Scary Movie 3
The Scary Movie series of parodies have quickly become more than cult classics. The Wayans brothers molded immature toilet humor into 3 hours of pure disgusting site gags and puns that make any audience member with a dirty mind laugh themselves to tears. Originally, Scary Movie mirrored Scream, the first in a series of next generation horror/slasher flics meant to draw in a new audience that was tired of the Freddys and Jasons that had dominated the screens for so long. Scream went on to be reincarnated twice more, but eventually you run out of material to make fun of. So the Wayans’ turned to parodying other flics like the Matrix and Thirteen Ghosts their second film out.
The third in the series, dubbed Scary Movie 3, harkens back to a better time of hilarity and comedy. The Wayans’ are nowhere to be seen, and instead SM3 is helmed by the great David Zucker, better known for the legnedary Airplane!, Naked Gun Series, and BASEketball. Zucker and his team of writers have a poorly filmed, badly acted, inconsistant, but laugh-out-loud-whiz-your-pants funny movie on their hands. It’s roughly 80 minutes of just plain hilarious sight gags, bad jokes and impromptu nods to nearly every sci-fi / horror film to come out in the last 2 years. Although the screener I viewed last night was unfinished (a Grinch and frankenstein parody were missing, despite crediting Bill Forsythe and Peter Boyle respectively), the movie is as funny as any additional special effects or missing scenes could have made it.
Anna Faris reprises her role of Cindy Campbell, the hapless hero/victim from the previous 2 movies. She’s all grown up now and a reporter for a Washington DC news program. Charlie Sheen is a down on his luck farmer and ex-priest whose tragic past events combined with mysterious crop cirlces popping up in his corn fields have caused him to lose faith and become bitter. All this ties in with, stay with me now, Alien invasions triggered by a video tape that kills you 7 days after watching it and Michael Jackson. Who cares though? This really isn’t about the plot anyway.
Celebrity cameos abound, including Queen Latifah, Eddie Griffin, Denise Richards, Pam Anderson, Jenny McCarthy, D.L. Hughley, George Carlin, Macy Gray, Simon Cowell and a slew of others picked to fit the stereotypical roles we expect to the see them in. Movies parodied include Scream, The Matrix, Signs, 8 Mile, The Ring and more. The director even throws a nod to his own previous hits by casting Leslie Nielson as the president of the United States and giving him lines pulled from BASEketball and Airplane!.
For me, SM3 tops my list of the trilogy. The first two were funny and just a little more disgusting than I enjoy, but the third installment takes more of a silly approach to it all and will easily reach a broader audience appeal, with less genitalia and racial jokes and more of the prat-fall style shock comedy.
