Scary Movie at 20: How the comedy franchise killed off the spoof film
By the end of the 2010s, parody had become shorthand for cheap gags and scatalogical riffs, rapidly metastasising much the way viral memes do now, writes Annabel Nugent
The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It. The brain scrambles to decipher the references in this abomination – and then short-circuits after realising someone was paid real actual money to make it. As the name suggests, the movie is an amalgamation of Judd Apatow’s greatest hits – and when it premiered in 2010, it acted as an obituary for the decade of spoof movies that preceded it.
At their best, parody films are the barnacle on the cinematic whale, piggy-backing along for the ride. At their worst, they are the hand shoved inside the whale’s corpse, turning it into a puppet for fart jokes and sexual innuendos. If this article had been written at the end of the 20th century, with the likes of Airplane, The Naked Gun, This Is Spinal Tap and Mel Brooks as its subject, it would likely be a love letter. Instead, it’s an anniversarial autopsy. Still, the genre’s demise was not sudden or unexpected; Nineties parodies like Spy Hard and Tim Burton’s star-studded Mars Attacks had lazy jokes that would characterise the next period of spoof cinema.
Cinematic parody is a territory traditionally dominated by four big names: Mel Brooks (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety), the Zucker Brothers (Airplane, The Naked Gun, Top Secret), the Wayans Brothers (Blankman, Scary Movie, Dance Flick) and the Friedberg-Seltzer duo (Meet the Spartans, Spy Hard, Vampires Suck).
The Scary Movie franchise hit cinemas in 2000 and has since become the watershed of spoofs. Just as the year marked the turn of the century, the movie defined a decade of parody cinema to come, setting a new mould for the modern spoof movie that looked little like the ones that had come before it. The series began under the Wayans Brothers, but over the course of five films has pulled in the Zucker Brothers and Friedberg-Seltzer; together, they are the holy trinity of 21st century parody.
The first was the most cohesive of the bunch, largely following the singular narrative of Scream. But the duo’s decision to parody seems half-baked. Like the unmasking of every Scooby-Doo villain, lurking beneath the Ghostface hood of Scary Movie’s bad guy is just another spoof. Scream was itself a parody, or at the very least a satire, of the slasher movies that preceded it; the 1996 film poked fun at the generic horror norms that had calcified with overuse. Scary Movie hinted at the cannibalistic nature of the spoof films that would soon follow.
I was five years old when the original Scary Movie came out, so suffice to say I wasn’t in cinemas on opening night, but seven years later (and six years before I was legally advised to), like a rite of passage, it was time for me to watch it. In the same way tweens gravitated towards the American Pie saga for a glimpse of what waited on the other side of puberty, Scary Movie offered that window, too. But any satirical prowess – if it even existed – was lost on an audience of giggly schoolgirls too focused on analysing make-out scenes and deciphering sexual innuendos.
Critical acclaim was non-existent – but nobody cared. Audiences knew what they were getting themselves into, and they loved every second. Numbers speak for themselves; the film debuted at number one at the box office and grossed nearly $160m domestically, with another $121m in foreign markets. The verdict was in: Scary Movie was a huge cinematic failure and an ever bigger commercial success.
Perhaps the Wayans Brothers had anticipated the cultural malaise of Y2K, and predicted the short attention span of the audience in the internet age. There is something very watchable about a parody. And it can be freeing to watch something you know from the outset is bad for you, an entity to be rapidly consumed and rapidly forgotten; something you know is too shameful for anyone over the age of 14 to enjoy – even under the pretence of ironic viewing.
Still, the effect was short-lived and the next four Scary Movies showed the trend was flatlining sooner than expected. The decline was marked by a general decrease in profits and a considerable drop in an already distinctly average Rotten Tomato rating. The fifth and final film in the franchise made $78m worldwide, just under a quarter of the first one, and boasts an embarrassing four per cent critical approval rating.
