Scary Movie
Scary Movie is a 2000 American slasher parody film directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans and written by Marlon and Shawn Wayans (who both also star), alongside Buddy Johnson, Phil Beauman, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. Starring Jon Abrahams, Carmen Electra, Shannon Elizabeth, Anna Faris, Kurt Fuller, Regina Hall, Lochlyn Munro, Cheri Oteri, and Dave Sheridan, it follows a group of teenagers who accidentally hit a man with their car, dump his body in a lake, and swear to secrecy. A year later, someone wearing a Ghostface mask and robe begins hunting them one by one.
This article is about the 2000 film. For the film franchise, see Scary Movie (film series). For the 1996 film codenamed "Scary Movie", see Scream (1996 film). For the genre, see horror film.Scary Movie
- Shawn Wayans
- Marlon Wayans
- Buddy Johnson
- Phil Beauman
- Jason Friedberg
- Aaron Seltzer
- Eric L. Gold
- Lee R. Mayes
- Bo Zenga
- Jon Abrahams
- Carmen Electra
- Shannon Elizabeth
- Anna Faris
- Kurt Fuller
- Regina Hall
- Lochlyn Munro
- Cheri Oteri
- Dave Sheridan
- Marlon Wayans
- Shawn Wayans
- July 7, 2000
88 minutes[2]
United States
English
$19 million[3]
$278 million[3]
The film is a parody of multiple genres including the horror, slasher, and mystery film genres. Several 1990s films and TV shows are also spoofed, and the script primarily follows the plot of the slasher films Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Some films and TV shows like Halloween, The Shining, Friday the 13th, The Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project, The Matrix and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were also parodied in some scenes.
Dimension Films released Scary Movie in the United States on July 7, 2000. The film grossed $278 million worldwide on a $19 million budget.[3] The film is the first installment in the Scary Movie film series, as well as being the highest-grossing film in the series. The film received mixed reviews from critics, with the film's humor dividing critics. It later spawned four sequels, starting with 2001's Scary Movie 2.
Plot[edit]
On Halloween night, Drew Decker receives a threatening phone call while home alone. Chased outside by somebody dressed as Ghostface, she is stripped to her bra and panties before being stabbed in the breast, removing one of her silicone implants. A vehicle driven by her father, who is distracted by receiving fellatio, hits her, and she looks at her murderer just before she is fatally stabbed.
Cindy Campbell meets up with her boyfriend Bobby Prinze and her friends, Brenda Meeks, Ray Wilkins, Greg Phillippe, Buffy Gilmore and Brenda's stoner brother Shorty. News teams, including hack reporter Gail Hailstorm, converge on the school because of Drew's murder. Gail hooks up with Buffy's intellectually disabled brother Special Officer Doofy to get info from him.
While in class, Cindy notices the killer watching her from outside before receiving an ominous note and realizes Drew was murdered exactly one year after she and her friends accidentally killed a man. After football practice, Greg finds a photo of his minuscule genitals on his locker saying "I KNOW" on it. Believing Ray took it, he nearly fights him.
Cindy tells her friends about the note, attempting to convince them to tell the police, but Greg beats her instead, fearing imprisonment for the murder of last year. At Buffy's beauty pageant that evening, the killer gets Greg in plain view, while the audience mistakes her pleas for help as part of her dramatic reading. Buffy ends up winning the pageant and forgets Greg.
Cindy goes home alone, the killer attacks her but retreats when she contacts the police. Bobby arrives and is arrested after a cellphone, knife and gloves fall out of his pocket. As Cindy spends the night at Buffy and Doofy's, she receives a call from the killer.
The following day, Bobby is released from jail. Buffy is beheaded by the killer with a cleaver. That night, Gail and her cameraman Kenny go to makeout spot Lovers Lookout to get a murder on camera. After they film the killer murdering teen Heather, he chases them into the woods and murders Kenny. Gail later gives a snot-filled apology to Kenny's family, a parody of a scene from The Blair Witch Project.
Later that night, Ray and Brenda go to the movies to see Shakespeare in Love, where he is stabbed through his ear in a bathroom stall through a glory hole. The killer chases Brenda, but angry movie patrons, fed up with her talking during the movie and her obnoxious behavior, stab her to death to make her stop and also as revenge for ruining Shakespeare in Love and several movies like Thelma and Louise, The Fugitive, Schindler's List, all Jackie Chan movies, Boogie Nights, and Big Momma's House until Brenda drops dead, much to the audience's relief.
