Scary Movie 2 Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.0

Scary Movie 2 Blu-ray Movie Review

Scary good or scary bad?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 6, 2011

There’s a famous Luther Ingram soul song which contains the iconic line “If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right.” It may not be love exactly, but it’s hard not to laugh at large swaths of Scary Movie 2 despite its stupidity, and in fact it’s that very stupidity which provides most of the laughs. This is a film which made no bones about it being “more shameless” than the first Scary Movie, at least if one is to take the film’s print ad campaign at its word. (The film famously originally carried the funnier tagline “We lied” after the first Scary Movie’s tagline promised “No sequel.”) There is indeed no shame left untouched (can shame be touched?) in Scary Movie 2, a film that starts with a disgusting yet undeniably funny parody of The Exorcist and then moves through a series of cartwheeling references to a number of horror films, both good and bad. Scary Movie 2 is a mess, in fact it’s an absolute jumble most of the time, but it’s hard to make it through without at least cracking a smile once or twice, if not dissolving into outright laughter. That doesn’t excuse the film’s idiocy, it just helps to explain this franchise’s allure, one which consistently defies critical lambasting to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide. In fact Scary Movie 5 is already on the way, and if it hits like its predecessors there’s no doubt we’ll be seeing double digits in the Scary Movie releases at some point. The fact is there’s probably no genre which lends itself to parody more easily than horror, if for no other fact that so many horror films seem to be parodying themselves a lot of the time. The Wayans Brothers, who wrote and directed the first two Scary Movie films, literally have no shame in exploiting the ridiculousness of the idiom, throwing every adolescent joke at the screen they can think of, in the hopes that something will stick. The fact that so many of the jokes involve bodily fluids of some sort means that a lot of the material is in fact relatively sticky.

One of the recurring gags in the Scary Movie enterprises is the fact that almost all of the supporting characters get killed and then end up returning for the next film. That’s certainly the case with Scary Movie 2. After the gross but amusing Exorcist parody (featuring a very weird turn by James Woods as the exorcising Priest), we get into the main body (dead or otherwise) of the film. Along with usually clueless Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris), her not quite dead anymore cohorts Brenda (Regina Hall), Ray (Shawn Wayans) and Shorty (Marlon Wayans) are all students at college where they’re soon joined by doofus Alex (Tori Spelling), as well as Tommy (James DeBello) and Buddy (Christopher Masterson), the latter of whom has a crush on Cindy. All of the kids are chosen by Professor Oldman (Tim Curry) as unwitting subjects in a “field study” taking place at a local haunted mansion charmingly nicknamed Hell House.

This is probably the most lurid and lascivious of all the Scary Movie outings, and it also contains one of the largest number of referents, some of which fly by with the speed of a passing sight gag. Aside from the obvious source material like The Exorcist and The Legend of Hell House, Scary Movie 2 picks and chooses bits and pieces of a huge array of material to skewer, including everything from What Lies Beneath to MacGyver to Harry Potter to Tim Curry’s own starmaking film The Rocky Horror Picture Show. What that means is that filmgoers are required to have a fairly large encyclopedia of viewing experiences to fully get some of the jokes, and in fact even then, some quite frankly fall flat as a ghost tripping down the stairs (one of many such pratfalls in Scary Movie 2)

As lame as much of Scary Movie 2 undeniably is, the good thing about it is its own relentlessness. If you don’t like one gag, you can be sure another is going to follow within seconds, and sooner or later one of them will land for you personally. The film is incredibly adolescent despite its R rating (actually downgraded from an original NC-17 after some judicious editing). One of the things that David Zucker, Craig Mazin and Pat Proft wisely realized (or were forced into realizing) with Scary Movie 3 is that for better or worse the chief demographic for content like this is somewhat younger than a typical R (and certainly a typical NC-17) rating audience. This is silly juvenile humor and it of course appeals most to silly juveniles.

The saving grace here is the lunatic antics of a game cast, especially the woefully underrated Faris who has seen her career hitched to this somewhat questionable Scary Movie star when it’s obvious she is a comedienne of remarkable skill, both physically and verbally. Curry is his usual Grade A ham, but that works perfectly within the hyperbolic confines of the film. Chris Elliott is his usual smarmy self, though at least this time he’s smarmy and deformed, which somehow helps to make him slightly more palatable, as odd as that may sound. The rest of the supporting cast is fine in roles which are by their very nature filled with clichés and stereotyping. Everyone knows the film is a big joke, both intentionally and perhaps unintentionally, and for that reason there’s not the slightest hint of anyone taking anything even slightly seriously. Or shamefully.

Scary Movie 2 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Scary Movie 2 arrives on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1 and if the results aren't exactly hair-raisingly bad, they're not very good either. The print utilized exhibits a fair amount of minor damage, with black specks, white flecks and other dirt marring the image. The overall look of the film is often quite muddy and murky, and several of the dark sequences in the haunted mansion are so riddled with crush it's hard to make out the action. Shadow detail is negligible as well. On the plus side, the brightly lit close-up sequences look surprisingly good, with decent fine detail, excellent color and some noticeably nice pop to the proceedings. There is noticeable edge enhancement in several scenes, and the transfer does look like it's had at least a minor digital scrubbing to remove noise.

Scary Movie 2 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Much better is Scary Movie 2's boisterous lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack, one which mixes some ample LFE and floorboard rattling source cues with some very nice placement of sound effects around the surround channels, creating a rather impressively immersive mix at several key moments of the film. As with the first Scary Movie, the Wayans like a very busy mix, and so any given scene will have effects piled on each other, while at the same time manic dialogue is taking place, and while that's the case here, the DTS track nicely separates the elements and keeps things from sounding very cluttered, at least most of the time. Dialogue is very easy to hear and is well mixed with effects and score.

Scary Movie 2 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Behind the Scenes Featurette (SD; 8:09) finds the Wayans Brothers bragging about the studio providing them with a blank check after the overwhelming success of Scary Movie. Yawn.
• Alternate and Deleted Scenes (SD; 43:51). There's quite a bit of material in here, including some nice extra bits for David Cross and even Tori Spelling (now that's funny).
• "Here Kitty Kitty" Featurette (SD; 1:48) shows us the preparations for the literal cat fight in the film.
• Special Effects Tour with Special Effects Coordinator Lou Carlucci (SD; 5:45) has a nice overview of some of the SFX in the film, including such priceless information as how to make bird poop out of mayonnaise.
• Behind the Makeup with Makeup Effects Department Head Barry R. Koper (SD; 4:16). In case you've been spending sleepless nights wondering how they did the "headless" Hannibal sendup in Scary Movie 2, here's your chance to finally get some sleep.
• Scary Effects (SD; 2:07). This odd mini-featurette, which really could have been folded into the Special Effects outing, shows a couple of added things, like the breakaway glass that's utilized in a couple of scenes.

Scary Movie 2 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Yes, Scary Movie 2 is relentlessly stupid and, yes, shameless, but that doesn't mean you won't laugh at least a few times as the movie whips out one idiotic reference after another and then skewers it mercilessly. When a film like this throws so much at the screen in such unending amounts, the chances of landing an actual punchline increase exponentially, and that's the case here. If more is better, Scary Movie 2 is the Citizen Kane of stupid movie parodies. Even though this Blu-ray doesn't look fantastic, it boasts great lossless audio and contains all of the extras of the previous DVD version, so fans of the film will probably want to add it to their collections. Others may want to take it for a spin as a rental first before deciding to be haunted by it permanently.