Cinema: Living Off-Color

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Oh poor, unsuspecting reader. Here you are, perusing a perfectly respectable magazine, floating down a river of Americana, and you dock at a story on Keenen Ivory Wayans, whom you may remember from the early-'90s groundbreaking sketch-comedy series In Living Color, and who has now directed a film called Scary Movie, which opens this week. But before we get to Wayans, we must familiarize you with the film, and there's the rub. Scary Movie had this writer giggling like Beavis on helium, yet it's a raunchy piece of work and not easily described in printable detail.

It has scenes like this: A guy in a men's room hears chortling in the next stall, so he puts his ear next to a hole in the wall and gets tickled by an enormous...

Maybe not the best example for print.

There's the, uh, climactic scene in which a sex-starved teenage boy is finally taken to bed and...

To tell you the truth, there's not much we can say about Scary Movie except that, frankly, Wayans (a father of three with a fourth on the way, no less) should be ashamed of himself.

"Ashamed and proud at the same time," he responds. "Ashamed we did it. Proud we got away with it." What he has got away with is a spoof in the tradition of the Airplane! and Naked Gun series--a send-up of such Hollywood darlings as the teen-horror genre (Scream), the teen-romance genre (Dawson's Creek) and some other nonsacred cows like The Blair Witch Project, The Usual Suspects and The Matrix. Wayans, along with his younger brothers Shawn and Marlon (who star in the film and share screenplay credit), also outgrosses the gross-out genre with two grotesque close-ups of male genitalia and a jaw-dropping ejaculation sight gag.

If this appeals to you, don't be ashamed, for you're apparently not alone. Thanks in part to a raucous trailer that has been showing since last spring, Wayans' $19 million comedy has been generating rapid-fire word of mouth. The film's strong "tracking" (surveys that indicate audiences' desire to see an upcoming flick) has inspired the distributor, Miramax's Dimension division, to step up its marketing blitz and increase its opening-day screens from 1,900 to about 3,000.

Miramax's co-chairman, Bob Weinstein, should be commended for his sense of humor; he's releasing a movie that savages his own Scream franchise. On the other hand, the movie he's releasing features star Carmen Electra breaking wind. He should be ashamed of himself too. "I appreciate that," says Weinstein. "I'd do penance if I was that religion. Since I'm Jewish, I'll just feel guilty about it."

As guardians of good taste, we don't recommend Scary Movie to everyone. For one thing, it's uneven--a flaw even more glaring on second and third viewings. But we happily endorse Wayans' re-entry into the spotlight. By the time he left In Living Color in 1992, he had ascended from his humble roots as the second of 10 children in a family in the New York City projects into television history. He had also ascended to the galaxy of stars fated to spend the bulk of their careers overshadowed by their own TV excellence. (Coincidentally, these stars often have three names: Keenen Ivory Wayans, Mary Tyler Moore and, next up, Sarah Jessica Parker.)