SCARY MOVIE
Just a bad, bad idea

  There's a certain pointlessness to reviewing a movie like this.  You either think a stoned Marlon Wayans with an afro pick in his hair saying "I see dead people!" is funny, or you don't.

I was suspicious of this movie when I first heard of it under its first title, Scream If  You Know What I Did Last Halloween, or something like that, which is an even worse title than that Don't Be A Menace... movie.  (these titles are becoming something of a Wayans tradition)  Any movie seeking to spoof Scream is going to have a tough go at it; are people forgetting that Scream was mostly parody in and of itself?  You can't spoof a parody, and you can't send up camp.  Well, you can try but you'll usually look like a fool.  And judging from the opening-weekend grosses of this movie, it looks like the audiences forgot that too.  But the dropoff was quick, and I imagine in a few weeks, nobody's going to remember this movie happened.

Scary Movie exhaustively repeats what seems like every last line, plot twist, character, shot and scene from Scream and tries having fun with them, usually failing.  The movie gets a little more life when it looks for laughs elsewhere, but not that much more.  It's this kind of exhaustive single-mindedness that dooms Scary Movie like so many bad Saturday Night Live skits that went on way too long.

There are any number of gross-out scenes which serve to gross one out but aren't actually very funny in and of themselves, making me cringe but not often actually making me laugh.  You can't coast indefinitely on raunchiness; there has to be a joke in there somewhere.

The gags are also so grounded in late 1999 and early 2000 that it'll be a wonder if anybody can even make sense of it a year from now.  Airplane! was funny and still is; in a few months, is anybody even going to remember what "Whazzuuuuup?!?!?" was all about?  Scary Movie sticks to mostly parodying movies that came out only in the last few years, most of which have already been deservedly forgotten, it seems.  As for the ones that are remembered, well, even the spoofs of The Matrix are lame, not to mention Deuce Bigelow beat this movie to it and was a lot funnier.

Still, there are a few chuckles.  Shannon Elizabeth gets a hilarious death scene that had me howling, as did...uh...whoever that girl was in the theater.  But the timing and pacing of most of the jokes are awful; drawing themselves out, repeating themselves, and just wheezing into oblivion.  In Living Color usually worked in part because it was only a half hour long; Saturday Night Live frequently fails because everything just goes on and on.  Scary Movie feels a lot more like bad Saturday Night Live than even bad In Living Color.

All this having been said, the sledgehammer comedy of director Keenen Ivory Wayans (and at least two siblings that show up here) appeals to no few people, and like I said, you either find this kind of thing hilarious or you don't.  Go with your gut, people, and remember this: does six (yes, six) screenwriters sound to you like they'd make a movie better, or worse?

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