Scary Movie 3 is this series’ Mason-Dixon Line. If you like your Scary Movies at all, chances are you heavily prefer either the Wayans Era, exemplified by the first Scary Movie, or you prefer the latter two films. For me, Scary Movie 3 is almost a perfect response to my misgivings with the original Scary Movie, basically that the Wayans Brothers at some stage forgot how to properly spoof, and that David Zucker would have handled the material better. Well, someone felt as I did, and that’s precisely who they get to direct 3.
David Zucker may be crowned king of the very specific vein of parody the Scary Movies traffic in, as he (the first Z of ZAZ) pretty much invented the form with Airplane! To reiterate, this brand of comedy is defined by rapid fire gags, using a serious preexisting movie as framework. That movie usually still comes across as self-serious, allowing the actors’ deadpan delivery of terrible, terrible jokes to become quite funny indeed, through contrast. These are elements I feel were lacking from the Wayans’ efforts: Characters who bought into their dilemma. Rather, the Wayans seemed to intentionally let their characters exist sort of “outside” the movie, and they devote reams of exposition to patch up the individual moments of pitched insanity.
Different styles for different folks.
Addressing the elephant in the room, the sticking point for many with Scary Movie 3: Yes, it’s PG-13, when the former two were hard Rs. Some say this undermines the comedy, which benefits from the ability to shock – perhaps what really sets the first Scary Movies apart from other spoofs. But those films became so hung up with vulgarity, they never modulated their approach. The PG-13 rating demands greater care when approaching risqué material; now, only a single non-sexual “fuck” may be uttered, so we’re no longer in for 2-esque profane birds devouring minutes’ of our time. It’s like the sonata. Artist restrictions heighten creative necessity, whereas granting total freedom can kill artistic discipline. And it frees up Zucker to revel in non-vulgar forms of silliness as well.
Not that the spoofical return of Zucker is anywhere near the plateau of, say, The Naked Gun, for he’s grown perhaps a little complacent with time. There are numerous very specific flaws with Scary Movie 3’s comedy (to say nothing of its greater status as a movie), a certain franticness and some overdone randomness, which undermines an ideal Zucker experience. With the man’s possible late career ennui, we have two second-string parody writers aiding him (Zucker did not officially write Scary Movie 3, though he no doubt contributed specific jokes).
Pat Proft has been with the ZAZ team since The Naked Gun, though kind of as an anonymous gag man without distinction. Beyond Zucker’s warm protection, Proft co-conspired the first Police Academy, and directed Wrongfully Accused – name a lesser Leslie Nielsen vehicle, and you’ll name 2001: A Space Travesty.
Prior to Scary Movie 3, there’s very little which would make you treasure Craig Mazin, certainly not RocketMan [ugh!]. Post-this, he evolved under Zucker’s tutelage to write and direct Superhero Movie, a sort of watered down take on the Scary Movie style, and proof the ZAZ vein is perhaps no longer fertile.
This is our team for the day, and despite reservations they’re still able to devise the occasional inspired gag – altogether too many to delve into, as there are literally hundreds of jokes throughout. If one doesn’t work, the old spoof maxim goes, it’ll no longer matter in 10 seconds, when the next wholly unrelated joke arises. Lacking a strong foundation, this method of attack can become soufflé light, like death by pushpins, but then again you rarely get mired down in whole scenes founded upon poor comic premises.
As for the actual content of Scary Movie 3, it is at this stage where the horror-centric series abandons any pretenses of doing whole horror subgenres in one go. Rather, Scary Movie 3 limits itself specifically to individual films. To its extreme benefit, it happens there have been some abnormally successful horror flicks in the two year gap since 2, most particularly The Ring. Yup, that forms the basis for Zucker’s lampooning, though that time is shared almost equally with Signs. Now, I’d have a hard time calling Shyamalan’s Signs a horror movie, but that’s the challenge you create for yourself with this brand of topicality.
