Running time: 88 minutes
Starring: Anna Faris, Shannon Elizabeth, Cheri Oteri, Regina Hall, Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Carmen Electra, Lochlyn Munro, Jon Abrahams, Kurt Fuller
Rating 5 out of 10
There's no accounting for taste. The latest spoof from the Wayan brothers has very little to offer: no big name stars, strained laughs and an uninspiring soundtrack.Moreover, all the best gags have been shoe-horned into the 60-second trailer. Yet Scary Movie has frightened up almost $100 million at the US box office, more than Scream, the film it so eagerly lampoons.
Perhaps this signals the start of a new cinematic fashion, one which British film-makers have been peddling unsuccessfully for years: the non-comedy, where the biggest joke is the total lack of humour. The setting is your average American high school, populated by well-coiffeured teens played by actors well into their twenties.
Plucky Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) is horrified when one of her classmates, Drew (Carmen Electra), is killed by a knife-wielding assailant. Targeted for immediate slicin' and dicin' by the mystery killer, Cindy joins forces with her equally clueless chums - feisty best friend Brenda (Regina Hall), sex-obsessed boyfriend Bobby (Jon Abrahams), school slut Buffy (Shannon Elizabeth), football jock Greg (Lochlyn Munro), pot-head Shorty (Marlon Wayans) and the sexually ambiguous Ray (Shawn Wayans) - to unmask the murderer before they all end up in the local morgue.
In their earlier films - I'm Gonna Get You Sucka, Don't Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice In The Hood - the Wayans satirised cultural stereotypes and took pot-shots at movies which treat their extremely violent content with utmost seriousness.
With Scary Movie, they make the fatal error of poking fun at a genre which continues to make itself look ridiculous: either by design (Scream) or without realising it (Cherry Falls).
There are only so many cliches, archetypes and conventions that the screenwriters can send up from the horror canon - certainly not enough to sustain a whole film, even for 88 minutes - so Scary Movie is forced to widen its scope to include references to a host of other genres.
Hence, The Usual Suspects is sourced for the twist ending, and one fight sequence between Cindy and the masked killer is choreographed to mimic The Matrix. The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense are both targeted for easy laughs - "I see dead people," giggles Shorty, in a drug-induced haze.
As is the current vogue, bodily fluids gush left, right and centre to meet the requisite gross-out factor, including one death scene in which a character gets a right earful of something rather unpleasant.
