Scary Movie 2 (2001, Anna Faris, Regina Hall) – Classic Movie Review 1180

No sequel, my eye! Breaking the promise made by the first movie, ‘No mercy, no shame, no sequel’, the Scary Movie characters are back in the Wayans Bros’s outlandish, pretty sick and mean-spirited 2001 swift follow-up to their 2000 blockbuster. It starts brightly enough, with quite a few laughs, but alas runs out of steam, ideas, targets and laughs more or less totally after about 45 minutes.

With Shawn and Marlon Wayans’s script so threadbare, it’s all much, much worse this time round, with wild parodies on The Sixth Sense, Hannibal and What Lies Beneath notably on the tatty menu. The Haunting, The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, The Changeling Hollow Man and The Legend of Hell House are also among the wide range of spoof targets going back aways.

The best bit by far is the opening spoof of The Exorcist, with James Woods (as Father McFeely) parodying the Max von Sydow role and Natasha Lyonne as Megan. Some of the eager-to-please performances are okay, especially by Shawn and Marlon Wayans and lively series stars Anna Faris and Regina Hall as Cindy Campbell and Brenda Meeks.

Keenen Ivory Wayans again directs, but it was the end of the line for the Wayans Bros with Scary Movie. Another followed in 2003 but with David Zucker in charge, then another in 2006 and another after a long gap in 2013. So, that’s right, we’re up to Scary Movie 5 by 2013.

(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Film Review 1180

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/