"Can you really make a parody of a parody?" asked Brian when he and I saw the preview for Scary Movie a few weeks ago. My guess is, the Wayans brothers thought they could.
As with many movies of this type, it was very hit-and-miss. Some parts of the film were downright hilarious (most of them at least glimpsed on the commercials) and some were downright terrible (most of which looked like gags the Farrellys rejected because they were too gross). What I thought was most interesting about Scary Movie was that topic initiated by Brian in his sarcastic quip at seeing the trailer: what about a parody of a parody?
First, I think we need to be clear that this film's immediate source material, Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, were not parodies themselves, but part of the late-in-the-genre revival that horror has been experiencing in the last few years. (This happened to the western too: look at Unforgiven, The Quick and the Dead and Tombstone). A genre, according to various sources, goes through several stages, among them the Classic period, the decline, the parody, and the revival. The revival is a pastiche of old styles with more recent sensibilities. One might consider it a more "mature" entry in the genre.
Scream was just such a film. It was still a scary movie (its original title, by the way), but it had a good deal of humor that comes from its own genealogy as a horror film. So where does Scary Movie come in? Perhaps as Scream's bastard sibling. Where the latter made clever, sometimes subtle references to its horror past (the Wes-Craven-played janitor dressed as Freddie Krueger), the former alludes just as cryptically, but with a less subtle touch (the fountain of bodily fluids that pinned the film's protagonist to the ceiling reminds us of the iconography of a similar scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The most problematic part of Scary Movie is its inability to choose its level of comedy. Unlike Airplane, which never stops its flying-feces comedy, Scary Movie tries to be both Airplane and Young Frankenstein, a film that sticks to the parody side for its laughs. Apparently the Wayans haven't figured out how to include a throwaway gag like the giant comb in Spaceballs without having it destroy the diegetic moment of the film.
Brian's comment comes back to haunt Scary Movie in some of its more traditional parodic scenes. While the self-referential scenes in Scream have a fantastic, funny irony to them, the same scenes in Scary Movie have a pathetic, hollow ring that does not trigger laughs at all. If anything. one just admires the shot-by-shot reconstruction of several scenes from the original.
Perhaps Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven were right to dump Scary Movie as their title. They couldn't have a movie that worked on the levels they wanted - both scary and funny - because its title was too self-referential. The Wayans should have learned from their hesitation. The ultimate problem is that a comedic movie like Airplane can't work as a slasher film. After all, the audience needs to know what a knife will do when plunged into someone. Scary Movie's indecision on its diegetic reality is a good description of the film's humor: it works some of the time.