Scary Movie is a 2000 film directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans, as part of Wayans Bros. Entertainment. It is an American dark comedy which parodies the horror, slasher, and mystery genres. Several mid-and late-1990s movies are spoofed, including the more subtle horror film parody series Scream trilogy, The Sixth Sense, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Usual Suspects, The Matrix, and The Blair Witch Project, while it also parodies many of the classic horror films, most notably Halloween.
The tagline is "No mercy. No shame. No sequel.", with the last reference being to the tendency of popular horror movies to become long-running franchises. However, in 2001, Scary Movie 2 was released (with the tagline "We lied"). The film was followed by a series of sequels Scary Movie 3 (2003), and Scary Movie 4 (2006). The original title for the film Scream was "Scary Movie" which ironically was later used to parody it. Both films were released through Dimension Films.
Plot
A young teenage girl named Drew Decker (Carmen Electra) is alone in her mansion when she receives a phone call. The caller wants to know her better, but she doesn't give in. The caller reveals he is looking at her. Scared, she grabs a baseball bat and answers the front door (thinking it is the prank caller) and attacks the trick-or-treaters. As soon as Drew went inside the house, the caller appears, revealing himself as the murderer Ghostface. Ghostface chases her onto the patio of the house, where he rips her clothes off, which leaves her only clothed with white bra and thong. When she runs into the sprinklers in her bikini, the killer catches up with her and stabs her in the breast and pulls out an implant. She went alongside the road and sights her father, only to be run over by him. She is then murdered.
Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) is on her computer when her boyfriend Bobby Prinze (Jon Abrahams) appears in the window. Bobby is upset because his relationship with Cindy "isn't going anywhere" (i.e., they have not slept together). Even though he expresses this to her, she refuses his intentions and he leaves Cindy's house.
The next day in school, Cindy meets with Bobby and the rest of her friends, Brenda Meeks (Regina Hall), Greg Phillipe (Lochlyn Munro), Ray Wilkins (Shawn Wayans), and Buffy Gilmore (Shannon Elizabeth). At the school, news teams are trying to interview the police and students who knew the girl who was murdered the night before (her name is identified as Drew Decker). The most prominent among the reporters is Gail Hailstorm (Cheri Oteri), author of the recently released book You're Dead, I'm Rich. Cindy points out to the others that Drew's murder happened exactly one year after they accidentally killed a man, and dumped his body off a pier. Greg swears the group to a pact that they will never reveal what happened that night, and becomes physically abusive to Cindy when she exhibits reluctance.
In class, Cindy receives a note from someone telling her that he knew about the incident with the man they killed; the first appearance of Ghostface to Cindy.
After football practice, Ray and Greg are in the locker room with a bunch of other guys, and when Ray and everyone else leaves Greg for the showers ("Don't let Uncle Ray catch you!"), the latter goes off to the punchbag. After he finishes and take a shower, he finds a note tucked in the door of his locker showing a picture of his small penis. Enraged, he goes to Cindy and the others and tells them about the note, and is ridiculed for it.
Buffy, competing in a beauty pageant, does a dramatic acting piece during the talent portion. During her reading, Greg is murdered by the killer in the balcony. Seeing this, Buffy attempts to warn everyone, but her desperate pleas are taken by the audience and judges as an exceptional acting performance and Buffy stops caring about Greg when she wins.
That night, Cindy is attacked by the killer, but she calls the cops and the killer escapes. Bobby shows up with the same gloves and knife as the killer, and is arrested. Cindy goes to stay with Buffy that night but receives a call from the real killer, which results in Bobby's release. Bobby and Cindy later bump into each other at school, but their reconciliation is awkward, stemming in part from Cindy not getting over Ginger Spice leaving the Spice Girls.
The killer confronts Buffy in the girls' locker rooms. Making a sarcastic, metafictional observation about horror movies clichés, Buffy mocks the killer, even as he stabs her, and continues to do so even after he decapitates her. In order to get her to really shut up, he throws her head in the lost and found bucket.
