“No mercy. No shame. No sequel.”
- Tagline to Scary Movie
“We lied.”
- Tagline to Scary Movie 2
At least someone in marketing must’ve believed that first one. Then again, marketing people would best understand why a sequel just must come about, spitting in the face of any non-financial necessity. For Scary Movie was surprisingly successful, and that’s the end of the story.
Redoing the Scream thing wouldn’t be viable, as they’d already gotten everything of value from that series (meaning Scream 3 went largely untouched). Indeed, slasher flicks are now off the table, for as little interest as the Wayans Brothers evidently had in them (can’t really fault ‘em, though). But the freedom of a spoof, beholden to a skewed anti-logic instead of anything sensible, gives plenty of other options. For what are the Naked Gun sequels but other examinations of the incredibly broad cop genre; what are Hot Shots! and Hot Shots! Part Deux but military comedies, trading the disparate Top Gun for Rambo?
So we go back to that title Scary Movie, and come sequel time it has the fancy serendipity of being a generic label (never mind its original specific relevance to Scream). Horror movies in general are open season, and with dozens of horror subgenres to choose from – possession, zombies, vampires, Hammer, Universal, Corman, schlocky exploitation, haunted house, psycho-thriller, demon, werewolf, atomic monsters, creature features, supernatural, romantic comedy. The Wayanseseseses simply brokes out a randomizing Wheel o’ Sequels, and dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit it settles upon…haunted house movies!
And now Keenan Ivory, Shawn and Marlon (which is still but a fraction of the family, as Kim, Elvira [!], Nadia, Diedre and Vonnie haven’t anything to do with the series) go ahead and watch themselves some haunted house movies. Hmm…see if you can spot the flaw in this approach? Given under a year to deliver a contractual automatic sequel, in a genre you evidently have little automatic interest in, go find a movie, and just hope it’ll prove an adequate foundation for wackiness.
Lord knows what 1963’s The Haunting ever did to deserve a parody trafficking specifically in 2001 movie references…No…wait…wasn’t there some Jan de Bont 1999 remake of The Haunting? Checking my archaic tomes of forgotten 1990s lore, indeed there was! (It won some Razzies.) Huh, could it be that is what underlies Scary Movie 2? This just goes to highlight a new problem: Perpetuating a horror spoof franchise built upon abnormally successful contemporary horror movies. The genre is notably niche, and the surface-level pop cultural appropriation favored by uninspired spoofsters demands the new and the obvious.
So if indeed Scary Movie 2 limits itself mainly to non-teen slasher horror cinema from 1998-2001 – not a good time for the genre – then what is an extended Exorcist pastiche doing kicking things off?! Well, call it The Version You’ve Never Seen, which got a highly successful theatrical re-release in 2000, which puts this classic 1973 touchstone right back on the spoofing block. Good thing, too, since while normally it’d be several decades too old for such a topical enterprise, it’s also far more appropriate for what ought to be the Scary Movie mission statement: To identify and spoof the biggest and best horror movies from throughout film history. And granted this R-rated sequel by default shall dwell upon bodily fluids, it helps that The Exorcist already offers ‘em up for your delectation: urination, vomiting, crucifix self-mutilation.
These opening eight Exorcist minutes are the best thing in Scary Movie 2. Too bad they have hardly anything to do with the film that follows, except that they occur in the same Hell House which’ll occupy the rest of our time. This opening has no connection to the legend of Hugh Kane, the house’s ancestral master who now haunts it. But who goes to these spoof movies for narrative cohesion?
Point in fact, several of the more beloved (or Wayansic) characters from Scary Movie reappear, ignoring that every single one of them was brutally slain before (er…spoiler?). It’s negative continuity, it’s left unaddressed, and it’s all the funnier for it. So to that end we get again…
Series MVP Cindy Campbell (Anna Farris), again doing her best as the de rigeur central heroine, grounding the looniness surrounding her in some sort of…well, I can’t call it seriousness, but Farris is one of the few elements which suggests this might actually be misconstrued as a real horror movie. Because Cindy, though a dingbat, is our straight man, and it’s a credit to Farris’ comedic sensibilities that she is the funniest member of these movies despite never really being the joke. She’s like the female Leslie Nielsen, only much younger, and infinitely more attractive.
