Scary Movie 2

Starring Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Chris Masterson, Kathleen Robertson
Based on characters by Shawn Wayans & Marlon Wayans & Buddy Johnson & Phil Beauman and Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer
Written by Shawn Wayans & Marlon Wayans & Alyson Fouse & Greg Grabianski & Dave Polsky & Michael Anthony Snowden & Craig Wayans
Directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans
no website

IN SHORT: Ten minutes of laffs. After that, feh. [not Rated . 85 minutes]

From the Producers of Scary Movie who promised that there would be "no sequels" -- they put it in writing in their advertising -- comes the inevitable breaking of the promise.

Once slice 'n' dice movies had been taken to the cleaners, the obvious followup was so called "horror" movies. Those are nowadays slice without dice, relying more on surprise and shock than on body piercing by large sharp objects. The "survivors" of Scary Movie, Shorty, Ray Cindy and Regina (Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Faris and Regina Hall, now in college, are given a class assignment to spend a weekend in a house on a haunted hill, an abandoned estate where a murder once took place. Tim Curry plays the professor who has wired all the showers for live video, David Cross is his wheelchair bound associate with an attitude. New meat on the block includes Buddy (Chris Masterson) who could get into Cindy's pants if he had a double digit IQ; Theo (Kathleen Robertson), who redefines the word "yum" and Tori Spelling.

There's a cheap joke to be made about Tori, but this movie is nothing but cheap jokes, so we'll pass. Rounding out the cast is Chris Elliot as manservant Hanson, whose hand is deformed and whose performance redefines the term "stomach-wrenching"

To be fair, the opening sequence of Scary Movie 2, which parodies The Exorcist (guest appearances by Andy Richter and James Woods as the priests; Natasha Lyonne as Linda Blair), is relatively funny. From there on in you are condemned to Comedy Hell. The sequence has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the movie but, then again, very little of anything in the successive scenes has anything to do with anything that comes before or after any of them. They do have everything to do with making jokes involving bodily functions one and two (and if there was a number for ejaculation, it'd be on the list), male genitalia and female breasts. If we remember correctly, all that stuff comprised 98 percent of movie number one. It is not necessarily an improvement that the percentage drops to 95 percent in movie number two because our margin for statistical error is plus or minus five percent.

On the plus side, Scary Movie 2 does have a trio of fine babes, one of whom is very fine and one of whom is most incredibly excellent, to keep us visually stimulated -- a revelation which should severely disappoint all the teenlets that accused us of being a homosexual with shriveled nuts for being bored silly by The Fast and the Furious. Then again, if you liked the latter, you probably liked the original Scary Movie so go enjoy yourselves. See if you walk out saying "that was stupid" like the kidlets in the row in front of us.

On the negative side, ten minutes of comedy is followed by seventy more of dick jokes, which took seven people to write. Pass it by.

On average, a first run movie ticket will run you Eight Bucks. Were Cranky able to set his own price to Scary Movie, he would have paid . . .

$1.00

Frankly, if all we wanted was more babes (and frankly, we're shallow enough that we prefer breasts in our scareflicks, parody or not) we could have spent less money on a magazine.

ADDENDUM: When we first posted, the rating was a flat zero. Reader Tony Tee rightly pointed out that if there was anything in the flick that we enjoyed -- and that would be as little as the The Exorcist parody that opens Scary Movie 2 -- then the rating should be at least a buck. And so it is...

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