There is only so much that a critic can say when reviewing a piece of, um, cinema like Scary Movie 2. A brief recap of what the movie is trying to do, how well it succeeds, its shortcomings — that's about all that this type of film leaves room for.
This is not Shakespeare. It's dumb, juvenile, gross-out comedy — you'll like it or you won't, depending upon your sense of humor. I didn't.
Basically what the Wayans Brothers and their collaborators have done here is rent a bunch of horror films (and a few other genres, for good measure), transplant their most iconic sequences into this movie and occasionally apply some level of observation or irony to the purloined material.
Unfortunately, though, instead of playing off of the idiosyncrasies of its predecessors, the film resorts to infusing its familiar scenes with scatological humor and little else. Apart from a select few moments, there is not much genuine wit on display here.
Scary Movie 2 borrows much of its plot structure from Jan De Bont's heretically bad remake of The Haunting and does little to improve upon it.
A group of students, most of them characters from the first Scary Movie, are duped by their lustful professor (Tim Curry) into spending the weekend at an abandoned mansion named Hell House.
During a sequence before the opening credits, we discover that a very putrid exorcism has taken place there a year earlier. (Considering what he has to do and say in these scenes, I can only hope the producers paid James Woods the same $2 million salary they were offering Marlon Brando.)
The movie is a parade of dumb jokes, a few of which work, most of which do not.
There's some sly humor involving the male-female "just friends" scenario, but for every witty joke (like the marijuana plant that seems to have been understudying the tree from Poltergeist), there are half a dozen flaccid, dull jokes about sex with ghosts, sex with roasted turkeys, sex with clown dolls...
In all fairness, the movie does borrow from some good source material: both Poltergeist films, The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror.
And it attempts to skewer a few easy targets like Dude, Where's My Car? and Charlie's Angels. (I'm not sure how the latter found its way in, but for all I remember it may very well have been on the AFI's list of thrilling movies.)
In balance, the film misses far too many opportunities and sets its sights too low to be very satisfying. Some actual intelligence shines through in jokes about the Florida ballots and the cheesy use of slow-motion in fight sequences, but such wit for the most part seems adrift in a sewer of locker room absurdity.
Given the talent involved here, this is one sequel that had every hope of outshining its predecessor, but this one only manages to limp ahead by default.
Grade: C
R, 1 hour, 23 minutes