Ray and Brenda go to the movies to watch Shakespeare in Love. Ray, while in a bathroom stall, peeps in on another occupant, and is impaled through the head with a penis. The killer then attempts to kill Brenda in the auditorium, but because of her discourteous behavior, the other patrons kill her before he has a chance.
During a party at her house, Cindy has sex with Bobby. At the same time, the killer shows up at Shorty's house to kill him and his friends, but gets high on marijuana with them instead. When they are rapping with each other, the killer raps and kills everyone at the same time except for Shorty, who was beside him all the time. Shorty congratulates the killer for the rap.
At Cindy's house, the killer shows up and apparently stabs Bobby. As Cindy attempts to attend to Bobby's wound, Bobby shoots Shorty in the left lung, causing marijuana smoke to exude. He reveals that the blood from his "wound" is ketchup, as he was never stabbed at all. Ray appears, very much alive, and reveals that he and Bobby are copying the serial killer. When Cindy asks for a motive, Bobby points out that they don't need one, because horror movies like Scream do not boast logically coherent elements like plot or motive. Bobby also sarcastically suggests that it was lack of sex that drove him to do this, and reveals that he and Ray are gay lovers who will start a new life once they kill Cindy, a crime they will get away with because they are merely copycatting a real serial killer who actually exists. To conceal their guilt, they decide to stab one another in order so that the authorities will believe them to be victims of the real killer. As Ray stabs Bobby, Cindy yells "You guys are psychos! You've seen one too many TV shows!", only to have Ray respond angrily "Watching television shows doesn't create psycho killers - canceling TV shows does! The Wayans Brothers was a good show - and we didn't even get a final episode!" (thus breaking character, since the actor playing Ray is Shawn Wayans). However, the real killer appears shortly afterwards, stabbing Ray to death.
The killer then attacks Cindy, but after she repels him, he escapes. The police show up and take Cindy to the police station, where they find out that Buffy's brother Doofy (Dave Sheridan) was actually faking his mental retardation and is the real killer, and is in cahoots with Gail Hailstorm. After Doofy and Gail escape, the sheriff and Cindy find Doofy's disguise in the street and as Cindy cries out in the street over this discovery, she is run over by a passing car.
During the end credits, two scenes are shown:
~Shorty talking to the audience about his plans to rob a supermarket.
~Doofy breaking up with his vacuum but then masturbating with it.
Characters
- Cindy Campbell - She is the parody character of both Sidney Prescott from the Scream trilogy and Julie James from the I Know What You Did Last Summer trilogy. Her name is a spoof of Sidney, and her surname is taken from Neve Campbell, the actress who played Sidney from Scream. Cindy is portrayed as naive and innocent compared to her friends. Her father is a drug dealer who works with the Escobar crime family ("Uncle Escobar," as Cindy knows him), dealing freebase and sometimes using it himself. To date, she is one of only two characters to appear in all of the Scary Movie films.
- Brenda Meeks - Brenda is Cindy's streetwise friend. She is the parody character of both Maureen Evans from Scream 2 and Karla Wilson from I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Brenda reappeared in Scary Movie 2, Scary Movie 3, and Scary Movie 4. She and Cindy are the only characters to appear in all of the Scary Movie films.
- Bobby Prinze - He is the parody character of Billy Loomis from Scream and Ray Bronson from I Know What You Did Last Summer and shares many of the same interests and personality traits with Billy, such as pressuring Cindy to lose her virginity to him.Then he admitted that he and Ray were gay, and they loved each other. His name is taken from Freddie Prinze, Jr., who starred in I Know What You Did Last Summer.
- Shorty Meeks - Often sporting his catch phrase Oh Shit Son, Shorty is the parody character of Randy Meeks from the Scream trilogy and Max from I Know What You Did Last Summer. He is Brenda's brother, and is depicted as a habitual marijuana user. He later reappears in Scary Movie 2.