Meanwhile, Cindy has a house party, hoping for safety in numbers. One of her friends Tina gets killed while getting beer from the garage. During the party, Cindy and Bobby go upstairs and have sex. The killer gets stoned with Shorty and his friends in the basement, but kills all but Shorty. After the pair has sex, the killer stabs Bobby and disappears. Cindy gets a gun from a drawer and Bobby follows. Shorty comes up from the basement warning about the killer, but Bobby shoots him. Ray arrives on the scene, still alive.
Bobby and Ray confront Cindy in the kitchen, announcing they will only kill her and her father, and that they are merely copying the real killer. Bobby admits being gay, while Ray denies it. The plan backfires when Ray stabs Bobby repeatedly out of anger and outrage because his favorite show, The Wayans Bros., has been canceled after five seasons without getting a final episode. The killer abruptly arrives and stabs him, so Cindy kicks him out a window, employing moves from The Matrix. However, the killer vanishes before the police arrive, to Cindy's dismay.
At the police station, Cindy and the sheriff discover the killer was Doofy and not David Keegan, the man whom Cindy and her friends accidentally killed a year earlier. He was faking his disability and has escaped with Gail Hailstorm after removing his disguise, similar to the ending of The Usual Suspects. Finding his discarded backpack with his Ghostface mask and knife in the street, Cindy begins screaming but is run over by a car as the sheriff walks away.
In the mid-credit scene, Shorty, who miraculously survived the bloodbath, shows a viewer how to survive a horror movie but it turns out to be a snatch and run at a convenient store.
In the after credits scene, Doofy is shown in his room, "breaking up" with a vacuum cleaner which he had a "relationship" with.
Scary Movie: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
Scary Movie opened theatrically in the United States and Canada on July 7, 2000, on 1,912 screens, and debuted at number one at the US box office, grossing $42,346,669 during its opening weekend.[3] It went on to break Air Force One's record for having the biggest opening weekend for any R-rated film.[17] The film ultimately grossed $157,019,771 in the United States and Canada, surpassing Good Will Hunting as Miramax's highest-grossing film in that market.[18] It grossed $121,000,000 in other markets, for a worldwide gross of $278 million.[3]
Critical response[edit]
Scary Movie received mixed reviews from critics. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 51% based on 117 reviews, with an average score of 5.50/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Critics say Scary Movie overloads on crudity and grossness to get its laughs."[19] On Metacritic, the film received a score of 48 based on 32 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[20] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.[21]
Joe Leydon of Variety said that the film was "unbounded by taste, inhibition or political correctness" and that "the outer limits of R-rated respectability are stretched, if not shredded". Leydon concluded the film is "practically guaranteed to make you laugh until you're ashamed of yourself".[11] Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four, saying it "delivers the goods", calling the film a "raucous, satirical attack on slasher movies." However, Ebert was critical of the film for not being as innovative as other films, saying it lacked "the shocking impact of Airplane!, which had the advantage of breaking new ground."[8]
Bob Longino of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution felt that the film's crude humor detracted from the film, saying that Scary Movie "dives so deep into tasteless humor that it's a wonder it landed an R rating instead of an NC-17."[22] Other reviewers, such as A.O. Scott of The New York Times, argued that the jokes were "annoying less for their vulgarity than for their tiredness." Scott remarked "Couch-bound pot smokers, prison sex, mannish female gym teachers, those Whassssup Budweiser commercials—hasn't it all been done to death?"[10]
Peter Howell of The Toronto Star wrote that the film "doesn't just push the gross-out envelope, it folds, spindles, mutilates and mails it to your mama." He adds, however, that "Scary Movie has a nasty side to it that negates much of the humour. Many jokes are just plain sexist, racist, homophobic, violent . . . and not funny. A scene where a woman is knocked to the ground by an angry man who then proceeds to brutally kick her is sickening to watch. The film's frequent use of profanity also seems gratuitous, even by these standards, but that may be beside the point. By the time you realize the four-letter word count is running high, the plot itself has become repetitious and forced."[23]
