SCARY MOVIE 2 Directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans With Shawn & Marlon Wayans, Anna Faris De Vargas R 99 min.
It must be said of Scary Movie 2 that it is a very fluid movie. Pretty much every fluid that can emerge from the human body does emerge from the human body, in living color and copious, screen-filling quantities. There is solid waste as well, and of course the indispensable gaseous emissions without which no contemporary American comedy worthy of the name would dream of being seen or heard.
In short, Scary Movie 2 has pretty much everything that its chart-busting antecedent Scary Movie had except an original idea. It has the same cast, more or less, including those wacky eternal college kids Shawn Wayans (30), Marlon Wayans (29), and Tori Spelling (28), and including a lot of characters who were killed in the original. It has the same pacing, the same quality of jokes, the same striving tastelessness.
2 opens in a place called Hell House with an Exorcist take-off, which offers one of the few mildly amusing moments in the picture: a group of middle-aged white people gathered around a piano singing a rap hit. But before we leave Hell House we are treated to dueling vomit, and the sight of James Woods (in the role of the Exorcist) straining and performing at top volume on the toilet. It could have been worse. The role was originally intended for Marlon Brando.
We move from there to One Year Later , and pick things up with our heroine Cindy (Anna Faris) now in college. Evil Professor Oldman (Tim Curry) and his wheelchair-bound sidekick Dwight (David Cross) have hatched a nefarious research project that involves getting the stupidest undergraduates on campus to spend the weekend at a haunted house, the same Hell House where the opening Exorcist stuff took place, now presided over by Hanson (Chris Elliot), a butler with a deformed hand and mind. This serves as a vehicle for a rapid-fire burst of parodies of haunted house movies, but Wayans and his team of seven, count em, writers never heard of a joke that didn t involve bodily functions, so if you were looking for wit with your haunted house mystery spoof, rent the 1976 Neil Simon movie Murder by Death.
Much hilarity is wrung from Hanson's deformed hand, and from Dwight's wheelchair, and from Tori Spelling performing ghostly fellatio, and from a sexually aggressive talking parrot, and from the heroine using the black cat's kitty litter box. A reasonable definition of what is funny might be something that makes you laugh, and at the showing I attended, which was also attended by a lot of small children, there was the occasional ripple of laughter. The original Scary Movie was the largest-grossing R-rated movie in history, so there is undoubtedly an audience for this one too. But if you are literate enough to be reading a newspaper, it probably isn't you.
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