The worst offence Scary Movie committed, though – far worse than the smutty-for-the-sake-of-smut jokes and D-list cameos – was the whole new generation of spoofers it spawned, beyond its own series.
It’s become fashionable to express virtuous disgust at the likes of Scary Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Date Movie and every other film with the word “movie” in its title. Given the venom spat in every review and every commentary, it becomes tempting to try to find some merit in them – a redeeming quality, a defence invoking postmodernist terms like intertextuality or self-reflexivity, or some sense of purpose behind the bikini-clad women and projectile vomit gags. But then you actually watch one, and any hope for a deeper meaning slips away.
Take Epic Movie (2007). The film is a hodgepodge of films that were hardly considered epic the first time around (Nacho Libre? The Chronicles of Narnia?) stitched together to make one unwatchable monstrosity. Low-rent cameos attempt to beef up a shoddy script and bad humour. Narnia’s White Witch character being rechristened as “White Bitch” is an apt summary of the movie’s target age bracket. Its rating, incidentally, is 15 – although even to a 12-year-old me, the relentless toilet humour felt immature.
The defining trait of the best spoofs is exactly the thing that was missing from this new crop: subtlety. The likes of Scream and Spinal Tap bore proximity to the thing being parodied. Not only did they look a lot like what they spoofed, but in some way, they were the real thing. You didn’t have to have seen Psycho or Halloween to enjoy Scream. It worked just as well as another iteration of a slasher film than it did as a lampooning of the genre.
Conversely, one can only imagine that the writing room for Disaster Movie (2008) was a pissing contest between Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer to see who could fit in the most popular culture references – a contest that no one wins, least of all the audience. The film opens in the wilderness; a caveman and a wrestler fight until the wrestler gets hit in the groin (where else?). Enter a prophecy-telling Amy Winehouse character resembling a sabre-toothed tiger, before cutting to a man waking up in bed to discover it was all a dream – of course.
Jokes about bodily fluids form the backbone of the rest of the film, until its finale: a roll-call of any and every pop culture figure with an iota of relevance, masquerading as a musical number, finished off with Alvin and the Chipmunks being squashed by a falling cow. And, scene.
Where earlier parody required viewers to be literate in generic protocol, this new batch simply demands an audience that’s seen a YouTube compilation of memorable moments in Noughties blockbusters. Rather than having fully developed jokes, these movies play a cheap reference game. The succession of vignettes are too brief to do anything more than simply point and refer; the mere moment of recognition counts as a joke.
That’s not to say there aren’t some exceptions; Wet Hot American Summer, Black Dynamite, and, however embarrassed we might be to admit it, Not Another Teen Movie, all had their moments and were well-received. But by the end of the 2010s, parody had become shorthand for cheap gags and scatalogical riffs, rapidly metastasising much the way viral memes do now. Audiences churned through 50 films in one 90-minute sitting, masticated and regurgitated into bite-size, utterly pointless content.
This summer marks the 20th anniversary of Scary Movie, and in the years that followed, we lived through its consequences, until eventually the deluge of spoof films let up and died a quiet death. Perhaps prepubescent boys grew tired of the vomit and the farts, or they switched out the PG-rated make-out scenes for Pornhub, but the modern spoof boom was over – and The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It was its coup de grace. The comedy was a cannibalistic, mutilated mess. Its final bow? A musical ensemble number turning the lyrics of “Jai-Ho” into “She’s a Hoe”. RIP.
The modern spoof is dead, bar a few failed attempts at resuscitation during the early 2010s with Vampires Suck, Super Fast, 50 Shades of Black, and The Starving Games. With the rise of Netflix happening at the same time and the subsequent death of DVDs, later spoofs couldn’t even make it onto the straight-to-DVD circuit.
While the hope that we might again enjoy smart, relevant, actually funny parodies is not totally futile (past eras have proved it’s possible), unless there’s a radical shift from the Friedberg-Seltzer recipe of boobs, bros and belches, here’s to another decade of no spoofs.
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