SCARY MOVIE 2
Reviewed December 20th, 2001 by Dan Jones
No mercy. No shame. No sequel.
Guess where the tagline above comes from: Scary Movie. Yes, the original tagline promised that this was going to be a one-time affair; a one time gross out, satirical movie revolving around teen and horror movies of the past. What came out of Scary Movie was some comedy, but overall it was not a movie that required a sequel... dumb fun is okay once, but with the decided making of Scary Movie 2 I cannot help but despise the Hollywood machine. Just because a movie makes money, does not mean a sequel has to be made.
In Scary Movie 2 the Wayans brothers set out to essentially parody the horrible remake of the Haunting, while bringing in elements of other, more classic horror films, such as The Exorcist and Poltergeist. But, besides a quasi-amusing starting scene, bringing in Andy Richter from Conan O’Brien fare along with James Woods to perform an exorcism, the rest of the movie goes horribly, horribly south.
To reiterate, Scary Movie 2 is a horrible, horrible movie. It is one of those movies that are given to us for one reason only: to empty our wallets using the original as bait. This is a movie that was made, just to be made; nothing more, nothing less. The Wayans’ brothers did not try with Scary Movie 2 the way they somewhat tried with Scary Movie. Rather, they saw the huge box office numbers that the original did, got greedy, and decided to make a movie so bad, that I could not help but leave the theaters disturbed (yes, unfortunately I went with friends to the theaters to see this one, anyone have my $8.00?). The only saving grace that I can come to was that the movie ran only 83 minutes, leaving me with only a small portion of my life completely wasted.
Would I say Scary Movie 2 is the worst movie I have ever seen? Why yes, yes I would. Although, in all honesty, I really do not consider Scary Movie 2 to even be a movie... in fact, after sitting at this sentence for five minutes to think up something clever to express it as besides a movie... I have come to a loss... but film, it is most definitely not.
Perhaps I am the wrong kind of person for this movie. Perhaps I cannot drop to insanely dangerous levels of comic acceptance to laugh at the same potty-jokes and wheelchair jokes I did when I was seven years old. I have talked to people about this movie; how insanely torturous that I felt it was, and how they felt about it. I felt that most that liked Scary Movie, walked away with a bad taste in their mouth after viewing the sequel. A few said that it had its moments, but was not as good as the original. Some would not give me an answer, leaving me to only imply their emotions of this tragedy of a film. Then there were a couple people who enjoyed it, and for that I will not judge them. People have different tastes in movies, in comedy, in expectations. I expected nothing but to go into Scary Movie 2 and laugh, a bit, but generally be okay with it... obviously my expectations were not met. One of Scary Movie 2’s taglines is “No More Mercy. No More Shame. No More Sequels - Honest! - We Lied.” I can only hope they will live up to this. Yet, I’m left feeling that they wont. Scary Movie 2 made huge profits and judging from the overall lack of care put into this movie, I can only expect another sequel to be made to rip more money out of people that do not know any better. Come to think of it, they will probably make another one and refer to it as a prequel, thus not ruining the tagline of the second (since it would not really be a sequel). Let’s just hope not.
Enough ranting, if you are reading this you’re probably more interested in the DVD then my opinions on the movie. So onward to the DVD we go.
Surprisingly enough, for a movie that came out this year, the audio and video on the Scary Movie 2 DVD is none to standout. The included 5.1 Dolby Digital mix is not very lively at all, sparingly using your rears and subwoofer. Voices are generally pretty good and overall it does not sound bad. But, the sound is lacking in the immersion department... but I guess the movie did not really have too many standout audio scenes. Because of which, I would say the 5.1 mix is adequate, but nothing special. We are also given the option for a Dolby Surround 2.0 track, which all in all, sounds fairly similar to the 5.1 mix. Lastly we are given the option for English and Spanish subtitles, along with English closed captioning.
On the video side, as I said before, Scary Movie 2’s presentation is lacking a bit. Presented in approximately 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, the image is generally soft throughout the DVD, and overall it just does not prove to look film-like. Overall, it is not a bad transfer though, no real edge enhancement problems are noticeable, nor a compression artifact, blemish or scratch to be found. It is a decent transfer, but again, nothing special.
As for extras, Scary Movie 2 provides us with a pretty decent collection. First up, we have a behind the scenes look at Scary Movie 2, providing us with various interview footage with the cast and crew (along with the Wayans and James Woods). Next up is a featurette on the special effects of Scary Movie 2. This gives us some insight into just how they made that vomit do that (sigh....). Next up, we have “Here Kitty, Kitty”, an extra that talks about the fighting robot cats’ scene. Joy.
Next, we have “Scary Effects” and “Behind the Make Up with Barry Koper”, these extras provide us with more “how’d they do that?” material. The Behind the Make Up featurette is somewhat interesting, and is probably the second most appealing featurette on the DVD.
Next up we have twenty-two deleted or altered scenes that were not in the 83-minute theatrical run of the film. Some of these are decent, and probably worth a skim through. Finally, we have a standard Stills Gallery and a sneak peak section giving us a number of trailers for other films. Scary Movie 2’s trailer though, is nowhere to be found.
Overall, Scary Movie 2 is a movie that I cannot recommend to anyone. The DVD does a fairly decent job of presenting a horrible movie. If you’ve yet to see Scary Movie, then this one is not for you. If you’ve seen Scary Movie, and enjoyed it, you might find some lingering fun in the sequel; but please rent it before you buy it. Scary Movie 2 is plain bad filmmaking and writing. Steer clear of this one.
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