Brenda Meeks (Regina Hall) is back to reprise her schtick as the black woman who realizes a black woman has no part in a horror movie. Scary Movie 2 not being preoccupied with actual terror, racial preoccupations seem more at ease now than in Part One. Brenda gets a particularly fun moment near the end when circumstances continually conspire specifically against the film’s black characters. A more disciplined satire could actually stretch this angle to feature length, but then we’d lose jokes about gonads and handjobs, and we can’t have that!
These gals were the funniest things about Scary Movie, which justifies their return. That Shorty Meeks and Ray Wilkins (Marlon and Shawn, respectively) also return, that’s not quite as acceptable…though one sees why they’re here, seeing as these duders wrote the movie. (Oh, and their older brother is directing!) Hell, the first one already overstayed their individual gags: Shorty sure does love that chronic something fierce, and Ray is a closeted homosexual. There’s such a thing as simply telling a joke for too long. When a second movie then comes around, you’re tasked with finding new gags for tired conceits (see also the recurring characters in the Police Academy sequels).
Otherwise, we get a new cast today. Okay, pausing for plot…Well, it’s a haunted house movie. How many plots are there? A group of people go to spend the weekend in a haunted house, spooky things happen, the end. As assembled by a scheming professor (Tim Curry), this is the House on Haunted Hill angle. The other option is the Amityville Horror-style “family moves into a house, stays for altogether too long, leaves” story. Cutting themselves off from that rich vein, the archaic Amityville is still referenced…if you count flies decorating the set as a “reference,” or a “parody,” or anything like that, as though the Wayans made it through watching that thing, then decided they had to justify it somehow. (Likewise, the word “It” is written on a background wall in one scene, simply to technically say that, yeah, IT gets parodied too.)
Okay, so, some new cast…They’re mostly college students, and too bad Scary Movie 2 hasn’t the wit to make a joke out of the stock types they play; they simply are stock types, like a Friday the 13th sequel. As the Frat Boy, we have Christ Masterson. As the Sexy Girl (named Theo – is that a girl’s name?!), we have Kathleen Robertson. As the Tori Spelling, we have Tory Spelling. Not really sure what’s going on with that last one.
Of greater interest, Hell House is host to two, count ‘em, two disfigured comic buffoons! Contestant #1 is Dwight Hartman (David Cross), balding and wheelchair-bound…Hmm, I recall Cross’ Tobias Fünke in a very similar predicament – on top of that, “Arrested Development” was host to dozens of “obviously gay” jokes like this film’s Ray, as proof the material isn’t itself the problem. The issue is in the execution, which is all the more problematic when you see a funny person like Cross acting unfunny.
Opposing Dwight is the house’s caretaker (or handyman), Hanson (Chris Elliott, who specializes in disgusting me personally). His deformity? His left hand is…small and lumpy. I dunno, not sure if any movie directly demands “small hand parody,” but the Wayansi sure do lean on that appendage as one of their main jokes. So we’re handfed extended scenes of Han(d)son handling food, and it all aims for gross-out (still a comedic preoccupation in ’01), only that hand is just kind of hard to take seriously. Like, they insist it’s gross when it’s just doofy. Then Hanson starts squeezing his zits onto the turkey, and not in a gleeful Dead Alive sort of way, and it’s evident that this scene is just desperate.
Then all the characters sequester themselves off in various bedrooms, as the Wayansae set about attempting to lampoon the stately haunted house story. It’s kind of beyond their scope, so they retreat to the same scene-long gag multiple times…Basically, an anthropomorphized entity fights someone. We’re talking “pause the movie for this buffoonish, unchorographed lunacy,” with the joke apparently that supernatural beings are as klutzy/stupid/horny/stoned as humans. Here’s what we get:
• Cindy fights a black cat…because, uh, you know, there’s, like, black cats in old horror movies. Which is why this becomes an out-of-place Rocky parody. Suuuuuure. Oh, and that cat is patently false, which might be OK in a spoof, except that isn’t the joke. Nope, we’re meant to ignore the taxidermy.
• Ray fights a toy clown. Okay, this is lifted from Poltergeist, proof they’re casting the net further into the past after all. Seems like they went with a “checklist” approach, as there’s no reason to lampoon Poltergeist here, and therefore they resort to a penis joke.
• Shorty battles an enormous marijuana plant, which smokes him. (In Soviet Russia...) Potheads, rejoice, for I can’t see this being otherwise funny! It’s your basic one-panel “Far Side” sorta reversal, stretched out into a multi-minute scene. In fact, a major failing of Scary Movie 2’s humor is pacing, as the wrong jokes get overindulged.
