For this movie to be good, it
had to be funny; it wasn't

By Amy Diaz
(A review of Scary Movie)

The Wayans brothers remind us all why they don't have a TV show any more in Scary Movie, a very bad horror movie parody.

Scary Movie is a parody of Scream, which itself was a parody of teen slasher movies. What is a parody of a parody? In this case, it is 85 of the most painful minutes I've ever spent in a movie theater (that includes the time I had to sit through Look Who's Talking Too as a disgruntled participant in a bad double date).

Scary Movie is populated with characters based on characters in the Scream trilogy, the I Know What You Did movies and a grab bag of other recent horror films. The plot is essentially the same plot as the original Scream - inasmuch as either movie had any kind of plot. Where the plot of a slasher movie is carried along by the mounting body count, the plot of Scary Movie is carried by the skewering of recognizable scenes from other films. In both cases, the result is a big bloody mess.

I laughed exactly once during the whole movie. A character asks Shawn Wayans if television shows could be blamed for the string of murders. Wayans replies that TV shows don't cause people to murder; canceling TV shows causes people to murder. He goes on to lament that the Wayans Bros. never even got to do a final episode. Funny, but not worth the $5 I paid for admission. I heard other people in the theater laughing at various and seemingly random points during the movie so maybe there are other funny parts. Maybe I was so consumed by the desire to flee that I missed the Oscar Wilde-like wit of some fart joke.

The Scream movies carved out a new niche in the horror genre; call it ironic slasher. The trilogy quickly declined in quality as it progressed but the original fulfilled its purpose as a horror parody that was also, occasionally, suspenseful. Scary Movie is all parody and zero suspense. Save your money, rent Scream.