Scream was advertized as a knowing parody of the horror genre. While it has certain elements of that, viewers expecting the whole Airplane! shebang must’ve been most surprised to find an actual horror movie embedded in there…
Kevin Williamson’s Scream came about at an opportune time, heralding a new form of teenager-oriented film and television that’s actually better exemplified by Joss Whedon…though Williamson sure had his say. And that Scream scribe has an interesting legend behind his creation’s, er, creation, holing himself up in a Palm Springs hotel room like some bargain basement Hunter S. Thompson to bang out the screenplay in three days. This created the impression that any dumb, untrained schmuck could copy Williamson’s approach to a T, to similar success – hence a particular wave of watery ‘90s horror, which I shall not honor with specific examples. This all ignores the truth behind what Williamson did, that Scream was already carefully planned out beforehand, and rewritten afterwards, and that the man had some relationship with Hollywood to begin with.
Anyway, Scream…Epochal, inexpensive, distinct…Yeah, except for the fact it’s a meta movie, it’s certainly the sort of thing asking for a meta movie about it. And if Scream is a dumbed-down variation on Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, then whatever borrows from it’ll be equally dumbed-down. Nothing against the Airplane! style of spoofery (I god danged love Airplane!), but it seems to attract a worse crowd of copycats than, well, Scream. Artfully deadpan slapstick tomfoolery is deceptively complex, and it takes more than having a fart joke open your movie to duplicate Airplane!’s lofty heights.
Now, Scream REALLY seemed to inspire the would-be parodists, for in the half decade following its existence, multitudes of spoof scripts came about. So many that the inevitable actual spoof is an amalgamation of three different scripts by six different men…and it’s hard to say how much (if any) material was used from where. Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween, the in-progress production was called. This title-by-combination reveals the hand of the Wayans Brothers (go ahead, guys, take a bow), as their ZAZ-esque former films employ a similar tactic, especially Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. But with a rival Scream spoof getting put out by Rhino (who?!), starring a different African-American icon (Coolio), and this one called Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the Thirteenth, Scream If You Know What I Did last Halloween needed to switch its title to something a little more succinct, a little more sane.
Well, Scream WAS originally to be titled Scary Movie, so why not call its parody Scary Movie? Especially since both come from Dimension Films, so there’s not even any legal entanglement. Nor is there a problem in flat out reusing Ghostface (though the mask is in the public domain to begin with). So Scary Movie is actually a much cleverer title than a cursory glance or ten more years of spoof cinema would suggest.
There the cleverness ends. Most criticisms of Scary Movie would dwell upon its excessively poor taste – though it’s hard to fault something for doing what it sets out to do. While Scary Movie IS filthy – most horror hasn’t this ratio of blood to semen – filthy humor can be utilized successfully, as can any other form. And it’s the duty of any Airplane! style comedy to utilize as many styles of comedy as possible, in the time-honored scattershot approach. Rather, I most fault Scary Movie for not being Airplane!
It’s unfair to hold such a film up to those lofty standards, for it’s like comparing all action movies against Die Hard. While no other spoof has been the equal of Airplane!, hosannas be sung unto it, there are other great examples within that school: Top Secret! (this one is under-appreciated, and if you haven’t, check it out NOW), The Naked Gun, Hot Shots!... No surprise those all come from Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, the trio which invented Airplane!
Okay, am I faulting director Keenen Ivory Wayans for not being David Zucker (oh god, what am I gonna say once Scary Movie 3 comes about?)? Well, no…Wayans has made a decent stab (heh?) at the ZAZ in the past, such as the aforementioned (and now abbreviated) DBAMTSCWDYJITH, or the jocular blaxploitation lark I’m Gonna Get You Sucka (which is bettered by the recent, Wayansless Black Dynamite). The elder Wayans even has his own sensibility, and isn’t a mere ZAZ copycat.
