Scary Movie

Comedy. Damn. It's the 'eye of the beholder' thing again isn't it? What is it that you find funny? Is it my job to tell you what I find funny? Certainly not.

'Scary Movie' is a parody of 'Scream' (both from Dimension/Miramax) and 'I Know What You Did Last Summer'. For good measure it also takes off a slew of contemporary staples including 'The Matrix' and 'Blair Witch'.

The concept comes from the 'brainchild' of the Wayans brothers; alumni from the US skit based comedy 'In Living Color'.

'Brainchild' may be overselling it as this isn't highbrow humour - it's scatalogical, slapstick, sight gags, rapid fire humour along the lines of the Zucker Abrahams Zucker unit who came up with 'Airplane'.

It's the shotgun approach - put enough 'comedy' in the air and some of it is sure to stick (or schtick?).

I found a lot of it very tasteless and surprisingly, very unashamedly funny. You'll be going 'ewwww' more than a few times. The number of pieces based around various sexual activities is unbelieveably high and of quite low moral calibre - just how you'd like it I'd expect.

To counterpoint the 'up' side, some of the stuff will fall flat as our wonderful Aussie dollar...

" I see dumb people... "

Generally excellent. Now the biggest problem is that this is a single layer disc weighing in at 4.28 Gigabytes. The film is 85 minutes. The anamorphic picture displays excellent colour and contrast. There is also excellent detail on close objects. Many scenes are quite dark however they still have plenty of detail. The trademark white mask and black robes look better than they do on 'Scream'. Daytime scenes are excellent except for limited background detail.

However motion suffers in some places and it looks like the compressionist had the 'squeeze' knob turned up to '11' in some instances. The motion artefacts never made themselves known during the fast actions scenes like you'd expect (eg. during the 'Matrix' takeoff), so they never become an issue.

Of course, going with a dual layer disc and letting the compressionist go to lunch might be a better solution however single layer discs do save the company quite a pretty penny.

No layer change obviously...

There's a single soundtrack - a 448k/s Dolby 5.1 track which is quite excellent in a fairly unobtrusive way. The effects are limited in the film but when they are used, you do notice it and they are used quite effectively to accompany what is happening on the screen. For example, the bass and rears are present in most of the music numbers however I loved it when the piano was pushed down the stairs and the bass thumped to the obvious delight of the reviewer.

More importantly, a comedy lives and dies on vocal intelligibility and in this case, every joke is telegraphed with exceptional clarity. Vocal levels are quite good although expect dynamics to stretch during effects. Music tends to be forgettable except where it's used to parody other movies.

The other extras are Dolby 2.0 - workmanlike but adequate.

Menus are crispy animated and everything is anamorphic. The music is also aggressively 5.1 - different for every menu screen as well.

There's a short featurette and trailer and a slew of random pictures, some staged and candid cast photos.

I was surprised to see some deleted scenes, not in itself but some of them are quite good and should have been put back into the movie as a directors' cut. Missed opportunity for some branching action?

All offcuts look OK except for some sharpness problems. The featurette is also anamorphic and looked quite nice which is not generally the case.

There's also a rather obvious easter egg, plain as the mask on ones' face I'd expect. Inside you'll find an alternate trailer and a trailer for a Miramax film in the same vein.

What is it that you find funny? What is it that you find funny second time round? Now that's hard. I found 'Dumb and Dumber' to be incredibly funny first time round. Second time round much less so... third times brings out the 'off' button on the remote.

I find Tarantino's 'From Dusk To Dawn' to be funny no matter how many times you spin it up. So guess which one I own?

I think the trailer telegraphs half the jokes anyway so it should be pretty clear if it's your bag (or not).

Maybe rent it and watch it with some friends while you toke and drink whenever you match a joke to the original movie.

Or buy it. It's well presented in both audio and video so you can be sure about that. Or get the originals. All three of them even...