Hacker Cinema
Scary Movie
2000 · Film · 88 min
Part of Scary Movie Collection
Directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans
A familiar-looking group of teenagers find themselves being stalked by a more-than-vaguely recognizable masked killer! As the victims begin to pile up and the laughs pile on, none of your favorite scary movies escape the razor-sharp satire of this outrageously funny parody!
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20 comments on Hacker News
A couple of months ago I started listening to the Scriptnotes podcast, by Craig Mazin (showrunner for Chernobyl and Last of Us, also wrote for Scary Movie and Hangover sequels) and John August (Go, Charlie's Angels, Big Fish, etc.). They discussed receiving notes like that from executives on their scripts- that there needed to be a line of dialog here to explain, rather than just using the visual to explain, so that someone on their phone could follow along.
There are, of course, ways that writers and directors get to ignore executive feedback, have a bunch of recent hits already is one, do your movie outside the studio system is another, have it in your contract because you gave up some money or whatever is a third. This is why some movies are still made in older ways, but from what they said that feedback is pretty universal now.
Except American movies(and entertainment in general) haven't been good for about 10 years now, it's all slop based on established IP from 20-30 years ago.
When I was a kid growing up in the post communist 90-00s, we were going nearly weekly to the cinema to watch the latest American movies: Blade, Shrek, Toy Story, The Matrix trilogy, LotR trilogy, American Pie, Batman trilogy, Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Fast & Furious, X-Men, Spider-Man, Star Wars, Scary Movie, Rush Hour, etc
We couldn't get enough of US entertainment, while now everyone here avoids the new US releases like the plague since it's only cash grabs injected with $CURRENT_DAY identity politics, diversity box ticking based on focus group testing, resulting in sterile, predictable, zero-humor, zero-edge, zero-creativity slop that's not even worth pirating.
Americans have no idea how much soft power they lost worldwide by forcing their identity politics and ideologies in entertainment. Japanese anime and Koran movies and TV shows now run rings around the US entertainment industry.
It really doesn't lol.
I don't get the reactionary right's hysteria about Reddit. It's so clearly not true it's just silly.
It's like when my brother let my little cousin watch a scary movie and she had hysterics about scary things for days. Y'all tell each other ghost stories and convince yourselves it's real.
I love this kind of fake news. It's like that scene from Scary Movie (can't remember which one) in which someone says "I heard the japs took out one in Kikoman" :')
Oh no... this was a case of me being a little buzzed from Thanksgiving beverages, and overly confident in the content of what I was pasting. I apologize!
For the record, I had that commercial on tap because I ran into someone who thought that the origin of the "Wasssup" meme was from Scary Movie.
Scary Movie did the best parody of this.
https://youtu.be/A3oL7v7PLac?si=4rk01Dn91kYurtfN
I miss the cheesy but wholesome comedies and parodies of the 1990s and 2000s: Anger Management, Rush Hour, The Cable Guy, American Pie, Scary Movie, Bruce Almighty, Eurotrip, Tropic Thunder, Hot Shots, Borat, Idiocracy, How High, White Chicks, etc.
We can't have any like those in this age because someone on Twitter will claim to be offended. Good thing to back-up those old gems as well before they get cancelled/edited to comply with modern sensibilities.
Tangentially related, but as someone who watched Salad Fingers when it came out (I was ~20) I have the feeling it didn't age well.
Somehow much of the stuff I found really funny in the 00s seems kinda pointless to me now. I rewatched Scary Movie and thought it was disgusting.
People say, yes that's because you're old now, but it's not true for everything, and especially not for stuff that came before the 2000s.
Lampshading something is different than parody it’s goal is to push suspension of disbelief just a little bit further, where parody doesn’t try to maintain it.
You can’t watch “Are We the Baddies?” as a war story. It introduced such elements simply to establish who’s getting made fun of. They remain in character but that’s it, the war story plot doesn’t progress the skit just keeps hammering the parody. Some parody has a more complete story but “Scary Movie” progresses the underlying plot to make fun of different elements of the movies it’s making fun of.
Harry Potter on the other hand calls out many of the tropes it’s using. House of the lions vs house of the snakes, guess who’s supposed to be the hero and who the villain. Except the characters once introduced are telling an actual story.
Snow Crash is between those extremes but focuses too much on the underlying story and its characters to be an actual parody. Over the top elements exist in the world, but they are played straight more Gulliver's Travels than Spaceballs.
I do think there's kind of an element of truth to this, though it feels very broad to say so. American absurdism does exist, just maybe not as much on TV? Screwball comedy is very much a thing in film, and occasionally reaches for the same feeling.