But the thing about Scary Movie, and where its potty humor does rather sink it, is that it destroys Wayans’ voice, his discipline. It’s the easiest thing in the world to revert anything into a cheap joke about sex or pot or poopoo or caca or weewee or ho-hos or wawas or Shakespeare in Love. It was the style at the time. In the comedic wake of There’s Something About Mary and American Pie (whose oft-nude Shannon Elizabeth appears alarmingly clothed in Scary Movie – which still gladly parades testicles and erect penises before us)…er, in the wake of those gross out bonanzas, a comedic gold rush erupted, as filmmakers struggles to outdo pie-fucking and semen-slurping. This aberration led to dismal scourges upon this earth like Tomcats, until Tom Green dropped the gross-out A-bomb with Freddy Got Fingered, from which point on diarrhea-drinking jokes receded into the broader comic quiver.
So to cite certain TV specials on the making of Scary Movie from 2000 (aired on Fox alongside Scream, to ensure attention span-challenged audiences knew Scary Movie’s target), the Wayans Brothers (and lo, alongside Kennan Ivory, his bros Shawn and Marlon are 33.333% of Scary Movie’s writers) admitted their stakes in the perversion arms race. On TV, they didn’t provide examples, but that’s because the film’s offenses couldn’t be recounted on television…But they can on a blog!
• A “female” teacher grinds her gonads in the heroine’s face.
• Close-ups of a very small (white) penis.
• Impalement via erect male member – the reduction of all “killer’s knife is a phallus” arguments.
• Repeated incidents of a driver receiving fellatio while driving.
• Constant dwelling upon the characters’ sordid, oft homosexual past sexual histories.
• Vacuum cleaner sodomy.
• Fire hose quantities of human ejaculate.
• Fire hose quantities of human ejaculate.
• Fire hose quantities of human ejaculate.
• Fire hose quantities of human ejaculate.
• Fire hose quantities of human ejaculate.
Oh wait, did I repeat that last one too many times? Welcome to the Scary Movie school of comedy! (Actually, it was a mistake, but it seemed too amusing to lose.)
Once you’ve concluded most scenes are likely to end with this sort of joke, it kind of limits the ostensible “satire” of Scream (and I Know What You Did Last Summer, which would be undeserving of this treatment – or its mere existence – without Scream to prop it up). Really, that duo of neo slashers becomes not a target, just a framework for whatever random joke at all.
Not that Scream is really the best target for a parody – a damning, damning fact when that’s the central thesis of your spoof. Most spoofs benefit from self-serious but lousy movies, like Airplane!’s disaster pictures, or Blazing Saddles and a very particular form of western. Scream is itself too far gone into cinematic ouroboros to support this approach, making Scary Movie a parody of a parody…making this blog entry what?! So when once you have a scene of characters discussing how “this is just like a movie,” now you go further and point out the nearby film crew (and layer a subtle cunnilingus joke on top of it somehow). It’s the same joke as in Scream (which Scary Movie’s characters all seem to have seen), made more obvious. This particular gag feels like something Seltzer and Friedberg would write.
(For the time being, I have nothing more to say about those asshats (because I actually intend to work through their own “series” soon enough.)
Another pair of writers would be Buddy Johnson and Phil Beauman. To my knowledge, their most other effort is Not Another Teen Movie, which is, despite that “Movie” appellation, not of a piece with most useless _____ Movies. That film is a more concerted effort to actually satirize (as opposed to parody – look ‘em up!) the teen genre, as is Scary Movie to some extents. Scary Movie has far more focus upon B.A. Corpse High School than Scream ever gave to its Fonz-ruled academy. So jokes like discussing how actors in their thirties often play “teens” in horror films…that’s likely a joke by this duo.
Then there’s the Wayans’ input. Much of their earlier efforts are race-centric, as is fitting when lampooning the “growing up in the hood” genre. The white bread slasher genre isn’t so pertinent, something addressed already by Scream 2. Given this, and the need to grant both Marlon and Shawn major acting roles, there’s a lot of racial humor in a context where it simply feels shoehorned in. For instance, when the heroine is threatened, she IMs the cops with “White woman in trouble.” They are there instantly. It’s a funny joke (I laughed…in 2000), but you’d only find it in a slasher movie if assuming a black point of view.