Kind of an odd thing, too, since there was a specific new horror subgenre to tackle – American remakes of Japanese tech-terror flicks (The Ring from Ringu, The Grudge from Ju-On, plus Japanese goodness like Pulse and Battle Royale and Suicide Club and all that Takashi Miike stuff). I lament they didn’t spoof this entire cycle. As it is, The Ring doesn’t “get got,” isn’t actually lambasted or critiqued in any meaningful way, but just enables head-bonkings – the true focus of Zucker’s art.
Leaving Scary Movie 3 with the wide focus of Signs/The Ring (Rigns?!), the challenge is to do something coherent. As a story, Scary Movie 3 largely fails. The two movies’ stories – “Aliens prep an invasion via crop circles why not” and “Killer video tape kills” – are presented as just that: two stories. Occasionally a character from one side will interact in the other, to no productive end. It’s only by the finale that the writers try justifying their mash-up, by saying (SPOILERS – can you spoil this kind of thing?!) this alien invasion is actually part of a preventative measure to stop the evil little girl from that Ringu VHS. This means the movie’s actual dénouement is, as they say in the Bay Area, hella asinine, hella abstract, hella arbitrary, hella fueled by desperation. In the time leading up to that, it’s perhaps possible to individually groove on the separate plot strands, to perhaps enjoy the Ring stuff more, and accept that you weren’t expecting much from Scary Movie 3 to begin with. (Even for series fans, hugely lowered expectations are always a good tactic.)
Ah, but when we delve deeper into these parodies, things unravel a bit. Within The Ring, moments of exposition manifest as Matrix/Matrix Reloaded parodies, and not just as dated bullet time references.. I mean they actually mock the content of the Matrices, with Queen Latifah as The Oracle, Eddie Griffin as “Orpheus” (cough, cough!), and George Carlin as The Architect. (I appreciate this last one the most, because I like Carlin.) Of course, none of this has to do with “scary movies,” per se, but is simply something well known from recent (as of 2003) cinema. For what it is, this works better than, say, the Charlie’s Angels parody in Scary Movie 2, simply because when we inexplicably visit The Architect’s media center within The Ring’s lighthouse (see how awkward things are?), they wholeheartedly give us a visual approximation of that scene from Reloaded. No more kung fu battles in haunted laboratories!
But tightening that plot focus a little further, one finds nearly an entire half hour devoted to spoofing Eminem’s 8 Mile, which just begs the question. Okay, not only is 8 Mile the absolute furthest you can get from that inane tag of “scary movie” without being a “Veggie Tales” cassette, but…was that movie even important enough to warrant Zucker’s “blockbusters only” mode of lampoonification?!
Here’s my theory: See, the Wayans Brothers are black guys, and they populated their Scary Movies with pertinent black humor, simply becomes that comes naturally for them. Meanwhile, David Zucker is the furthest thing from a black man – a Wisconsin-born Jew. Hell, this whole Airplane! style of jocularity is sorta Jewish. (Proft and Mazin are, by all evidence, equally Caucasian.) So why is it that once the series got co-opted by white guys it suddenly started engendering dedicated spoofs of black culture?!
I think the culprit is whiggerism. The first Scary Movie was unexpectedly successful, perhaps in part because it spoke to a (black) audience mentality in a way that, say, Hot Shots! doesn’t. So now we get a concentrated effort to do something similar. Methinks they doth protest too much. Hell, Scary Movie 3 tries so hard to be “hip” and “down” with the rapper community, it just seems whiter than ever. To me, anyway. All this is to compensate for a lack of Wayanseseseseseseseses, with the fat and never-funny Anthony Anderson appearing in their stead, on the path between Kangaroo Jack and those Transformers movies. Kevin Hart is also there.
