I just finished rewatching Scary Movie, and I'm trying to figure out how a twenty-six-year-old parody flick holds up after all these years. Honestly, watching this today is just strange. Back in the summer of 2000, every multiplex was completely clogged with self-aware teen slashers trying to ride the wave Scream started. Everyone was wearing baggy cargo pants, listening to late-era nu-metal, and taking I Know What You Did Last Summer a bit too seriously. The Wayans brothers took one look at that whole trend and decided to just burn it to the ground with the support of a proper studio budget.
The movie works way better than all those terrible mid-2000s knockoffs like Epic Movie or Date Movie because the Wayans crew actually understood horror tropes. They weren't just throwing random pop culture references at the screen for the sake of it. They specifically tore apart the structure, the beats, and the visual language of the movies they were roasting. They knew how slasher setups worked, so when they twisted the knife, it actually landed.
Anna Faris carries so much of it on her back as Cindy Campbell. Making her feature film debut here, she plays the innocent, oblivious final girl with complete deadpan seriousness. No matter how disgusting, absurd, or completely ridiculous things get around her, she treats it with the grave dramatic weight of Neve Campbell or Jennifer Love Hewitt. That commitment is pure comedic gold.
Regina Hall as Brenda in the movie theater scene is still one of the funniest moments of that whole decade. Watching her yell at the screen, spoil the plot, and talk on her phone until the entire crowd turns on her never fails to make me laugh. Marlon and Shawn Wayans bring raw energy as Shorty and Ray. Marlon feels like he is completely unscripted for half his scenes, and Shawn plays the closeted jock trope with fantastic dry delivery. The film just barrels through its 88-minute runtime without slowing down.
Sure, not every joke lands twenty-six years later. Some bits drag out, and a lot of the shock humor is firmly trapped in the year 2000; the homophobia and transphobia on display are disgusting. With that being said, the sheer volume of jokes packed into this thing is crazy. You get hit with gags in the background, physical slapstick, and verbal roasts all at once.
This transfer is not a jaw-dropping, pristine restoration from the original camera negative. Honestly? It looks an awful lot like a glorified upscale of the old Blu-ray master. It's fine. It gets the job done if you just want to watch the movie, but it doesn't have any wow factor. You still see some weird digital sharpening in places where edges look artificial, and wide shots look oddly flat and scrubbed of fine detail. The layer of grain isn't particularly refined or organic. Dolby Vision helps tweak the contrast a bit, giving the dark scenes during the opening rain sequence with Carmen Electra slightly better black levels, but don't expect a revelation. It simply looks like a clean high-definition source given an HDR coat of paint.
Audio-wise, you get a standard DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track. There is no Dolby Atmos remix here, but honestly, you don't really need height channels for people mumbling, screaming in high school hallways, or getting slapped around. The 5.1 mix is loud and clear enough. Dialogue stays centered so you can actually hear all the quick muttered jokes, and the low end punches through fine whenever the late-90s rap-rock soundtrack hits or during jump scares. It gets the job done without doing anything fancy.
The physical steelbook itself is actually decent, which feels like where most of the effort went. The front cover features the classic key art with the main cast jammed into theater seats and Ghostface sitting right in the middle. It has a glossy finish instead of that flat, chalky matte texture cheap budget steelbooks use, so the colors look punchy. When you flip it over, the back cover keeps things minimalist.
The special features, on the other hand, are a bit of a letdown. Paramount just ported over the exact same old legacy extra features from the original 2000 DVD release and called it a day:
- Behind the Scenes Featurette: A useless six-minute vintage promo piece from the original EPK kit. It's just quick soundbites from the director and cast saying basic stuff about the movie.
- Deleted Scenes: A small collection of cut scenes and alternate bits, including extra surveillance camera footage with Shorty and Gail Hailstorm.
- Movie Showcase: An ancient DVD menu shortcut that lets you jump straight to specific joke scenes, which nobody uses anymore.
That is literally all you get. No new audio commentary, no retrospective interviews, no new look back at the film's impact. Getting Anna Faris or the Wayans brothers to sit down today and talk about making an unfiltered studio comedy at the turn of the millennium would have made this an absolute must-buy. Instead, you just get twenty-four-year-old press kit files. And this feels like a missed opportunity. Looking back, it's easy to see the strides we've made as a society. The cast and crew's lookback at the material could have been fascinating.
If you already own the old Blu-ray, this isn't an essential upgrade unless you just really want the metal case for your collection. It is a mid-tier release for a wildly popular movie that has significant cultural relevance, and I'm left feeling like it deserved a little more effort on the disc side. But I'm also a sucker for stacked discs with special features that take multiple sittings to pour through.
Scary Movie will be available to own on a limited-edition 4K Steelbook on 10/20. Personally, I'm a big fan of shelf aesthetics, and this sits nicely next to my Scream 4K's. Does a mediocre transfer on a catalog comedy like this kill the buy for you, or are you still picking up these 4K steelbooks purely for the shelf art?
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