Scary Movie 2 (2001)
There's a moment in Scary Movie 2 where you can almost feel the production running out of ideas in real time. The jokes don't build, they just pile up, louder and cruder and more desperate with each passing minute, as if sheer volume might convince you something funny is happening. It mostly doesn't work. And yet here I am, giving it two and a half stars, so let me explain myself.
Keenen Ivory Wayans returns for this 2001 follow-up, and if Scary Movie was a cheeky, if somewhat crude, spoof of late-nineties slashers, this sequel takes everything that made the original bearable and cranks it so far past the point of reason that it collapses under its own weight. The targets this time are whatever happened to be vaguely in cinemas around the same period, things like Thirteen Ghosts and Hollow Man, picked off with cheap, scattergun shots that rarely hit anything worth aiming at. It's less a parody than a mood board of half-remembered references, and the distinction matters.
The fundamental problem is that the film mistakes sheer vulgarity for actual satire. There's no structural intelligence here, no real sense that anyone sat down and asked what makes these horror films worth sending up. Instead, you get recycled gags from the first movie, only louder, more exhausting, and significantly less inspired. You spend the runtime waiting for something genuinely sharp to land, and it mostly doesn't. It feels, if I'm being blunt, like a cynical cash grab dressed up in a haunted house.
What rescues it from being a total write-off is the cast, who commit to the chaos with more enthusiasm than the material deserves. Anna Faris remains a remarkably decent lead, her deadpan timing keeping her afloat even when everything around her is drowning in toilet humour. Tim Curry turns up in a supporting role and does exactly what you'd expect Tim Curry to do, which is chew the scenery with enormous relish and make you wish the whole film had been built around him instead.
The undoubted standout, though, is Chris Elliott as Hanson, the creepy one-armed caretaker. His "strong hand" routine is easily the most memorable sequence in the entire picture, the one moment where the film finds something approaching a genuine comedic rhythm. But I have to be honest: watching it now, in 2025, it has aged very badly. What was presumably intended as broad, physical slapstick reads as casual ableism, and it's genuinely uncomfortable to laugh at. That discomfort doesn't disappear just because the joke is thirty years old.
That tension between nostalgia and unease is actually the most interesting thing about revisiting Scary Movie 2, which is a damning thing to say about a comedy. The early-2000s brand of crude teen humour it wallows in had a very short shelf life, and most of it has well and truly expired. Compare it to something like Bodies Bodies Bodies, which manages to be genuinely funny about horror conventions while also having something to say, and the gap in wit becomes pretty stark.
So. Two and a half stars. I think I'm being generous, honestly. There are a few moments of mindless amusement if your tolerance for early-noughties crudeness is particularly high, and the cast do their level best with deeply silly material. But Scary Movie 2 is, by any reasonable measure, a mediocre film that fails to justify its own existence beyond the commercial logic of making it in the first place. It's the cinematic equivalent of a joke someone tells twice. The second time, it's just noise.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2001 | Watched: 2026-08-01
Where to watch
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