The complete anti-thesis of what the first was all about

Rating: 2/10 (7 July 2001)

Scary Movie was a brilliant, hilarious, and intelligent satire of scary movies. It poked fun at Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Nightmare On Elm Street and so on, and it did it with compassion and care. The writers really did their homework and thus we were presented with a film that not only was entertaining and funny, but it was smart and witty. You could infinitely count the number of movie references in the film and and some of them were so subtle that it took you a moment or two to realize that they were making fun of whatever movie it was making fun of. This cheap ersatz of a film, this charlatan, this sheep in wolves clothing is not only a terrible film, it does a terrible injustice to all that the first one stood for. It angers me when films like this are made as irresponsibly as this one was because it suckered me into the theater based on memories of last year. I actually put The Wayans and Kevin Williamson ( creator of the Scream franchise ) in the same category after Scary Movie. Now, my perception of the Wayans is that they are all one hit wonders.
Scary Movie 2 has one big problem, and that is they decided to make fun of movies that weren't as iconoclastic as the ones they made fun of in the first one. When you are satirizing films like The Haunting and House on Haunted Hill, you alienate perhaps your core audience that didn't really like those movies all that much in the first place. There were some clever references to Amityville Horror and The Exorcist at the beginning and those were the best jabs in the whole film, but what about the rest of this debacle? Why do I want to watch The Haunting and Hollow Man all over again when I didn't enjoy it in the first place? There are many horror fans out there and this film is not commensurate with the abilities that the Wayans showed in the first one. There are only so many times you can get by with fart, puke, pee, poo and sex jokes before you enervate your audience. I was enervated after the first fifteen minutes. I kept waiting for it to get better. But it never did. For every reference I could pick out and comprehend, there were long, painful stretches of film when I just didn't understand what they were trying to say or do. What was the point of Chris Elliot's character? Was he an amalgamation of every creepy character that has ever appeared in a haunted house film? Was he a pastiche of butlers or chambermaids from haunted house Hammer films? What was he? I have seen a lot of horror films in my day but never have I been privy to a more repulsive and useless character than him. He just wasn't needed, and if he was, then how about giving him more to go on than just a small and deformed appendage?
To give a little credit, as I said, the beginning with James Woods and the Amityville/Exorcist scene was clever and there is one brilliant homage/satire that starts with the bouncing ball from The Changeling that turns into a wonderfully directed spinoff of the Nike basketball commercial. I was very impressed and entertained for those two minutes. But then for that clever scene, there are dozens of others that go absolutely nowhere. There is another embarrassing scene with Tori Spelling spouting off sexual profanities to an invisible miscreant that has his way with her against a wall that is supposed to be a send up of A Nightmare On Elm Street when Tina is attacked by an invisible Freddy Krueger. It is horribly done in here and there is no payoff.
Back in the 10th century, the charlatan and the mounteback, two unsavory types, used to sell bogus panaceas, cure-alls, at bargain prices. They called this their "nostrum", meaning literally, "our remedy." Well my nostrum for this foul-stenched excuse for a film is for the Wayans to put a little more effort into the writing and maybe cut down from seven writers to two. This way ideas don't mesh and egos don't get bruised. As it stands this is one of the worst films I have seen this year and seeing how good the first one was, they should be ashamed of this deplorable, egregious, vapid and totally unnecessary film that they have given to us. And that is a shame.
1.5 out of 10- The 1.5 being for the clever beginning and the Nike/Changeling send off. The rest of the movie receives a 0. Instead of making fun of films that are here today and forgotten tomorrow, why not take on the greats like Friday the 13th, Halloween, Cujo, Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre? There is plenty of great material out there, so why go after films that people disliked? It doesn't make much sense.