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SCARY MOVIE 2

Dimension Films' SCARY MOVIE 2
© 2001 Dimension Films

I have a modest proposal for Dimension Films. I would like to shoot a movie of me taking an 86-minute dump and distribute it on 2,000 screens across America. It will cost under $80 million and will look better and be about as funny as SCARY MOVIE 2.

Now if you're already laughing at the idea of a man taking an 86-minute dump, or if the sound of the word "dump" is inherently funny to you, then you might get a chuckle or two out of SCARY MOVIE 2. The audience of 19-year-olds I saw the movie with laughed at every bodily function joke in the movie, although since they were all laughing and yelling before the movie even started, I'm discounting their reaction. I will say that they seemed a little mystified when the movie was suddenly over, but maybe they had never become aware of the fact that there wasn't really any plot to end.

When SCARY MOVIE was released last summer part of its advertising tag line was "No sequel," but sadly Dimension Films broke its sacred trust with the audience after the movie made a bazillion dollars, and the studio decided it was essential to get a sequel out one year after the first film opened. In the resulting panic something masquerading as a film was indeed released after months of audience testing and endless reshoots. It's entirely possible, in fact, that reshoots are being done on SCARY MOVIE 2 as you read this. For all the effort and money that went into this movie, SCARY MOVIE 2 looks only slightly more expensive than a MAD TV sketch and is much less funny.

Apparently the reason it was vital to make SCARY MOVIE 2 was because there were some very important movies that needed to be made fun of. Movies like DUDE, WHERE'S MY CAR, HOLLOW MAN, STIGMATA, THE HAUNTING and CHARLIE'S ANGELS. If you haven't committed every shot of these movies to memory you're going to be awfully confused by SCARY MOVIE 2.

James Woods and Natasha Lyonne parody THE EXORCIST in SCARY MOVIE 2

© 2001 Dimension Films

The film starts off reasonably well with a parody of THE EXORCIST. That's not a bad topic for a parody, were it not for the fact that THE EXORCIST has already been parodied about a million times, in everything from SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE (in the '70s no less) to the Leslie Nielsen movie REPOSSESSED. I hate to drop this on the hip filmmakers behind SCARY MOVIE 2, but by the time Nielsen gets around to parodying something, it's over, baby. It's done. James Woods does a good Max Von Sydow impression, although the bulk of his role is spent on the toilet (again, if the word "toilet" perks up your ears, run out and see the movie). Marlon Brando was originally going to play Woods' role, but he was too sick to film SCARY MOVIE 2. How I envy him.

Granted, the EXORCIST parody has absolutely nothing to do with SCARY MOVIE 2's "plot" a term I use loosely. The adorable Anna Faris returns from the original SCARY MOVIE as Cindy Campbell, and somehow she gets involved in a campus science experiment that requires her to stay in a haunted house with a group of other students (played by Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Tori Spelling, Christopher Masterson, Kathleen Robertson and Regina Hall). Conducting the experiment is a horny professor (Tim Curry) and his handicapped assistant (MR. SHOW's David Cross), while Chris Elliot plays the creepy caretaker of the house.

That's pretty much it as far as plot is concerned. Characters come and go, often disappearing for 20 or 30 minutes at a time. While there are some running jokes (Masterson of MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE has a puppy-love relationship with Cindy that is expressed entirely through schoolboy sadism), often the jokes are simply repeated (in one case, five or six lines of a previous comedy routine are repeated verbatim). Most of the jokes go on about five minutes past the point where we get it, already. There's even a parody of a Nike sneakers commercial that seems to run about 10 minutes.

Tori Spelling, Kathleen Robertson, Chris Elliot, Marlon Wayans and Regina Hall join the cast of SCARY MOVIE 2

© 2001 Dimension Films

Parodying THE EXORCIST is in one respect a smart thing to do compared to what happens throughout the rest of SCARY MOVIE 2. THE EXORCIST is, after all, a classic movie that almost everyone has seen, and it's in the public mind because it was reissued last year. The other older movie lampooned is THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, a film I'll bet SCARY MOVIE 2's target audience of 19-year-olds has never seen or heard of. Then there are lengthy, excruciating send-ups of HOLLOW MAN, THE HAUNTING and STIGMATA. Uh, does anyone out there really remember anything that happened in HOLLOW MAN, THE HAUNTING and STIGMATA? The big problem here is that HOLLOW MAN and THE HAUNTING are funnier without intending to be than SCARY MOVIE 2 is after two months of reshoots.