• Tori Spelling battles, is raped by a ghost. I don’t want to dwell upon this one, because it’s gross. Ick, Tori Spelling!
…
The Airplane! format, the films of David Zucker and friends, rely upon mass comedic density. Every scene is endlessly planned out from every angle, foreground, background, dialogue, slapstick, satire, jokes of every stripe. I’m perhaps overselling it a little bit. The point being, nothing is wasted, as though the target movie is a buffalo, and ZAZ are Indians.
Forced to rapidly parody a movie type they could care less about, the Wayansazi do not populate Scary Movie 2 with as much wall-to-wall gaggery as that. Between these attacks, which all resemble television skits more than anything Zuckeresque, we get scenes of pure exposition, explorations into the past of Hugh Kane and his bride Caroline, because ghost movies are so complex. There’s a lot of effort to set up gags which never come, individual horror movies are aped in order to make a single joke, and so much of it goes for naught.
Though surely I’d be hard-pressed to wring a film’s worth of yucks out of a spooky house, at least in the Airplane! idiom. Older movies made the “comic buffoons in a haunted house” a subgenre unto itself! I’m talking in the 1940s, with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein being the most famous example, but a decade’s worth of assorted things utilizing the word “Spook” all predate that. And many of those movies fall back on the same lamentable stereotype, that black people are just “terrrrrrrrified o’ dem ghos’es.” Given the resources at the Wayans’ disposal, updating and undermining this approach (that is, being satire) would be viable. Of course, that assumes movies a 2001 thirteen-year-old wouldn’t know, and we can’t have that!
Oh boy, whatever Scary Movie 2 is doing, it degenerates towards the end into directionless mayhem. Here’s some of the movies they spoof, and by “spoof” I often mean “recreate shot for shot with no additional jokes.” Hannibal, Titanic, What Lies Beneath, Hollow Man, Charlie’s Angels, old Nike commercials…Wait, old Nike commercials?! Way to craft a timeless comedic masterpiece for the ages (sarcasm)! (For the record, this is what I’m talking about, and this is the Scary Movie 2 version. Can’t say what it has to do with “scary movies,” but there you go.)
Chances are, if you mostly limit yourselves to movies a layman would’ve seen theatrically in the past year, you’re not gonna be spoofing the genre’s best and brightest. Furthermore, there’s little connective tissue between Hollow Man and Hannibal and What Lies Beneath, making the transition from one to another jarring. At least they’re all nominally horror movies, which cannot be said for Charlie’s Angels, so of course it gets the most extended coverage. It’s like when Scary Movie did The Matrix, only that was (relatively) brief, and funny on its own for being left-field. Here, it’s as though the Wayansisizisesizieses simply wanted to spoof Charlie’s Angels, but were necessarily limited by the horror genre. To hell with it, let’s just stage the climax as a kung fu fight anyway, and ignore that the mad science laboratory automatically negates any kung fu-related jibes. Shame, too, for the same basic scene in, say, a dojo, now that might’ve worked. Wouldn’t be a Scary Movie sequel, though.
A lot of the jokes in Scary Movie 2 simply trust that they’ll be funny. What else explains the repeated appearance of a sassy, shit-talkin’ parrot in a tuxedo, with its pages worth of dialogue. Perhaps it’s meant as the genre savvy author avatar, but it that’s the case…it means Keenan Ivory Wayans’ opinion of horror can be summed up by (to paraphrase): “Fuck off, four eyes. I know your momma, I fucked her last night.” Then it references “The Weakest Link.”
Later, the bird shits, because any non-human animal in a comedy = automatic opportunity for a shitting joke.
Guess what? Scary Movie 2 was the least successful movie in the series, financially. Twas but a cash grab, and cash it did grab, but audiences in general could sense the wafting stink of not-giving-a-shit underlying it. And that’s how the Wayan(pluralizer) felt, never hoping as Dimension did to make a franchise out of their tossed-off Scream parody. Rather, they had lofty artistic ambitions, to go and make White Chicks, leaving the future Scary Movies out of their hands. It’s just as well, if 2 is an indicator of what they’d be up to otherwise. And that leaves the slot open for a new helmer.
RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 Scary Movie (2000)
• No. 3 Scary Movie 3 (2003)
• No. 4 Scary Movie 4 (2006)
No comments:
Post a Comment