Scary MovieYear: 2000 Director: Keenen Ivory Wayans Written by: Phil Beauman, Jason Friedberg, Buddy Johnson, Aaron Seltzer, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans Threat: Psychopath Weapon of Choice: Knife Based upon: Parodies several Kevin Williamson-penned movies. IMDb page: |
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Other movies in this series:
Scary Movie 2
Scary Movie 3
Rish Outfield's reviews
This is a unique review, as I saw this at a test screening, months prior to its release. The
version I saw may/will be very different than the film as released. Also, it wasn't really
Horror. It was Comedy, a broad, stupid parody that was far less serious than Dracula:
Dead and Loving It, which we didn't review here. But I couldn't just let my seeing
it go to waste, could I?
Young virginal Cindy is having a bad year: last year she and her friends accidentally hit
a guy with their car and disposed of the body, this year, strange scary notes start showing
up taunting Cindy and her co-conspirators. And this week, a ghost-faced killer is dispatching
people at her school after taunting them with phone calls. Could they be related? Could this
be any more familiar? Well, actually, the departure is that this is a broad parody of
Scream and I
Know What You Did Last Summer, directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans.
First of all, it was raunchy. In the race for tastelessness, it shoved There's Something
About Mary out of the way and trampled it severely. It was a dirty, dirty movie, and
I'll be quite surprised if the version I saw avoids an NC-17 rating (lots of naked male members
and sex jokes aplenty).
Second of all, it follows Scream almost TOO closely. Released by Dimension
Films, it included a ton of the same dialogue as Scream, and repeats, almost verbatim,
certain scenes (a lot of certain scenes). The first ten minutes of the film is like "Stab" (the
Scream parody featured in Scream 2), only longer. The rest of the film,
for the most part, simply parodies/mimicks Scream and
Scream 2, plus a heavy dose of I Know What You Did Last Summer,
with little references to The Blair Witch Project,
Titanic, The Usual Suspects, The Sixth
Sense, and The Matrix spread throughout.
So, was it any good? Well, it WAS very, very funny, with some big laughs, a lot of little
ones, and some gross-outs that aren't quite the same thing, but will be what people talk about
after the movie. But, like all parodies like this, the film took many turns for the stupid, and a
lot of jokes weren't funny at all. Most of the murders were funny, though they went on a bit
too long. As I mentioned above, the plot remained tediously faithful to Scream's,
even going so far as to have the same locales, the same plot twists, and the same killers
(sorry). The cut I saw was a work print, and it even used Marco Beltrami's music and a
couple of songs from the 1996 soundtrack. I would've enjoyed the parody more if it had
gone off in a different direction or threw in a couple clever surprises instead of restricting
itself to Kevin Williamson's previous works (yeah, there was a "Dawson's Creek" reference),
but most of the folks in the audience seemed to be loving it, so I could be wrong.
Still, Shannon Elizabeth didn't take her clothes off . . . whose idea was that?
Best Scare: Well, there are a couple of shots of male genitals that elicited screams from the
audience, but none of the traditional kinds of scares.
I'd Recommend It To: Fans of the two main films it mocks (just don't see it with Mom),
though in my case, knowing Scream as well as I do tended to lessen my enjoyment
of the film. At one point in Scary Movie, one of the characters says, "This is just like
a horror movie," to which another character responds, "Yeah, that movie 'Scream.' Same
dialogue and everything.").
Total Skulls: 29
| Sequel | ||
| Sequel setup | ||
| Rips off earlier film |  |
Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer |
| Horror film showing on TV/in theater in movie | |
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| Future celebrity appears | ||
| Former celebrity appears | ||
| Bad title | ||
| Bad premise | |
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| Bad acting | ||
| Bad dialogue | ||
| Bad execution | |
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| MTV Editing | ||
| OTS | ||
| Girl unnecessarily gets naked | ||
| Wanton sex | |
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| Death associated with sex | |
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| Unfulfilled promise of nudity | |
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| Characters forget about threat | |
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| Secluded location | ||
| Power is cut | ||
| Phone lines are cut | ||
| Someone investigates a strange noise | |
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| Someone runs up stairs instead of going out front door | |
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| Camera is the killer | ||
| Victims cower in front of a window/door | |
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| Victim locks self in with killer | |
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| Victim running from killer inexplicably falls | |
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| Toilet stall scene | |
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| Shower/bath scene | |
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| Car stalls or won't start | ||
| Cat jumps out | |
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| Fake scare | |
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| Laughable scare | |
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| Stupid discovery of corpse | ||
| Dream sequence | ||
| Hallucination/Vision | ||
| No one believes only witness | ||
| Crazy, drunk, old man knows the truth | ||
| Warning goes unheeded | ||
| Music detracts from scene | ||
| Death in first five minutes | |
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| x years before/later | |
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| Flashback sequence | ||
| Dark and stormy night | ||
| Killer doesn't stay dead | ||
| Killer wears a mask | |
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| Killer is in closet | ||
| Killer is in car with victim | ||
| Villain is more sympathetic than heroes | ||
| Unscary villain/monster | |
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| Beheading | |
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| Blood fountain | ||
| Blood spatters - camera, wall, etc. | ||
| Poor death effect | ||
| Excessive gore | ||
| No one dies at all | ||
| Virgin survives | ||
| Geek/Nerd survives | ||
| Little kid lamely survives | ||
| Dog/Pet miraculously survives | ||
| Unresolved subplots | |
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| "It was all a dream" ending | ||
| Unbelievably happy ending | ||
| Unbelievably crappy ending | |
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| What the hell? | |