By the time it gets around to an endless parody of CHARLIE'S ANGELS, it becomes clear that SCARY MOVIE 2's attention span regarding movie history is limited to a year or two. Apparently the concept is to do a yearly genre-movie wrap-up and lampoon films that audiences have just seen. But HOLLOW MAN and STIGMATA were box office bombs, and THE HAUNTING is such a lame movie that nobody really remembers anything about it. All of this could be forgiven had the Wayans brothers and their screenwriters come up with some really funny punchlines to pay off their laborious set-ups, but much of the time they just don't bother. The point of parody (as brilliantly illustrated by movies like YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, AIRPLANE! and TOP SECRET) is to set up a familiar, cliché situation, and then put an extra twist on it to pay off the joke. But ever since HOT SHOTS, PART DEUX, filmmakers seem to think it's enough just to visually rehash a scene from a movie so the audience can go "Oh, I get it, that's from STAR WARS." Hardy har har. Where's the joke? In SCARY MOVIE 2 we get a rehash of a scene from THE HAUNTING where a skeleton jumps up out of a pile of ashes. The exact same thing happens...and the characters just run away. What was the point of simply repeating this not-funny scene from another movie?

Even more confounding is the film's recycling of a joke from that modern classic...DUDE, WHERE'S MY CAR? Yes, it's the fabled tattoo joke you've all seen from the trailer, only with different words tattooed on the characters' backs. So what we're getting is a parody of a farce. I'm sorry, but at this point I actually became confused and uneasy. Was there some sort of existential game being played out that I didn't understand? Nah, not when the rest of the movie consists of fart jokes and trash-talking parrots.

Even HANNIBAL isn't safe from Keenen Ivory Wayan's SCARY MOVIE 2

© 2001 Dimension Films

There are two comic performances in SCARY MOVIE 2. Elliott throws himself into the role of the intentionally loathsome caretaker, while Cross does everything he can with the role we have now seen in every gross-out comedy of the past three years: the bitter handicapped person. Left to their own devices Elliott and Cross could have made a movie about 500 times funnier than SCARY MOVIE 2 (in fact, Elliott's recent appearance on DAVID LETTERMAN was way funnier than anything in SCARY MOVIE 2). Unfortunately, the two men are rarely left to their own devices here: their often improvisational performances are so brutally sliced and diced for nanosecond-long attention spans that most of their work is done in vain.

The other performers are squandered to varying degrees. Faris is inherently appealing and lovely, and she's game enough to do tons of goofy, oddball thingsbut she has no character to play and the movie is so unfocused it can't make her a likeable heroine. Masterson, too, is game and of all the younger actors comes closest to creating a consistent comic character. The Wayans Brothers are the Wayans Brothers, and the implied attempts to lampoon how black people are portrayed in genre movies never pay off. Spelling's character seems like the victim of an extremely severe retroactive editin fact, I have no idea what happened to her or Curry's character by the end of the movie. The mouth-watering Robertson is on hand just to skank about in sleazy outfits, and I'll admit that's one of the few elements of the movie that held my attention. Richard Moll, who plays a ghost, must be wishing he were back on NIGHT COURT.

If you have read all the way to the bottom of this review your attention span is way, way too long to like SCARY MOVIE 2. You can also read, which indicates that your IQ is much too high for this film. However, experience tells me that SCARY MOVIE 2 will still make much more money than it deserves. And this year's crop of movies are so damned lousy that I can't imagine any of them being remembered by the end of the year, let alone next summer. But if your dream is to see incoherent parodies of LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER and SWORDFISH, get in line now for SCARY MOVIE 3.