Scary Movie 2: Its Awfulness Defies Description

Maybe I'm a few years too old to appreciate the Scary Movie franchise. I hadn't seen any of them before I watched Scary Movie 2 with some friends last night, but by the time the credits were rolling, any plans I had to see the other ones had been dragged through the mud by what is easily one of the worst movies I've seen this year, if not ever. To some degree, I can understand that comedies are prone to divide audiences; humor is by its very nature subjective. Still, the target audience of Scary Movie 2 is teenage boys and people with a screw or two loose, which are so often the same thing these days. This movie is practically holding up a "please laugh" sign for much of its runtime, and the harder it tries to be funny, the more its already-obvious shortcomings stick out. 

The Scary Movie franchise is a pastiche of horror movie parodies, with The Exorcist being the most immediately apparent influence in Scary Movie 2. I have some problems with this, the biggest being that this movie has exactly one gear that allows it to travel at exactly one, unimpressive speed. It does the same thing over and over as it presents a famous horror-movie cliche, subverts it for the sake of comedy, and then laughs at itself, regardless of whether we're laughing with it or not. The more it laughs, the less funny it becomes. But to be honest with you, it wasn't like I was having fun to begin with. This movie is forceful when subtlety would have been better suited for its comedy, a lot like a kid trying too hard in an elementary school comedy stand-up bit. Some people will "get" this movie. I am not one of those people. 

Scary Movie 2 and every other movie in its franchise are horror-comedies, and this sophomore slump fails as both horror and comedy. First, the attempted laughs drown out any sense of horror. Because the jokes are so unceasing, none of them are given enough time to sit in our consciousness before another one comes along, not that I would want humor this low-brow sitting in my head for any amount of time. The horror is the same way, and ruthless currents of that self-deprecating humor undercut many moments that could have been suitably chilling on their own. This is shock-value comedy with no surprise. This movie has zero taste, and it tries way too hard to make us laugh; the harder it tries, the harder it gets to watch. 

In all honesty, many of the normal metrics for reviewing movies go out the window when it comes to something like this. What it tries to do on a thematic level is difficult to put into words; you’ve certainly seen that I’ve tried, but I can’t say I’ve done this movie justice. Whatever it’s trying to do, it’s trying to do way too much of it. This movie becomes repetitive and irritating, and doesn't change lanes. That’s a nicer way of saying it never tries to do anything other than shove cinematic bile back down our throats. In so many ways, this is a parody of horror movies, and in just as many ways, it's not a very good one. There is no attempt made to do anything meaningful with this endless pipeline of juvenile humor. Just a repetition of the same dead-on-arrival joke over and over again. It’s counting on the fact that some people are tasteless to court laughs.

In so many ways, Scary Movie 2 made me mad. It reminded me of an era in my own life when I was not as mature as I am now, and some of the memories of people I knew who actually talked like the characters in this movie set my teeth on edge a little. They say you get boring when you grow up and mature, but I've come to think of it as gaining class. That is a commodity that neither this movie nor the rest of its franchise has, or so I can safely assume in the case of the latter. 

Scary Movie 2 - 1/10

Ephesians 5:3-4