Scary Movie 2 Fails to
Scare Up Laughs

By Teddy Durgin
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed last year's Scary Movie, a dead-on parody of the Scream and I Know What You Did Last
Summer movies of the late 1990s. The movie was fantastically gross and stupid, but director/co-writer Keenan Ivory Wayans proved to be a real master of the material delivering laughs on a consistent basis. Not only that, but the timing was perfect for such a spoof.

By contrast, the inevitable Scary Movie 2 (due in theaters July 4) feels tired and calculated by comparison. Having skewered the Wes Craven/Kevin Williamson Dead Teenager movies, Wayans and his small legion of screenwriters (seven in all!) had to find a different series of horror films to tackle. They should have looked longer. Instead, they focused on the tired haunted house genre, and the results are disappointing to say the least.

Reuniting from the first film are Shawn and Marlon Wayans, Anna Faris, and Regina Hall. The four are now college students, and a manipulative professor (Tim Curry) seeks to use them as guinea pigs in an off-campus house known to be possessed by an evil spirit. What follows is a spoof of such mediocre films as The Haunting, The House on Haunted Hill, and What Lies Beneath, with elements of Charlie's Angels and Mission: Impossible 2 thrown in for good measure.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about Scary Movie 2 is not the body excrement jokes, or the handicapped jokes, or the gay jokes, or even the sex jokes. The most shocking thing is how badly edited the film is. It almost seems like the producers weren't able to schedule the principal cast members' days of shootings very well. Characters get separated, two or three at a time. Then, in the next scene, those characters might be alone in different parts of the house or suddenly in a group of four or five. A plot thread involving Tori Spelling being seduced by the house's ghost is so terribly integrated into the final action, it's actually never fully explained. Keenan Ivory Wayans is the one most to blame for failing to juggle the subplots. But he gets no help from editors Peter Teschner and Richard Pearson, who should join the production crew of Tomb Raider in some kind of Hollywood Hell prison for delivering such a woefully amateurish effort.

Say what you want about the first Scary Movie, but structurally, that film delivered. Scary Movie 2, by contrast, feels rushed and incomplete. That is probably because Miramax's Dimension Films division wanted to get this sequel into theaters as soon as possible before the brand recognition wore off.

This is a shame, as the majority of Wayans' cast is certainly game for the material once again. Faris is a lot of fun to watch as Cindy, a kind of ditzy, clueless Neve Campbell knockoff with a little Eve Plumb thrown in for good measure. The always delightful Kathleen Robertson is also in the film as a flirty sexpot, whose wardrobe gets skimpier and tighter with each passing scene.

But Chris Elliott flat out embarrasses himself in an unfunny and tiresome role as Hanson, a butler with a mangled hand. One mangled hand joke is funny. Ten mangled hand jokes, and you're wondering when this extended cameo is going to end. A hundred mangled hand jokes, and you want to take up a collection in the theater so that Elliott never has to debase himself like this ever again.

HOWEVER, there is one reason to see Scary Movie 2, and one reason alone. That is the film's pre-title sequence, a dead-on, razor-sharp parody of The Exorcist. These first seven minutes have nothing to do with the rest of the film (none of the original cast members are in it), so the sequence stands completely on its own as a short film of sorts. James Woods is Father McFeely (a role that was originally to be played by Marlon Brando!) Summoned to the house where a little girl (Natasha Lyonne) is possessed, McFeely teams up with Father Harris (Andy Richter) to exorcise the demon. The sequence works, because: 1) it rips an all-time classic of the genre; 2) it is legitimately, laugh-out funny; and 3) you'll never look at the original quite the same way again.

The line that Woods' delivers when the girl's head spins around is almost worth the price of admission. The vomit contest between the girl and the two priests is fall-on-the-floor absurd. And the scene ends with a classic Woods' gesture. For a brief moment, I thought: "Wow, the Wayans' brothers are going to pull it off again!" Then, the rest of the movie happened.

My advice? Save your cash, folks. Wait for Scary Movie 2 on cable, watch the first seven minutes, laugh your tookus off, then change the channel. Or better yet. Just rent Scary Movie and remember when these same people were on top of their game.