Note: Since June is Pride Month, I’m focusing on horrors/thrillers with a LGBTQIA connection.
By the summer of 2000, In Living Color had been off the air for six years. And The Wayans Brothers had been off the air for one year. The last time, Shawn, Marlon and their older brother, Keenan Ivory, had released a parody movie, it was during the dump month of January in 1996. Yet, Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood had been a modest success grossing over $20 million more than five times its meager budget of $3.8 million.
But it was obvious, American audiences were still a bit leery of comedies with predominantly black actors made by black directors. Now considered a comedy classic, Friday, directed by F. Gary Gray and starring Ice Cube and Chris Tucker didn’t fare much better than Don’t Be a Menace. So, it must’ve surprised the hell out of the Weinstein Brothers when Scary Movie was a major blockbuster during the summer.
I remember going to go see it the summer I was taking classes at Georgia Southern University on a weekend matinee and the theater was packed. It can get really hot and humid near the Georgia coast in the summer months and there was a great way to beat the heat for an hour and a half. Yet, the only thing scary about this movie was how so many in Hollywood underestimated it.
Scary Movie opened on 1,912 screens, which is common, and ended up becoming the biggest R-rated movie of the time as well as the most money by a movie directed by a black director, Keenan Ivory. It would gross over $157 million in America and a worldwide total of over $278 million. It would become the biggest hit for Miramax under the Weinsteins’ control, surpassing the Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting, and prove that the irreverent raunchy American Pie the previous year wasn’t a fluke.
For many people who had been watching the Wayans since the late 1980s, it was a no-holds barred comedy that almost makes a mockery of everyone. Yet, at the same time, you can tell the writers really love the material they’re parodying. Mel Brooks said you have to love your subject matter even when you’re making fun of it. The production team of ZAZ (Jerry Zucker, Jeffrey Abram and David Zucker) loved the movie Zero Hour so much, they bought the rights to parody it in their hit Airplane!
The Wayans parody horror but with a love for the material. Scream, released a few years earlier also by Miramax under its banner Dimension Films, is almost a parody of the slasher horror genre that didn’t take itself too seriously. (Scary Movie was the working title Kevin Williamson had given Scream while he was trying to sell the script.) Since then, there was a resurgence of the format in the late 1990s with I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, Valentine and others. Even the fact that this was filmed in British Columbia with actors way too old to be playing teenagers is part of the joy. Most 1980s slasher movies were filmed in Canada to take advantage of tax incentives.
Starting off with a parody of the opening of Scream itself a homage to the opening of When a Stranger Calls has a ditzy Drew Decker (Carmen Electra) getting a phone call from the killer who later terrorizes and kills her. As he stabs her in the breast only to pulls out her silicone implant. And Drew goes running for help (choosing a direction sign reading DEATH over SAFETY) as her parents are come home only to get hit by them as her mother was giving her father oral sex and he wasn’t paying attention.
The next day at school, Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) and her sex-obsessed boyfriend, Bobby Prinze (Jon Abrams), recount that Drew’s murder happened one year to the day before they accidentally hit a man while out joyriding with their friends, jocks, Greg Phillips (Lochlyn Munro) and Ray Wilkins (Shawn Wayans) and their respective girlfriends, preppy Mean Girl Buffy Gilmore (Shannon Elizabeth) and Brenda Meeks (Regina Hall). They dumped the man into the nearby harbor bay but now they are being terrorized with notes that someone knows what they did.
But this is basically a meager excuse for the plot for the jokes to come after the viewers in rapid fire. Marlon plays Brenda’s stoner brother, Shorty, who is too busy getting high to really notice much of what’s going around. And there’s Gail Hailstorm (Cheri Oteri), a vicious TV reporter, willing to do whatever it takes to get the story, even performing sexual acts on Doofy Gilmore (Dave Sheridan), a slow-witted sheriff deputy obviously a parody of David Arquette’s gullible character in the Scream franchise. I had never heard of Sheridan before this movie but he is a delight to see every time he’s on screen.
The jokes target everyone, white people, black people, gay and straight. There’s a running gag where Ray is constantly saying or doing things that makes everyone think he’s gay. There’s also another scene in which the girls’ gym coach, Miss Mann (Jayne Tricka), inadvertently reveals she may not be all women with a testicle dropping out of her short skirt. Some might say the jokes about Ray are insensitive but the irony is he reveals at the end he isn’t gay. As for Miss Mann, the joke is more about the doping scandal of East Germany women athletes. I don’t think some in 2000 understood the joke as much but there is a East German military uniform in Miss Mann’s office and she makes a reference about doping for athletic edge.
Unlike Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Naked Gun 33 1/3, the joke isn’t making a character disgusted by a gender, but uncomfortable as Miss Mann seems oblivious that she’s got something showing. And questions over Ray’s sexuality are a mockery on how people assume because one person acts a certain way, they are gay. Yet, Ray does in fact imply a lot that he’s gay, but he just went to San Francisco to go shopping and went to a gay nightclub because they had good music.
