Scary Movie

A group of ordinary-looking high school students find their lives upended when a masked killer starts picking them off in increasingly ridiculous ways. Cindy Campbell, a sharp-tongued but awkward teen, and her circle of friends try to make sense of the scares while absurd mishaps and sight gags keep interrupting the terror. The film riffs on familiar slasher setups, mixing obvious references to recent horror hits with gross-out humor and pop-culture jokes, so the scares are as much about the laugh as the threat. Tension keeps getting undercut by spoof beats, and the focus stays on lampooning genre clichés rather than on delivering a straight mystery.

Released in 2000, the movie was directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans and developed by Shawn Wayans, Buddy Johnson, and Phil Beauman. It deliberately spoofs late-90s hits like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and it stars Anna Faris as Cindy, alongside Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Jon Abrahams, and Lochlyn Munro.

The film turned into a pop-culture talking point in the years that followed, spawning several sequels and a franchise that kept the parody formula going. It helped make Anna Faris a recognizable comedic lead and cemented the Wayans family's role in sketchy, irreverent satire of Hollywood tropes. Certain scenes and gags resurfaced in comedic references and were parodied themselves, so the film had a ripple effect on early-2000s comedy.

Critics and audiences reacted unevenly, reflected in a middling vote average of 6.38/10 from a large number of viewers. Many reviewers praised the movie's willingness to lampoon its sources with quick, dumb jokes and physical comedy, while others faulted it for relying on crude humor and broad stereotypes. The central theme is a lampoon of horror-film formulas, using meta-humor and over-the-top set pieces to point out how predictable slashers can be, and the film works best if you're in the mood to laugh at the genre instead of being scared by it.