Scary Movie (2000)

(In theaters, July 2000) If ever there was a genre which deserved its satiric roasting, it’s the late-nineties “teen horror” craze, which -for all its hip self-awareness- wasn’t all that much better than its predecessors, the early-eighties slasher films. Scary Movie takes up the task with gusto, and despite an annoying intrusion of gross-out comedy, the film is oodles better than most satiric comedies have been in years. The script is filled with genuinely funny material, and most parodies are on-target. I’d have cut about five minutes of unnecessary vulgar material (which gets old real quickly, and ends up annoying rather than amusing), but the rest works well. Wait for the TV network version.