Plot: What’s it about?
The tagline for the original Scary Movie read, “No Mercy. No Shame. No Sequel,” and as they craftily admit with Scary Movie 2’s tagline, they lied. But after such a trashy piece of filmmaking, it’s hard to forgive them for the mistake. This Wayans brothers sequel is a huge piece of evidence to add to the heaping stack of embarassing flicks with an awful case of sequelitis — or maybe just flat-out poor writing.
A team of writers, including Shawn and Marlon Wayans, pieced together the “plot,” which involves a professor (Tim Curry, Charlie’s Angels) tricking a group of teens into visiting a haunted house under the guise of a scientific experiment, a la The Haunting. Consistent with the plot in general, they include several spoofs of horror movies from our past along the way. The movie’s opening segment is an entertaining parody of The Exorcist, and it leads us to believe that the bulk of the film to follow may actually be pretty good. But don’t, by any means, get your hopes up, because it all goes downhill from there. Way downhill.
The premise — the ragtag group of teenagers that killed in the last movie return as if nothing happened — seems funny, but the Wayans brothers forgot they have to attempt to put at least a little substance into their story, rather than just stringing together a bunch of raunchy, idiotic jokes. Even worse, these jokes make no sense together in the same movie. And it happens so often throughout the film (and the punchlines become increasingly, disgustingly obvious), it’s almost sickening. There is literally nothing to engage us (a basic requirement for any movie). Scary Movie 2 is simply an 85-minute comedy skit that bears no resemblance to the actual motion picture it claims to be.
The lack of effort put into making this movie quickly becomes apparent. It’s most obvious when they parody Hannibal, a movie that came out a mere few months earlier, proving this film was thrown together so quickly, all the producers were thinking about was how much money they would rake in on opening weekend. These are the symptoms of sequelitis, and Scary Movie 2 reeks so badly of them, audience members will be reaching for their cell phones to dial 9-1-1. It’s also not a good sign when each new installment of a movie series comes out only a year after its predecessor, meaning every thing is haphazardly throw together in order to release it as soon as possible.
In comparing it to the first Scary Movie, this in indeed worse, and that’s about as far from a compliment as possible. The original at least had a vaguely coherent story to follow, and the jokes, though tasteless and contrived, were still laughable. In both, the Wayans are obviously trying to match the wit of the Farrelly brothers, and either we were more in the mood for that sort of comedy in 2000, or it’s just very poorly done in Scary Movie 2.
The few good things that can be said of this movie are two noteworthy spoofs (those of The Exorcist and a Nike basketball commercial) and a handful of funny performances. James Woods and Andy Richter (the ex-sidekick on late night TV’s “Conan O’Brien”) are perfectly cast as the priests who must exorcise a demon from Natasha Lyonne (American Pie), but some other recognizable cameos turned out to be a waste: Chris Elliot (There’s Something About Mary) can hardly ever find a good movie to be in, Tori Spelling (TV’s “Beverly Hills 90210”) still can’t act worth a damn, and Tim Curry needs a new agent. As for the actors from the original Scary Movie (Anna Faris, Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans), they have the potential to be funny, but they didn’t get a penny’s worth of help from this script.
Video: How does it look?
Unlike the first installment of this series (I say series because once a movie makes money, you know there will be at least three of them), this is presented in a 1.85:1 anamorphic ratio as opposed to it’s predecessor, which was shown in a wider 2.35:1 ratio. Nevertheless, I was a bit disappointed in how the film looked. While there’s not a lot of supplements on the disc or many sound options to fill up the disc, the image tended to be a bit soft at times, something that’s a bit strange with day and date releases. It’s not horrible, by any means, but considering the age of the film (brand new), I was expecting a bit more, especially from Disney who usually delivers top notch video presentations. Black levels are right on target and a bit of edge enhancemnt distracted me from the film even further. While this looks good, it’s not up to par with how it should look.
Audio: How does it sound?
The audio is a bit better than the video as it’s presented in a Dolby Digital 5.1 mix. Though comedies have never been the type of movie to really show your system off with. Plenty of on-screen sounds accompany the equally lame jokes to a fairly good effect. The dialog is very clean, with no distortion present. Most of the action tends to be located in the front three channels, which makes sense as again…comedies don’t really sound as good as an action movie. The soundtrack serves it’s purpose here, plain and simple.
Supplements: What are the extras?
While not sporting nearly as many features as the original, Scary Movie 2 is made up of a lot of featurettes. The most robust of these are the 22 deleted scenes, though the movie isn’t that long, so it would make sense that at least a few of these would have made the final cut. Apparantely not. An eight minute behind the scenes featurette is not unlike the ones we’re so used to seeing. It has brief interviews with the cast and crew. A special effects tour is mildly entertaining showing us the different type of gross out material used in the movie (fake vomit, puke…) and so on. James Woods does offer up why he chose to take a part in the movie, but maybe he’ll wisen up and go back to doing what he’s best at. Just my opinion. Here Kitty, Kitty focuses on the cats used for fighting in the movie and it’s pretty straight-forward. Behind the Make Up (a parody of Behind the Music?) does show us some rather interesting things, most notably the tongue used in the Excorcist parody was the exact same one that Linda Blair used in the original Excorcist movie. I wonder howt hey pulled that off? Lastly, a still gallery is included, which does have some pretty interesting scenes from the movie. All in all, Scary Movie 2 doesn’t live up to it’s predecessor (I laughed so hard at the original that I had to pause the DVD just to catch my breath). It’s more of the same here, but the gags fall way short. I wonder if Scary Movie 3 will be any better?