- Ray Wilkins - Played by Shawn Wayans, Ray is the parody character of Phil Stevens from Scream 2. He also parodies Stu Macher from Scream towards the end of the movie. Although he is Brenda's boyfriend, numerous allusions appear in the film that he is homosexual, though he denies it. At the end of the film, he is revealed to be Bobby's accomplice. He is killed when the real killer (Doofy) stabs him in the back, though he is revived for the sequel. His name was taken from Ray Bronson, a character from the I Know What You Did Last Summer trilogy.
- Buffy Gilmore - Played by Shannon Elizabeth, Buffy is the parody character of both Tatum Riley from Scream and Helen Shivers from I Know What You Did Last Summer. Her name is a homage to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as she parodies Shivers, who is played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, who starred as Buffy the Vampire Slayer).
- Greg Phillipe - Played by Lochlyn Munro, Greg is the parody character of Barry Cox from I Know What You Did Last Summer. Greg has the same basic personality as Barry. His name is taken from Ryan Phillippe (who played Barry). Greg has an extremely small penis, and tends to be bellicose at times, and abusive towards Cindy for her desire to reveal their crime to the police. He is killed by Doofy at the pageant, parodying Ryan Phillipe's death in I Know What You Did Last Summer.
- Drew Decker - Played by Carmen Electra, Drew is the parody character of Casey Becker from Scream. Her name is taken from the actress who played Casey, Drew Barrymore. Her favorite horror movie is Kazaam. When the killer claims that isn't a horror movie, Drew simply tells him, "Well, you haven't seen Shaq act."
- Special Officer Doofy Gilmore - Played by Dave Sheridan, Doofy is the parody character of Dwight "Dewey" Riley from the Scream trilogy. Doofy is short for Doofus, as he suffers from mental retardation. He still attends special education at B.A. Corpse High School. Doofy is a "Special Police Officer" whom nobody takes seriously. He enjoys masturbating with his mom's vacuum cleaner. At the end of the film, he is revealed to be one of the killers, and in a nod to the film The Usual Suspects, he is seen changing his look and mannerisms (his retardation having been faked), and getting away in a car with his accomplice, Gail Hailstorm.
- Gail Hailstorm - Played by Cheri Oteri, Gail is the parody character of Gale Weathers from the Scream trilogy. Ultimately, Gail and her long-suffering cameraman, Kenny, are stalked by the killer in a sequence parodying The Blair Witch Project. She is revealed to be Doofy's accomplice at the end of the film.
Parodies
In addition to parodying the Scream series , a number of other pop cultural references are made:
- The Usual Suspects - Doofy's character and situation remotely resembles that of Verbal Kint's. The scene towards the ending is an almost exact replica of the final scene from the film, complete with Cindy dropping the coffee mug with "Doofus Porcelain" written on the bottom (a direct parody of the scene where Detective Kujan discovers his own mug was made by a company called "Kobayashi Porcelain"), Doofy's limp gradually disappearing, him shedding clothing to reveal his real appearance, lighting a cigarette, etc.
- "I Know What You Did Last Summer"
- Titanic and Amistad - When Brenda and Ray are at the movies, a film trailer is shown showing a man on a ship at sea resembling Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic, and features a character (Keenen Ivory Wayans) saying the infamous "I'm king of the world!" line, leading the viewer to assume that the film is related to Titanic. Instead, a slave master whips the man, who is revealed to be a slave, as the trailer is revealed to be for a sequel to the 1997 film Amistad.
- The Matrix - The fight scene between Cindy and the killer utilizes "Bullet Time" special effects.
- Drop Dead Gorgeous - The beauty pageant scene with Buffy.
- The Blair Witch Project- Gail's apology after being chased by the killer.
Reception
The film was released on July 7, 2000 and grossed $42,346,669 (USD) in the opening weekend in the box-office. It went on to gross a total of $157,019,771 at the domestic box-office and a worldwide total of $278,019,771. Critics gave the film mixed reviews. The film currently has a "Rotten" rating of 52% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a rating of 48 out of 100 from Metacritic, indicating "mixed or average reviews".
See also
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