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Halfway through this film I was praying for something subtle and witty to happen. Praying that we wouldn't get another joke which was easy to spot a mile off. Hoping beyond hope that I would find something to actually laugh at. Unfortunately, there isn't a single funny moment in SCARY MOVIE. There are a couple of mildly amusing parodies and in-jokes but otherwise, this film sits in the barren wasteland of humour. That ultimate failure: a comedy that just isn't funny.
It's obvious which audience the makers of this film were aiming at: the teen market. Thus, we have a movie whose jokes fall into two categories: the parody, and the crude. By crude I mean jokes which are extremely obvious in nature and lack both wit and sophistication - somebody getting hit by a car is an example of this (so hilariously funny that they do the same joke twice). In the right context these jokes can sometimes work (take THE NAKED GUN trilogy for example), but here they fall flat. And, to make matters worse, many of the jokes are of the explicit sexual nature which have been depressingly filling the movies as of late. Do they make me laugh? No, they just make me sigh.
The parodies should have worked, by all accounts. A fight between the heroine and the killer is done in slow-mo, to remind us of THE MATRIX. Yet even infallible jokes such as these somehow fall flat - perhaps because they were all used up in the film's trailer, so that we simply spend our time waiting for them to show up. They fly by thick and fast, references to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, THE SIXTH SENSE, and many more, but they consistently fail to provoke laughs. The film's ending is ripped off from THE USUAL SUSPECTS, but incredibly this is played seriously - a cop out for sure. A cameo from DAWSON'S CREEK star James Van Der Beek is unexpected and successful, so perhaps more cameos would have helped.
The one funny scene in this film has Cindy (Anna Faris) stalked by a mask-wearing murderer up a flight of stairs. She grabs anything at hand to throw at him, and the items become more and more ludicrous - beginning with a vase, moving on to a bicycle, an old woman, and finally a piano. Yet for one genuinely amusing moment, there are a hundred more painfully bad ones. For fans with bad taste only, this is guaranteed to offend everyone else - as witnessed after I watched other audience members walk out of the cinema I was in as this was playing.
score 2/10
Leofwine_draca 11 December 2016
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3596473/ |
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22-11-2019 07:40:54
