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One problem of many in Keenen Ivory Wayans’ Scary Movie (2000) is that it isn’t as funny as Scream (1996), the film it spends most of its time making fun of. Did nobody in its packed writers’ room (six screenwriters are credited) ever think there was some danger in using a celebrated horror-movie satire as its primary source material? It’s hard to mock something already in on the joke, and much better, and smarter, at the tricky art of ridicule. 

Scary Movie is a fast-food parody whose jokes about the horror movies it lampoons are cheap and easy. There are some pretty good ones — its scatological humor is unexpectedly one reliable source — but they’re outnumbered by others couched in punching-down offensiveness. Characters being developmentally disabled and probably gay are the sole reasons why we should laugh at them. Transphobia, sexism, and fatphobia are dependable fonts of humor, from a hypermasculine female gym teacher to women competing in a “Miss Fellatio” beauty pageant-style contest. It’s a cyclical movie where, one minute, you’re genuinely laughing — anything involving Cheri Oteri, whose character exaggeratedly pokes fun at the crass scoop-hungriness of Scream’s TV-journalist character Gale Weathers, is riotous, for example — and then you could be moved to throw the remote at the TV.

It’s probably daunting to make a movie that employs the joke-a-minute style of Scary Movie, which echoes the kind perfected by Airplane! (1980) and The Naked Gun (1988). They’re movies that can’t take a breath without trying to immediately inspire a laugh. Airplane! and The Naked Gun were not immune from offensiveness, but they didn’t resort to it as handily as Scary Movie does. In those movies, the laziest jokes felt more like blips, interruptions from the mainstream social attitudes du jour. In Scary Movie, the numerousness casts a pallor of apathy over the rest of the film, sinking the sense of buoyancy one should feel when watching a particularly good comedy. 

Scary Movie’s depressing quality doesn’t diminish the work of, in addition to Oteri, Anna Faris (in the final-girl role) and Regina Hall (in the BFF of the final girl role), whose careers were only just getting started and who prove themselves skilled comedy actresses. Faris has a cache of wacky facial expressions that never feel Jim Carry-level forced. Hall is a repository of charmingly screechy line readings responsible for two of the film’s most inspired moments: one where she slut-shames someone not because of her body count but the social-climbing opportunities missed, another where she cartoonishly heckles Shakespeare in Love (1998) in a theater and earns complementarily cartoonish levels of ire from her fellow theatergoers.

Scary Movie is not good. It’s also hard to watch it and not feel a little nostalgic for the kind of raunchy, mid-budget comedy that used to be theatrically commonplace rather than rare. (A recent example coming to mind is 2023’s self-consciously throwbackish No Hard Feelings, which is often as uncouth as its progenitors from the aughts and early 2010s but rids itself of the mean-spiritedness that wasn’t too hard to find.) Just because most of the ideological foulness shilled by Scary Movie has been left behind in mainstream cinema doesn’t mean we should abandon the winning joke-a-minute form it makes you miss at its best.