Scary Movie opens with Carmen Electra’s Drew Decker alone on Halloween night, taking a threatening call before a killer in a Ghostface mask chases her outside, strips her to her bra and panties, and stabs her in the breast, removing one of her silicone implants. Her father, distracted by receiving fellatio from her mother, runs her over on his way out. She looks at her murderer just before the fatal knife.
That is the pitch, and Keenen Ivory Wayans directs it straight at the two franchises it steals from: I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream.
Trailer, via YouTube Movies.
Cindy Campbell and the Lake
The plot is a parody engine. Cindy Campbell, played by Anna Faris, and her friends hit a man with their car, dump the body in a lake, and swear secrecy. A year later someone in a Ghostface mask and robe starts hunting them.
Dimension Films released Scary Movie in the United States on July 7, 2000. It runs 88 minutes. It made $278 million worldwide on a $19 million budget, the highest-grossing entry in the series and the ninth-highest-grossing film of that year in the States.
The money is the story here, not the jokes. A $19 million comedy that returns $278 million tells you what Dimension bought: a cheap, fast, disposable spoof with a recognizable mask on the poster.
Marlon Wayans as Shorty
The cast is stacked with the era’s comedy faces. Marlon Wayans plays Shorty, the stoner brother of Brenda Meeks, played by Regina Hall. Shawn Wayans is Ray. Jon Abrahams is Bobby Prinze, Cindy’s boyfriend, who spends the movie pressuring her to have sex for the first time.
Lochlyn Munro is Greg Phillippe. Shannon Elizabeth is Buffy Gilmore. Cheri Oteri is Gail Hailstorm, the hack reporter who seduces Buffy’s intellectually disabled brother, Special Officer Doofy, played by Dave Sheridan, to get information. Kurt Fuller is the Sheriff.
The film was written by Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Buddy Johnson, Phil Beauman, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. Six writers. That number shows on screen.
Gail Hailstorm at the School
News teams converge on the school because of Drew’s murder, and Cindy notices the killer watching her from outside her classroom before an ominous note arrives. She realizes Drew was murdered exactly one year after she and her friends killed the man at the lake.
She tries to convince her friends to tell the police. Greg beats her instead, afraid of prison for the earlier killing.
Greg Phillippe and the Locker
The set pieces arrive in a running order that never slows down:
| Sequence | What happens |
|---|---|
| Halloween night | Drew is chased, stripped and stabbed |
| One year later | Cindy learns Drew died a year after the lake |
| Football practice | Greg finds a photo of his small penis marked with the words I KNOW |
| Buffy’s pageant | The killer murders Greg in plain view |
| Cindy’s house | The killer attacks, then retreats when she calls police |
The pageant is the best of these. The audience mistakes Buffy’s pleas for help as part of her dramatic reading. She wins the pageant and forgets Greg entirely.
The Mask and the Money
Scary Movie is not a good film. It is a profitable one. The satire has no target beyond whatever was in theaters that summer, and the jokes lean on shock rather than construction.
What holds it together is Faris. She plays Cindy straight while everything around her collapses into noise, and that deadpan is the only reason the 88 minutes move. Hall and the Wayans brothers get the bigger laughs, but they get them by shouting.
Six Writers and Five Sequels
The tagline promised “No mercy. No shame. No sequel.” There were five, starting with Scary Movie 2 in 2001. The reviews were mixed, and that reads right. This is a film built to open wide and fade fast, and it did both.
Score: 52%.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
