Scary Movie

year: 2000; rated R; genre: comedy/spoof
Anna Faris, John Abrahams, Shanon Elizabeth, Cheri Oteri

Summary: A parody of modern horror/slasher/teen flicks which follows the storyline of Scream.

I felt a little bit disappointed by this movie. I guess the trailers (which contain most of the funniest moments from the movie) got my hopes up. It's not that Scary Movie isn't funny - in fact it's the funniest movie I've seen this year. I just expected a little bit more.

Scary Movie is filled wall to wall with dumb humor. I guess that's what you should expect from a parody, but I was hoping for some smarter pokes at the modern horror genre.

OK, it's starting to sound like I didn't enjoy this movie. The truth is - I laughed a lot. The first 30 minutes were hilarious. There were so many jokes per minute, even if one didn't work, there was another one right after that that cracked me up.

After the first 30 minutes though, the laugh per minute quotient lowered significantly. The biggest problem with Scary Movie is that if follows the Scream storyline too closely. In some scenes, the Scream dialogue (wich is funny on it's own) is just copied. The trouble with spoofing Scream is that it is a bit of a spoof itself, and it's really hard to spoof a spoof.

The I Know What You Did Last Summer spoof on the other hand is hilarious, because I Know... is not a parody - it's a stupid teen slasher flick. Movies like that NEED to be spoofed.

Teen horror flicks are not the only target of Scary Movie - it succesfully parodies movies like American Pie, The Matrix and even Pulp Fiction. One of the funniest things about the movie is the characters Doofy and Gail Hailstorm - an obvious parody of Dewey and Gale Weathers from Scream. They (especially Gail Hailstorm) provide us with a lot of laughs.

The acting was overall OK. Cheri Oteri stole the show as Gale, and Anna Faris did pretty good as Cindy. I did not however like Marlon Wayans as Randy, he was overacting and annoying as hell. Shanon Elizabeth (Nadia from American Pie) was also overacting but she's forgiven cause she's hot.

One of the things about Scary Movie that surprised me was how gross it was. Some of the humor was too nasty to be funny. It's simply amazing that this movie passed with an R rating. Another thing that surprised me was that there was much more male nudity than female nudity. I was very disappointed by Shanon Elizabeth and Carmen Electera.

As for the plot... there isn't one. This is a parody.

Overall, Scary Movie is a funny movie. Not one of the best in the genre, but it has enough laughs to satisfy any spoof fan.

written by Dani Koev

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