Not that there’s really anything in Scary Movie which comments upon slasher movies themselves. This is to me the greatest missed opportunity, especially after spending weeks plowing through every single motherfucking Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street. Scream knew those movies, and far better lampoons them, even while genuinely being one of them! Scary Movie barely knows anything older than Scream…Oh, sure, it references The Exorcist, but simply because Scream referenced The Exorcist. Friday’s “ki ki ki” gets a three-second appearance, and one shot suggests one Wayans or another must’ve seen Halloween once. But there’s no genuine desire to mock what’s mockable, no love for the target of satire…and for an Affectionate Parody, that’s the touch of death. I mean, how could six independent guys create references no deeper than a one-year-old Matrix shot-out, or The Blair Witch Project, or The Sixth Sense, or some transitory late ‘90s thing I no longer recognize (“Dawson’s Creek”). Compare this to the hundreds of cop movies Edgar Wright went through to make Hot Fuzz.
But there’s a maxim which states a mainstream parody oughtn’t to go too obscure, and that reductive and condescending philosophy even comes from my hero, David Zucker. Viewers are morons, it’s said, and how better to peddle juvenile humor to juveniles when not straying beyond what’s most current. I hate this attitude; it cannot create a classic, and it misinforms young viewers that nothing older is worth knowing. Though to be fair a lot of the pop culture crazed dialogue of the Scream series (which this one completely pilfers, with the obvious exception of Scream 4) has the same problem, so…huh, maybe that’s Scary Movie’s point after all!
Looking back at the unfunny diatribes of a comedy-starved blogger (myself), I realize I’ve said nothing about the plot of Scary Movie – for as good as it does a spoof. (Nor does listing out gags help anyone.) It’s simply assumed when I say “Scream parody,” y’all know what that means. Basically, “Dude with knives kills teens,” which is practically the only sort of movie I’ve seen in over a goddamned month (that and Tyler Perry)! My brain is melting.
The cast deserves comment, however. For even if I call the humor over-broad (though comedy is subjective, and I mean no offense), a capable performer might be able to salvage something from that. And I’m not referring to the “In Living Color” style of the Wayans (though Shawn does get a great, drooling Matthew Lilard moment). And I don’t mean Cheri Oteri’s kinda “meh” Gail Hailstorm variation on Gale Weathers, even informed by her “SNL” experience.
No, I chiefly mean series star Anna Farris, as Final Girl Cindy Campbell. The actress has an easy, funny way about her, which has earned a lot of love for Farris despite the fact she’s most famous for the Scary Movies. But I won’t say very much about her for now, since there’ll be plenty of opportunity for that to come.
The same goes for Regina Hall as Brenda Meeks. With limited screen time amidst a progression of sketches posing as scenes, Hall gets our attention in Scary Movie’s variation on the Scream 2 movie theater murder. She delivers a pitch perfect prototypical talkative black moviegoer, and it’s only awkward because it doesn’t really belong in a movie like this one – that is, either a slasher movie, or a parody movie, as it’s more a totally different sort of comedy altogether. Still funny on its own right, though.
Of course, Scary Movie was never a terribly ambitious motion picture to begin with. It surely didn’t expect to engender what it did – but then again, neither did Scream. But here’s the shock: Scary Movie grossed $278,019,771 (how exact!), well above what any Scream has done (jury’s still out on what 4’ll amount to). It seems odd a parody could do that much better than its target. Could be Scream became better known on video. Could be people understand a dick impalement joke for what it is, without needing to know the original…
Could even be Scream, for all it presents a simplified “horror movies exist, and we’re one of ‘em” argument (as opposed to New Nightmare’s more 8 ½ approach to meta), was still too complicated for many viewers. The Airplane! approach, at its basest level, is dumb comedy which puts on airs of knowingness. Indeed, I’m sure some folks patted themselves on the back for recognizing the Usual Suspects pastiche at Scary Movie’s end, for all its alleged obscurity. Not that Airplane! (or the general “anything goes” spoof approach) is necessarily simplistic; it simply invites simplicity for those unwilling to do stupid smart.
RELATED POSTS
• No. 2 Scary Movie 2 (2001)
• No. 3 Scary Movie 3 (2003)
• No. 4 Scary Movie 4 (2006)
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