Scary Movie 2

Certain films make great trailers. This may be one of them. There are enough sight bites to titillate idiot adolescents, without giving away the secret.

The success of Scary Movie was as much to do with timing as anything else. After a spate of Scream clones, the teen slasher flick was ready for some serious satire. It wasn't difficult. The product itself had become a self-parody.

The Wayans brothers, Shawn and Marlon, with a bunch of friends, wrote the scripts of 1 and 2. Keenen Ivory Wayans directed. Shawn and Marlon are two of the main actors, playing a gay jock and a goofy dopehead. Their contribution is massive.

What about the humour? Lavatorial would be a polite word for it. Disability is mocked and sex runs riot. Subtlety has no place here, as the vomit and faeces fly. The young cast is instantly forgettable. Marlon stands out, because he looks wacky and actually tries to be funny. The others become victims of special effects.

The pre-credits sequence is an Exorcist sketch, in which everyone gets covered in green puke and James Woods in the Max von Sydow role has a miraculous moment on the toilet. Laugh? You'll die.

Somewhere in the middle of this, Tim Curry pops up as a university professor who selects a group of students for a scientific experiment, which never takes place, in a spooky house, exactly like The Haunting, in which Liam Neeson did the same, except his guinea pigs included Catherine Zeta-Jones.

The secret, by the way, is that there is nothing to say about this film, except "Don't go". If there were an award for gross jokes, it would win.