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After the smash-hit success of Scary Movie, a sequel was inevitable. Staying true to the genre it lampoons, Scary Movie 2 arrived just one year later. The result also follows another horror sequel tradition: it’s not quite as strong as the original, but it still delivers plenty of laughs and succeeds on most fronts.
Following the events of the first film, Cindy Campbell and several of her friends are recruited by Professor Oldman to spend a weekend in Hell House as part of a study into reported paranormal activity. As the group settles into the mansion, they encounter strange staff members, supernatural occurrences, and increasingly dangerous hauntings. While trying to uncover the secrets of the house, they find themselves facing ghosts, possessions, and other bizarre events inspired by a variety of horror films.
The original movie’s greatest strength is that it essentially takes the plot of Scream and bombards it with gags, absurdity, and pop-culture references. As a result, it’s a comedy that completely ignores logic, physics, and common sense, yet still works because there’s a recognizable story holding everything together. The end product isn’t really a movie in the traditional sense, but it is a hugely entertaining 90-minute ride.
Scary Movie 2 takes a different approach. Rather than piggybacking on a single existing script, it draws inspiration from several haunted-house and supernatural classics, most notably The Exorcist, Poltergeist, and The Haunting, while sprinkling in countless other references along the way. The result is a much messier film that barely attempts to tell a coherent story. Unfortunately, this would become a hallmark of many 2000s parody movies, often leading to films that were little more than a string of disconnected jokes and, in some cases, borderline unwatchable.
To its credit, Scary Movie 2 never sinks that low, but it is undeniably a step down from its predecessor, especially when viewed through a modern lens. Like the first film, it includes a parody of a popular commercial, but this time it’s the Nike Freestyle campaign. Unlike Budweiser’s iconic “Wassup!” ads, however, Nike Freestyle never became a cultural phenomenon, making the scene feel random and oddly disconnected from the rest of the movie. The film references fare much better, largely because most of the movies being spoofed have gone on to become classics in one way or another. I wouldn’t call 2000’s Charlie’s Angels a classic, but it’s certainly memorable enough that the joke still lands today.
For viewers who enjoy crude humor built around bodily fluids and shock value, Scary Movie 2 will probably work just fine. For everyone else, a certain familiarity with film history is almost required to fully appreciate what the Wayans brothers are doing here. The original Scary Movie mainly spoofed films that were, at most, a few years old, making the references feel fresh and topical. Scary Movie 2, on the other hand, frequently draws from movies that were already decades old when it was released. Most audiences probably had no trouble recognizing the Hannibal references, but some may have missed that the opening sequence is a direct parody of The Exorcist.
As I noted in my review of the original film, a movie like this cannot really be judged by the standards of a conventional movie because it simply doesn’t play by those rules. The same applies here, perhaps even more so. Although it is a direct continuation with the main cast returning and occasionally acknowledging the events of the first film, characters who died suddenly reappear as if nothing ever happened. Continuity, logic, and consistency are all sacrificed in service of the next joke. That leaves the comedy itself as the primary thing to evaluate. I could analyze the performances, but the material is intentionally broad and lacks any real depth, meaning that as long as the actors commit to the absurdity, they’re doing exactly what the movie requires of them.
One of the movie’s biggest problems is that certain characters completely overstay their welcome. Shorty, played by Marlon Wayans, was already one of the weaker elements of the first film, and I really didn’t need to see him return here. He may well be one of the most obnoxious stoner characters ever put on screen, with every scene pushing the joke further than it needs to go. His brother Ray also returns, once again built almost entirely around the running gag that he is an obviously closeted gay man. It was a one-note joke in the original, and Scary Movie 2 keeps revisiting it long after it has stopped being funny. At times, it genuinely feels as if some of these jokes were leftovers that didn’t make the cut for the first movie.
Scary Movie 2 isn’t nearly as bad as I remembered it being, but it’s undeniably a step down from its predecessor. More importantly, it serves as an early warning sign of what the parody genre would become throughout the 2000s: films with little interest in telling an actual story, instead stringing together a series of gags and pop-culture references held together by the thinnest possible plot. While Scary Movie 2 remains entertaining in places, it also marks the point where the formula started heading in the wrong direction.
