Review of Scary Movie
Year: 2000 Reviewer: Chris Docker
If you are a fan of movies that include Scream(I-III), I Know What You Did Last Summer, Halloween, the Matrix, Titanic, The Usual Suspects, the Blair Witch Project and Sixth Sense and the 35 or so movies parodied, this comedy spoof is made for you. If you haven't seen any of these but still enjoy a gross-out comedy, you'll probably enjoy it and laugh in all the wrong places (one of the most interesting things in watching it is that different sections of the audience puzzlingly laugh in completely different places).
The basic story concerns a bumbling killer who uses the Scream movie cloak and techniques to hunt down a group of teenagers who accidentally killed someone years ago. Laughs are in two categories - totally gross ones that push the limits of acceptability and the censor, and in-jokes based on parodies of other movies. For instance, many will remember the "I'm so scared" scene from Blair Witch where the girl's nose runs: in Scary Movie, the nose runs, and runs and runs and eventually starts hilariously blowing bubbles. The gross-out jokes make There's Something About Mary look definitely prudish. There's a retard who has sex by putting his penis into a vacuum cleaner hosepipe, a man who doesn't realize he's gay but chases men (and, when an erect penis is offered him through a latrine wall, finds it goes, quite literally, in one ear and out of the other.) The real nastiness of the reporter from earlier movies is made obvious. And so on. Scary Movie II follows on soon - but meanwhile I will be going to see this one a second time to see how many hilarious film references I can spot! Don't wait for the TV version - it's been heavily edited. Very vile, very funny, very un-pc. . . oh - and it has some scary bits too! Stay to the end of the credits for an extra treat.
Rating: 8/10
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