The horror parody Scary Movie has proved a staggering box-office success, grossing $ 42 million in its first weekend. That’s more than twice what it cost to make, and this box-office bonanza makes it certain we are in for a dozen movies like it over the next two years — which is to say, scene-by-scene remakes of recent box-office successes played for laughs.
Scary Movie is a replica of Scream, a 1996 horror comedy that poked knowing fun at the conventions of the modern teenage sex-and-murder genre even as it scared the pants off its audience. What’s troubling about the whole concept is how unfunny and amateurish Scary Movie is, with maybe three decent laughs in its ninety minutes and a lot of scenes of people standing around until director Keenen Ivory Wayans stages the next obvious and crude joke. (Wayans’s own parents, devout Jehovah’s Witnesses, were so offended by Scary Movie they actually walked out of the screening.)
Scary Movie’s contempt for its audience was masked by a clever trailer, and so audiences came in droves. And now we’re really in for it, because its success will encourage Hollywood to spatter the big screen with painfully uninspired comic takeoffs of hits like The Matrix in hopes of making big first-weekend money by luring teenagers in — before even these unenlightened audiences figure out they’re being taken for a ride.
Scary Movie’s lame technique of Xeroxing a better movie and then drawing mustaches and graffiti all over it is a sad indication of the decrepitude into which a delightful movie genre has fallen. It is almost twenty years to the week that three guys from Milwaukee (whose only previous Hollywood credit had been as the screenwriters of an amusing series of sketches called The Kentucky Fried Movie) made their first movie.
Two brothers, David and Jerry Zucker, and their childhood friend Jim Abrahams, bought the rights to a forgotten 1957 disaster movie called Zero Hour about a shell-shocked Korean War vet forced to land a passenger jet when the pilots take ill with food poisoning.
And then, with inspired invention, they turned around and convert ed Zero Hour into Airplane! — eighty-eight minutes of sheer cinematic bliss that may comprise, on a second-by-second basis, the funniest film ever made.
Airplane! is a piece of amazingly sustained silliness that can still manage to provoke gut-wrenching hilarity in those of us who have seen it twenty times on television. It has literally a thousand individual jokes and bits of shtick — some witty, some ridiculous, some really stupid, some in very bad taste, some as wholesome and sweet as a shaggy-dog story told by a five year-old.
But the rat-a-tat nature of its comedy wasn’t the quality that made Airplane! unique. What set it apart from other contemporary parodies of overwrought movies from Hollywood’s past was its utter lack of camp. Rather than exaggerate the already exaggerated conventions of the disaster movies they were spoofing, Abrahams and the Zucker brothers (who came to be known in Hollywood simply as “ZAZ”) instead made light of the weird and self-important solemnity of middlebrow Hollywood entertainment.
Airplane! is a ceaseless compendium of pompous speeches, reductive Freudianism, tortured gazes between former lovers, and the behind-closed-doors breathlessness with which Hollywood supposedly took audiences behind the scenes of then-beloved American institutions like a big international airport and the Mayo Clinic (which is depicted in Airplane! as a doctor’s office with rows and rows of mayonnaise jars on the walls and a heart ready for transplant bouncing on a desk like a Mexican jumping bean).
ZAZ populated Airplane! with second-rank actors who had starred in the manly-man television shows of the previous two decades — twisting their square-jawed excess of propriety in ways no one had ever thought of before. Peter Graves, the star of the original Mission: Impossible, is here a pilot with a cheerful and increasingly peculiar interest in the tastes of a sickeningly cute little boy. “This your first time you’ve ever seen a cockpit, Joey?” he asks the boy, who told him that gosh, no, this is the first time he’s even been up in a plane — to which Graves responds: “You ever see a grown man naked?” Later, he adds: “Joey, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”
In Airplane! and several subsequent projects, ZAZ magically mutated a profoundly uninteresting lummox of a TV actor named Leslie Nielsen into one of the cinema’s greatest clowns — a career alteration matched only by the 1930s saccharine boy tenor Dick Powell’s transformation into a believably hard-boiled private detective ten years after his heyday in Busby Berkeley musicals. Playing an unflappable doctor tending to the sick passengers who made the mistake of choosing the fish dinner rather than the chicken, Nielsen tells the terrified ex-pilot that he must land the plane because the pilots are unconscious. “Surely you can’t be serious!” the ex-pilot exclaims. “I am serious,” Nielsen replies with unparalleled dead-pan. “And don’t call me Shirley.”
