Scary Movie 3, and Scary Movie 4 should not have been grouped up with the other lazy spoof films in the era.

I remember when spoof movies were maligned for being entirely reliant on reference humor, and the David Zucker-directed Scary Movie installments are partially guilty of it, but they truly stand on their own, removed from the pop culture context they drive from. You can tell these films were directed by the guy who did the Naked Gun films, the humor is non-stop, verging on cartoonish, a type of humor I rarely see in live-action films anymore. The gags that are dialogue-centric don't meander or dwell too long, and rather than coming off like it has a short attention span, the writing feels more calculated and character-based. Scary Movie 3 and 4 still hold up because of how well they deliver their comedy through timing and visuals, not nearly as much as something like Hot Fuzz, but I feel it was underappreciated for the time.

I think the actual flaw of the scary movie franchise is by premise, in contrast to Airplane where it parodies one specific type of airplane-centric drama, Scary Movie parodies several genres and movies that each gag doesn't build up over each other and the narrative feels convoluted. Another is that older spoof movies seem more celebrated because the production is a lot closer to the media they are referencing, so it doesn't come off cheap. The set and look of the scary movies 3 and 4 are completely different from the other films they are referencing, so it would naturally look lazy and cheap, this wasn't a big issue in the first two films, but that cheap look does get worse as the franchise went on.

Likely the biggest criticism scary movie or any spoof movie at the time faced was how immature, crude, and mean-spirited the humor was. This is a very temperate perspective, but I really appreciate humor that is not overly reliant and self-referential or meta, which tends to be the most predominant kind of humor nowadays. Sometimes I think movies I've watched recently are too self-conscious about their sense of humor, so they try to lampshade it by making it clearly self-aware, which takes away the punchiness of a joke. To the credit of 3 and 4, I like how genuine and straightforward the comedy is.

Plus, anything with Leslie Nielson is gold so I consider them better than Scary Movie 1 and 2.

Submitted October 08, 2023 at 07:13AM by ringkun https://ift.tt/E6LzR5d