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Scary Movie 2

The surprise success of "Scary Movie" has prompted the original team of filmmakers to break their promise of "no sequel" and return to the screen one year later with "Scary Movie 2," which brings back most of the original cast for another round of horror spoofing with the gratuitous use of crude humor, bodily fluids, and unabashedly raunchy style.

This time, the teen horror genre is replaced by the classic horror films of yesterday and today, as well as a few other films thrown in for good measure (if the first one could spoof "The Matrix," what's to stop the sequel from playing on "Charlie's Angels," right?). I find it hard to categorize the movie as anything more than a gross disappointment, a movie that had the chance to be just as good as its predecessor, yet ends up falling flat on its face when it comes time to deliver real laughs. Guest appearances by recognizable actors prove to be little more than embarrassments for those involved, while the returning cast seems to have lost all sense of what made the first movie such a riot. Again, we are given a cookie-cutter plot, jumbled together from the various classic and traditional horror movies devoid of teenage casts.

Our surviving (and resurrected) characters from "Scary Movie" are now in college, with some new additions including Tori Spelling as a pig-tail-sporting twit and Kathleen Robertson as a busty bimbo with style to match. When offered a chance to spend a night in Hell House, in which a famed ghost by the name of Hugh Kane cheated on his wife, they readily accept, only to find, once again, that something is out to get them. The movie begins interesting enough to spark some attention; the spoof of "The Exorcist" in the beginning moments manages to provoke some laughs, especially from James Woods as the priest sent to exorcise the young girl, Megan. The movie's minute amount of comical moments are interspersed throughout the movie, in such characters as a talking parrot and Tim Curry, who plays a combination of Liam Neeson's David Marrow from "The Haunting, and Geoffrey Rush's Steven Price from "House on Haunted Hill."

As for the rest of the material filling in the voids, it virtually goes nowhere. It was easy to laugh at these characters in the first film because the teen horror genre is so incredibly overrun with cliché and ridicule from audiences; here, the writers seem so determined to do themselves one better by spoofing as much as they can, that the movie quickly loses track of what it's trying to make fun of, and ends up making fun of itself.

Of course, there are the plays on dialogue from other movies ("Titanic's" goodbye dialogue is shamelessly exploited here), and a spoof of "Charlie's Angels" that does nothing for the film. Spelling spends the entire movie acting like an idiot in the most unappealing way, while Robertson as the rest of the cast are constantly looking as if they don't believe in any of the material's comedic potential. The movie feels rushed and thrown together, without any attention to the films and culture it so desperately tries to parody. --

I'm an avid believer that DVD can better a bad movie, and "Scary Movie 2" has some hope in the format. Let's forget about the standard-issue behind-the-scenes featurette, which doesn't tell us anything we couldn't gather ourselves; let's ignore the special effects and make-up artistry, none of which shows great potential in the finished production; let's walk past the production stills and DVD-ROM content that is inaccessible to those of us without DVD-ROM capability, and get right down to the saving grace of the DVD: a sole deleted scene. Derived from a scene in "The Haunting" in which the group is sitting around a fireplace learning about the history of a haunted mansion, this abandoned sequence seems to capture the fun and humor of what the first movie was all about. Too bad it's the only really interesting feature on this edition, which is as slopped together as the movie itself. --

I'm left with nothing but shock over the appalling job done on "Scary Movie 2," which is hardly funny, and never reaches the level of the first, and far better, movie. The DVD edition is, of course, standard, though some may find interest in what it has to offer.