Scary Movie 2 (2001) 1 star out of 4. Starring Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Chris Masterson, Kathleen Robertson, James Woods, Tim Curry, Tori Spelling and Chris Elliott. Written by Shawn Wayans & Marlon Wayans & Alyson Fouse & Greg Grabianski & Dave Polsky & Michael Anthony Snowden & Craig Wayans. Directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans. Rated R.
They should have stuck to the promise emblazoned on the original movie's poster: "No sequel."
Scary Movie 2 is nowhere near as funny as its predecessor, and it is not because the Wayans brothers, Shawn and Marlon doing the writing and Keenen Ivory behind the camera, don't try.
What defeats them is the genre they have chosen to spoof. The first movie - an outrageous, low-brow, savage satire of teen slasher flicks such as Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer - succeeded because of its take-no-prisoners attitude toward a type of film that was in vogue, familiar and popular.
In Scary Movie 2, the filmmakers take on the haunted house-ghost story format which, if you look at the grosses for such recent lame offerings as the respective remakes of The Haunting and House on Haunted Hill, did not draw audiences nor enter the cultural psyche as did the various teen slasher series.
Scary Movie 2 does start off promising with a wonderful spoof of The Exorcist, featuring James Wood in the Max Von Sydow role and Veronica Cartwright lampooning Ellen Burstyn. Of course split pea soup is the punch line - an overabundant amount, which offers the hope that the rest of the movie will be just as tasteless and excessive.
But this pre-credit sequence has nothing at all to do with the main action, which features the cast members from the original signing up to spend a weekend at a creepy haunted mansion as part of a university class project.
Some of the jokes are as scatological and offensive as in the original, but they lack that take-no-prisoners bite that raised Scary Movie to the heights of burlesque.
Scary Movie 2 merely lurches from one lame sendup to another, offering weak spoofs of that Nike shoe ad in which everyone does acrobatics with a basketball, and the films What Lies Beneath and Hannibal (features that only faired adequately at the box office), John Woo's Mission: Impossible 2 and Charlie's Angels.
It is as if the Wayans and their team of writers - at least seven are credited - just threw ideas in a blender and hoped they'd coalesce. They don't.
While the pace of the original left you breathless, the sequel moves with the speed of an 18-wheeler carrying two tons of concrete up a steep mountain road. You can almost hear the reels panting.
Scary Movie 2 tries very hard to live up to its original, but it falls very short. It's a dissatisfying spectacle, a very weak sister of a very good movie. The really scary aspect of this sequel is how disappointing it really is.
Bob Bloom is the film critic at the Journal and Courier in Lafayette, IN. He can be reached by e-mail at bloom@journal-courier.com. Other reviews by Bloom can be found at www.jconline.com by clicking on golafayette. Bloom's reviews also can be found on the Web at the Internet Movie Database: http://www.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Bob+Bloom
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