Hmm…While I’m on the subject of unsuccessful elements (after I started this consideration by calling it superior to the first two), here’s another one: the franticness. Scary Movie 2 rather reveled in this tactic, staging heightened, flailing fracases. We get something like that in 3, with the extended mishandling of a corpse at a wake, or the President of the United States of America (the legendary Leslie Nielsen, no longer that valuable) beating up crippled people. This kind of desperate-for-a-laugh comedy is antithetical to the kind of confident nonsense Zucker thrives upon. I surely don’t know then if this is indicative of late-period Zucker cinema as a whole. To answer that question, I’d have to watch Zucker’s hyper-political screed An American Carol, and I like Airplane! too much to do that.
Moving on…to what works. As always in a Scary Movie, that starts with Anna Farris and Regina Hall. Let’s stick with Farris, whose Cindy Campbell continues to dominate the series – interesting that spoofs only take on a female lead once aping the horror genre. Now lampooning Naomi Watts (from The Ring), Farris returns to her natural blonde hair (speaking as a male, a good choice), which in turn does drastic things to Cindy’s intelligence. Or maybe it’s that Zucker style, where stupidity is the funniest thing. (No one ever complained about Nielsen’s idiocy being a slur against other grey-hairs.) But whatever the evident changes in Cindy’s demeanor, Farris remains great. She has a way with facial expressions, able to sell a a parking meter visual gag purely by the transfixed look on her face. It’s kind of an amazing act.
Hall is quite good too, though she dies way too early (and becomes that molested-upon wake corpse to boot). Actually, I’m not too sure if Zucker knows what to do with her, as Hall loses much of that wonderful spunk she paraded in the Wayans’ efforts. But a reduced Hall is better than no Hall, and it was probably needed for the PG-13 rating alone to drop her early. (No one curses out a preteen like Brenda Meeks.)
The rest of the cast is made of new faces, present because they best resemble the actors from whatever movie is being mocked. So to play an ersatz Eminem, we get another white rapper, Simon Rex, who – Oh my god, Wikipedia claims he was in three masturbation pornography movies in 1993! Moving on!
Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy appear at the very front, playing schoolgirls, because a shared Wayans/Zucker obsession is cheesecake – this parallels Carmen Electra’s presence in Part One better than, well…James Woods as a priest (Scary Movie 2) hasn’t nearly the same visual appeal. Of course, let this inclusion speak of the series’ permanent 13-year-old mentality. But 13-year-olds need movies too, and are too immature to get the intricately subtle humor of Mel Brooks.
The one final actor of note is Charlie Sheen, doing Mel Gibson in Signs. It’s hard to focus upon the good (Sheen’s familiarity with the Zucker approach) when my 2011 voice keeps chirping in. Here we have one famous celebrity nutcase making fun of a different celebrity nutcase. If only they could’ve done something with that.
Then there’s the gags themselves. I’ll highlight one specific, random joke as an example for the whole bunch. In The Ring, a well is found when spilled marbles all pool on the floorboards. Okay, how does one make fun of this?! Well, first the marbles roll in, then a few larger items (apples and such). Then a couple of inglorious melons. The end. It doesn’t really make any sense, it has no pertinence to anything else, and the actors aren’t even involved. But somehow it’s funny, to me at least, for how one-and-done it is. It’s kind of a classic uncelebrated Airplane! gag, breaking most rules of in-film logic.
When it’s all said and done, Scary Movie 3 is quite a rebound from Scary Movie 2, and I doubt even Wayans boosters would argue with me there. Commercially, that’s certainly the case, though 3 still lacks behind financial series MVP Scary Movie, which had the privilege of surprise. But it kind of shocks the hell out of me just how successful these movies have been, considering they rarely seem to dominate the blockbuster discussion. Overall, the series’ four entries have combined to gross over $800 million. Part One is as of now the 184th most profitable film in U.S. box office history – notable, but not ridiculously so. But make a franchise out of that, done on the cheap, and it’s amazing the sort of totals you can come up with. Makes being stupid seem like a really smart move.
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