The Wayans on In Living Color and the movie I’m Gonna Git U Sucka poke fun at black stereotypes and did the same in Don’t Be a Menace. The way the joke is handle is what makes it funny. Stereotypes against black people were created by mostly by white people as an insult but the Wayans aren’t afraid to say some black people have it coming. Characters in horror movies are usually not the most intelligent. During one scene as Cindy, Bobby and Buffy talk about whether Greg got killed, the killer is not too far behind them mopping up the blood off the floor after just killed him. Another scene has a heavyset woman trying to crawl out of the doggy door in the garage the same way Rose McGowan’s character did in Scream to show how absurd it is.
Some of the jokes don’t hit right and many seem to be dated. I don’t know if younger audiences will understand the reference between Prince and Electra. And a running gag where Greg is often violent toward Cindy isn’t funny even if it’s poking fun of how the macho men is often misogynistic and sexists in these movie. However, the reference to a Budweiser commercial where the killer calls Shorty and his stoner buds do the “Waassuupp!” yell into the receivers is timeless. The script was written by Marlon, Shawn, Buddy Johnson and Phil Beauman (the latter had also co-wrote Don’t Be a Menace.)
However, the movie was part of a screenwriting issue that resulted in Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer getting co-writer credits. However, per WGA rules, whenever the ampersand symbol “&” is used, it denotes a writing team. Yet, the use of “and” indicates additional writer(s) were hired to help rewrite the script. Yet, in this case, there were actually two scripts floating around. Friedberg and Seltzer had written a parody script titled Scream if You Know What I Did Last Halloween while the other writers had written a script titled Last Summer I Screamed Because Halloween Fell On Friday The 13th. Both had been bought by Miramax in 1998.
Yet, Marlon said when hired to direct, Keenan read through the script Friedberg and Seltzer wrote to see if they could use anything. But very little of what they wrote was actually in the movie. My guess is some of the grosser body humor gags might have been used where Cindy tells Bobby if he wants to see the PG-13 version and flashes a flabby hairy chest. It seems to be their style. However, to avoid a lawsuit, their names were added to the credit. Unfortunately, the two used Scary Movie and its popularity to make awful parody movies later in the 2000s and 2010s. Their only previous writing credit was the 1996 spy parody Spy Hard.
It is easy to look at Scary Movie and accuse the Wayans of just being tasteless, but you can get laughs when you tell the truth. During a fake preview trailer at a movie theater showing Shakespeare in Love, it begins to look like Titanic. But then Keenan, himself, appears on screen looking happy and doing Leonardo DiCaprio’s “King of the World” cheer at the bow. Then in the next shot, a bald, brutish man cracks a whip and we see Keenan scream as the title card shows us it’s actually Amistad II. When this was shown, the audience erupted in laughter. And Georgia Southern had a bigger population of black students, a lot who were sitting next to me. We laugh because Keenan wants us to laugh which is why I think he plays the enslaved person in a cameo.
Most of the gags are timeless unlike the sequels which would use more topical gags or Friedberg and Seltzer who would poke fun of whatever was current in pop culture at the time. This was Faris’ first lead role and she gets the ditzy role down pat. And Elizabeth plays up her role as the Mean Girl and eventual slasher victim. Probably one of the funniest gags is when Brenda becomes so annoying at a movie theater, those in attendance do the killer’s job for him. It’s obviously a mockery of Jada Pinkett Smith’s annoying character in Scream 2 but also a send-up on how black characters are portrayed in horror movies. Hall would later co-star with Pinkett Smith in Girls Trip and judging how she’s now looked in the public eye, you can see some truth to Hall’s behavior.
But it’s the Wayans themselves who steal the show. Marlon is having the time of his life playing up the black stoner stereotype who at one point uses a fish aquarium to smoke cannabis with the killer. And he does The Sixth Sense‘s iconic line “I see dead people!” while smoking a joint as his stoner friends commenting how good it is. The fact that Marlon played this role for laughs and his dramatic turn as a heroin addict in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream within the same year shows he’s a very talented and versatile actor.
Shawn also shows he’s able to do comedy along with his leading man looks. It’s a huge mystery why he hardly ever appears in movies or TV shows nowadays. It’s been over a decade since he appeared in a movie. Maybe he made enough money off this he didn’t have to work all the time.
Unfortunately, the Wayans couldn’t recapture the magic with the sequel Scary Movie 2, which parodied mostly the haunted house genre. It was reportedly rushed into production to get out during the summer of 2001. It made over $141 million but received mostly negative reviews. It also was in the news during production as Marlon Brando had been hired to play a priest during an Exorcist parody but had to drop out for health issues.
The Wayans weren’t involved in the last three Scary Movies with David Zucker taking over as director for the third and fourth movie. However, they weren’t well received by critics but made money at the box office. But you can tell a difference in the tone and style. Then, there was the fifth Scary Movie which somehow made a modest success off its meager budget but I watched it one time and didn’t laugh once. Now, there’s plans by Paramount who now officially own Miramax to do a sixth Scary Movie but nothing really has been established on who’s going to be directing and who’s in the cast.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 