electra and Shannon Elizabeth (she of American Pie, a hard-R movie that had the decency to hide its non-flaccid moments in tube socks and pastry). Electra is dispatched in the opening bit, a right-on spoof of the Drew Barrymore section of the first Scream, while Elizabeth displays some comedy chops in a death scene that has her decapitated head taunting the ghost-face killer. The director's brothers, Marlon and Shawn, are also on board, the latter as a BMOC who doesn't seem to understand just how gay he is, although everybody else gets it.

The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project sneak in there, in brief blackouts that look funnier in the trailers than they are in the movie. It's like that; the jokes tend to land, then disappear, though they are undeniably funny for a second or two. Still, Scary Movie is destined to be remembered not for its laugh-per-minute ratio, but for breaking a barrier of crudeness in mainstream movies. You have been warned.

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