Scary Movie

The best jokes in Scary Movie are about oral sex, and the lamest are too. The middle ground’s won by snot, poop, weed, boobs, ”retards,” prison sex, head trauma, French kissing, locker rooms, and — this being an Airplane!-style parody of Scream-style self-aware slasher flicks — the good ol’ metatextual generic marker. In other words, it’s for kids. And, as my roommate half-kiddingly said, ”Because it’s for kids, I worry about its moral character.” More importantly, I worry about the deleterious effect of this junk on the kids’ collective sense of comic timing. Gags lag or else pile up prematurely.

Director Keenen Ivory Wayans is best known as the creator of the hilarious TV sketch show In Living Color; Scary Movie is sketchily hilarious, with the ladies of the ensemble getting the ripest bits. In an Oscar-worthy performance, Carmen Electra, as the jiggling victim of a masked serial killer, gets to spoof her own existence as an awesome American cheese puff in a routine that touches on Baywatch, breast implants, and Dennis Rodman. If only the rest of the film were as classy. C+