ZAZ sought only to make a really funny movie, but the boys from Milwaukee had a significant effect on American show business. In its own modest way, Airplane! was revolutionary, for it not only put paid to the disaster movie but changed the face of comedy as well. The variety shows that had been among the leading staples of the home viewer’s diet since the earliest days of television — from Sid Caesar to Carol Burnett to Sonny and Cher — had always relied on movie parodies as the centerpieces of their sketches. But Airplane! pulled it off so much better and with so much more attention to detail. It looked and sounded so much like the disaster movies it was spoofing, down to the musical score and even the look of the film stock, that it hammered the final nail in the coffin of a TV tradition long gone stale and obvious.
Airplane! also effectively crashed the stratospheric career of Mel Brooks, the Hollywood director who had made parodies his stock in trade with the mammoth box-office hits Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Silent Movie. Brooks’s humor was broad, in the hoary traditions of American burlesque, and could not hold a candle to the new and far more contemporary style.
ZAZ followed Airplane! with a charming amalgam of an Elvis movie and an escape-from-Communist-country thriller called Top Secret!, an under-appreciated delight that features one of the greatest of one-liners: An East German woman tells an American that she has an uncle who once lived in the States, “but he was one of the lucky ones; he escaped in a balloon during the Jimmy Carter presidency.”
Then, adapting a short-lived television series they had created called Police Squad!, they brought out another huge and hilarious box-office triumph called The Naked Gun. This time, instead of parodying disaster flicks, they took on the cop and detective shows of the 1960s like Dragnet and the innumerable series that always began with a booming voice declaring the program “A Quinn Martin Production.” The star, again, was the crazily liberated Leslie Nielsen playing Frank Drebin, the dumbest and most mindlessly violent man ever to sport a badge.
Two more Naked Gun films were to follow, neither as inspired as the original but winning nonetheless. They also made Hot Shots and Hot Shots: Part Deux, which took well-deserved swipes at such films as Top Gun. Nielsen became an all-purpose spoof star in non-ZAZ movies as well, playing Dracula for Mel Brooks, a James Bond character in Spy Hard, and a Fugitive-like man-on-the-run in Wrongfully Accused.
But by the mid-1990s, ZAZ had lost their enthusiasm for such fare, and their parodies grew slack and listless. David Zucker’s High School High, set in an inner-city school, was an ineffectual blend of The Blackboard Jungle, To Sir With Love, and Dangerous Minds. In 1998, they brought out two really lazy pieces of work that may have signaled an end to their time as parodists: BASEketball and a hoary Godfather thing called Jane Austen’s Mafia!
ZAZ had a great run, but the fact that they ran out of steam wasn’t due just to waning inspiration. They were undone by the self-aware, self-mocking, post-modernist approach that is now built into the movie genres of which they had once made such gleeful sport. The most influential American moviemaker of the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino, sends up his own movies even as they are unrolling in front of you. And Scream, the basis for Scary Movie, is itself partly a parody — and is, even with its genuine scariness, far funnier than the movie that wants to make fun of it.
The types of movies that are ripe for a good slap in the face these days are precisely the ones Hollywood will never touch. A really daring parodist could score by going after Saving Private Ryan or Amistad or American Beauty, because they drip with the earnestness that cries out for someone mischievous with a needle to prick the balloon of Spiel-bergian self-importance. Hollywood’s idea of daring these days is to show multiple images of male genitalia. But skewering its own pretentious elite? That’s clearly far too much to expect.
John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