Stuff like Airplane! or some of Mel Brooks' stuff or National Lampoons movies, and later the "Scary Movie"/"Teen Movie"/etc. things... but it's like when they go much deeper than an average SNL sketch they almost always go too far and suddenly reach into trying to offend or anger or even disgust (though the new KITH has a bit of that too).
AS others have said, they seem lazy as they've been copied ad nauseam in the 40 years since the movie. I believe that Airplane! was the first zany comedy containing these ridiculous types of jokes. Many movies have followed and tried to copy the humour but have failed. Will there be discussions in 30 years about Scary Movie and its sequels? I doubt it.
> Airplane! is another movie that "wouldn't be allowed to be made today"
Yes, the kind of comedy it has is very tied to the immediate social context for commercial viability, both as to the what it is lampooning (late-70s disaster films) and how.
The broader template of Airplane! (broad take-it-to-11 parody of recently popular film patterns) because it was itself the pattern for its own flood of films in the 2000s (Scary Movie, Date Movie, Superhero Movie, and several sequels to Scary Movie).
I think you and I take vastly different dosages. I would not recommend taking enough to have a bad trip for a first-timer. During my first time, reality definitely wasn't quite as... solid as it is on a day-to-day basis, but I was perfectly aware that it was just a chemical experience and enjoyed what otherwise might have seemed scary.
All in all, it was about as bad as a scary movie.
I remember the footnotes in one Shakespeare play I read at school saying something like "[2] this is a humourous reference to Christopher Marlowe's contemporaneous play..." which I sort of rolled my eyes at and remarked how that was a bit of a stretch and was anyone really supposed to notice that.
My teacher drew the analogy to Scary Movie (which was relatively new at the time) and how we could all enjoy it just fine without footnotes explaining "this is a humourous reference to contemporaneous horror film Scream..." etc. It suddenly struck me the difference between studying culture historically and actually experiencing it "live". This analogy has only gotten better with time because I probably would need footnotes to get half the jokes in Scary Movie nowadays.
Yes; Scary movie.
I have a story of a lost PC game... Long ago, around the time of the first Scary Movie, the company I worked for was tasked with creating "Scary Game"... and we were given one month.
Since there wasn't much time, the game basically amounted to a few simple Flash-type minigames. Not great, but that's what they wanted.
After we finished, the client informs us that they goofed and they don't actually have the legal right to release the game. I wasn't on the project, and I didn't hear exactly how they made that blunder, but we still got paid.
The best part was that at the end, those who worked on it got T-shirts saying, "I see dead games."
Except the Australian plugs look like one of the masks from Scream or Scary Movie or something.
Evidence: Socket: http://i.imgur.com/zwRYC25.jpg Mask: http://i.imgur.com/b0RAZ9k.jpg
Most games tell a story of some kind, and sagas are a type of story. The idea that one company gets a lock on that word is ludicrous. "A first-person fantasy-based RPG called 'Dragon Saga'? Sorry, you can't have it because a tile-matching game has trademarked the word 'saga'".
It's a bit like being able to trademark the term 'movie' - should the makers of 'Scary Movie' be able to stop other films from having 'movie' in the title?
The author makes the mistake of equivocating rationalizing with rationalism.
"For example, suppose that (1) watching a scary movie usually makes a person fearful or anxious, and that (2) being fearful or anxious usually causes the person’s heart rate to increase. Applying logic we would conclude, therefore, that watching a scary movie raises a person’s heart rate."
This is why we say things like "sufficient but not necessary" or other nice things like this.
The author is ambiguous in this example and logic requires rigor, not equivocation.
I think the economic analysis of this is incomplete.
There is more to the cost of airing a pilot than just the production cost of the pilot, and this even assumes the network has agreed to assume the cost of that.
There is the cost of lining up advertisers for the commercial breaks during, before, and after the pilot.
There is the displacement of the show(s) that would've otherwise filled the time-slot the pilot occupies.
There is the opportunity cost of the advertisers you might have lined up if you hadn't punted the incumbent for the pilot.
The more pilots you elect to air, the more often you have to make these trade-offs. If there are a sufficient number of incumbents that can be thoughtlessly traded for pilots like this, I'd wonder about the general program management of the network, and how long they've been allowing things to stagnate.
Even if you just sacrificed a week, that is a huge amount of potential revenue to sacrifice for the sake of picking the "right" set of shows.
And, even if all the economics for airing every pilot works out, it still doesn't guarantee much. You are still gathering data based on what people say they might want to watch based on a snapshot. I can't imagine this is going to be particularly predictive of a series's performance. This seems similar to someone taking a vote on whether a movie sequel ought to be produced from an audience who had just seen the original; I can see far more people asking for that many Scary Movie sequels as actually went to see them.