Scary Movie (2000) Halloween Advent

Rating 18
Length 1h28
Release 8.9.2000
Director Keenen Ivory Wayans
About Cindy Campbell and her friends mistakenly end up killing a man. A year after the unfortunate incident, someone stalks them, leaves threatening messages and tries to kill them one by one.
Moon: no moon sighting
Where to Watch: Netflix
Trailer:

Trick

• This film hasn’t aged well. There’s some jokes and nods that reference things that were so of the moment that anyone watching today will not understand ‘wassssup’ and the Matrix ‘bullet time’ are among the few that just seem outdated. There are some ‘jokes’ that should never have been okay to put to film.
  Case in point is the ‘gag’ of Miss Mann, the PE teacher. They’re revealed to be a pre-op trans woman and its oh so funny *please understand the eyeroll and sarcasm that went into this* because geddit, geddit???! Just in case you didn’t, we get an eyeful of scrotum when the character sits, open legged with a skirt on.
  I don’t care about the intention of this. At all. It’s fucked up and wrong, and there’s no excusing it.
• Some of it is a little too on the nose. Like, in some cases its lines of dialogue lifted from the film they’re lampooning. Spoof is no new thing; Mel Brooks is the master and everyone loves Airplane! but the beauty of most of those films lie in their subtlety. They’re commenting upon the genre as a whole, but this makes it almost too personal.
• The over-acting at times is painful. It cheapens it and sucks IQ points from me every time I watch. I know I’m not the target audience; I prefer homage to whatever the fuck this is.

Treat

• I love the black representation in this movie; from the tongue in cheek “A whole bunch of people are dead, so these black asses are getting out of here” to the interaction in the cinema that riffs off the opening of Scream 2. I can see how carefully this film was constructed; it walked that careful ‘White Hollywood’ line so that films like Fifty Shades of Black and Black Panther could run.
• You have to hold off for the pay off, but I really like the ongoing persona of Shawn Wayans’ Ray. I’ll admit, I was a little uncomfortable at the sledgehammer hints that he’s gay. However, in that final act when Bobby reveals he’s gay and that so is Ray, Wayans response is brilliant; it’s not offended, its a plain and simple ‘I’m not’. It feels a little bit like a ‘fuck you judgemental motherfucker’ and I’m all up for that.
• Doofy is fucking brilliant. It’s a character that really takes the film to its most insane extremes and really does throw you off the first time of watching. Plus, kudos has to go to that neat little nod to the Usual Suspects right at the end there.
• Fair play to the sexual positivity of women in this film. Yes, it is done for laughs, but there’s equality in that- there’s pot shots at both male and female masturbation.

Final Thoughts

This has not aged well, but if you are a teenage boy, you have the emotional range of a teenage boy, or you’re looking to have 90 minutes of ‘I get that reference’ hammered down your throat…. this is your wheelhouse.