The Outre Limits

Euphemistically speaking, there are simply no words to politely describe the sight that has just been set before Keenen Ivory Wayans for his approval.

On Stage 7 at the BA Studios in Hollywood , the director is in the final weeks of shooting “Scary Movie 2,” the inevitable sequel to last summer’s sleeper shock hit, “Scary Movie,” a brazenly lowbrow parody of teenage slasher movies. As he waits for the next setup on the anything-goes parody--which is steering clear of its slasher roots to take a new tact by lampooning haunted house movies--aides, like so many supplicants parading before their all-knowing sire, step forward one by one with a series of odd requests that require his immediate attention.

First, one leads a young woman, dressed as the nightgowned Regan from “The Exorcist,” before him for his OK. Fine, he nods.

Then, another introduces a lineup of corpulent, Marlon Brando look-alikes. The second one will do, he says.

Finally, a prop man invites Wayans over to a table, where two custom-made props have been assembled for his consideration. One, a latex head with a wide-open mouth, looks as if it might have been lopped off an overeager sex doll. The other is-, here is where words fail to suffice. The prop man inserts Object B into Object A and Wayans--well, he can’t help it, the situation is so patently absurd and here he is, a grown man, a veritable auteur, if you will, king of this $35-million-plus production, about to pass judgment on a potentially X-rated gag that might make even Hustler’s Larry Flynt blush. After trying to offer an instructive word or two, Wayans is reduced to giggles.

Now of this you can be sure: When “Scary Movie 2” opens July 4, courtesy of Miramax’s Dimension Films division, if this particular gag makes it intact into the final cut, one or two shocked--shocked--reviewers are sure to cite it as further evidence of the current decline of Western Civilization. Fulminating columnists will pick it up and use it to knock Hollywood upside the head. And, from there, it’s anyone’s guess here the outrage will lead: congressional investigations, U.N. resolutions.

But all that is in the future. At the moment, back on Stage 7, Wayans and his collaborators certainly don’t come across as if they are cultural barbarians, out to subvert Mom, the flag, and apple pie. They’re simply merry pranksters, relishing the comic anarchy of anything-for-a-laugh. In another, more naive era, they’d be recycling hoary burlesque jokes; but since their particular brand of comedy requires an ever-escalating sense of outrageousness, instead of the requisite seltzer bottles and rubber chickens, they’re resorting to eyebrow-raising props straight out of the Pleasure Chest.

As he regains his composure and settles back into his director’s chair, Wayans concedes, “It’s really hard to take this stuff seriously. A lot of it is sexual, but it’s not offered up in a sexual way. It’s just body parts, gross stuff. It’s really hard to find a rational argument about why any of it would go beyond what adults should be able to see in a film that’s rated R.”

That, of course, won’t stop his critics. Last summer, just as “Scary Movie” was breaking the phallic barrier with one particularly prominent protuberance, Washington’s politicians, led by Sens. Joe Lieberman and John McCain, were bearing down on Hollywood, accusing the film industry of marketing its R-rated movies to underage ticket-buyers. Though the two issues were technically separate--while Hollywood filmmakers were pushing the limits of the industry’s self-imposed ratings, it was Hollywood’s marketing executives who were the primary targets of the politicians’ wrath--they were lumped together in the ensuing debate.

“If sharp restrictions were imposed on the marketing of R-rated films, this would seriously inhibit the production of edgy, character-driven films, already an endangered species,” Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart argued in one of his columns that addressed the increasingly censorious atmosphere, going on to add, “Further, they impose drastically increased pressure on self-regulatory boards .... The real danger, of course, is that the Born Againers of the world will ultimately be the ones who will want to decide what is and is not appropriate content, a development that would send our popular culture back to the days of the Spanish Inquisition.”

Asked about the ongoing argument that “Scary Movie” stumbled into, Wayans almost loses his comic karma, admitting, “What drives me crazy, there is this whole notion that somehow the cause of violence in our society is related to television and film. Yes, I think there has to be some responsibility on the part of filmmakers, particularly when they are making children’s programming, but most of the things that are being attacked were never intended for children.”

Launching into his own state of the union address, he explains, “A lot of the problems with our society have to do with the breakdown of society in general. We don’t have any branch of society that has retained its sense of moral standards--everything from the church to the White House, from the police force to the military.

“Previous generations were able to live with a certain sense of naivete, but nowadays everything is in your face, and the media has exploited everything. We’ve watched murder trials, presidential scandals. Children emulate adult behavior, and what they are being inundated with is immoral adult behavior. To villainize film and television is to scapegoat it. It makes the politicians look good. It’s naive and silly to think if you clamp down on film and television, somehow things are going to go back to normal.”

Not that “Scary Movie” ever pretended to offer anything even close to the secret for world peace. As a performer/writer/director/producer --not to mention the senior sibling of the Wayans acting clan--Keenen Ivory Wayans has made a career out of goofing on popular culture ever since his first movie, the 1988 blaxploitation spoof “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.” Moving on to his Fox TV sketch show “In Living Color,” he’s thrived on testing the limits of both political correctness and the ever-watchful censors.

” Wayans insists he had no argument with the ratings board of the Motion Picture Assn. of America when it slapped a restricted R-rating on “Scary Movie.” According to Bob Weinstein, Miramax co-chair and head of Dimension, the whole ratings process went relatively smoothly, with the board reviewing just a couple of cuts before making its decision. “They [the MPAA] are very sensitive--and should be--toward violence,” he says. “But they’re also look at a movie’s tone, and with a spoof, it’s all silliness.”

Wayans prefers to takes his cues from preview audiences who can be counted on to tell him when he’s gone too far. For instance, an early cut of “Scary Movie” included one gag where Anna Faris, who played Cindy Campbell, the plucky stalkee, ripped open her shirt to reveal, instead of the expected charms, a Dali-esque array of pigs nipples.

“It freaked out the test audience so much,” Faris recalls, “they just couldn’t recover. That was one instance where the joke was so disturbing, Keenen just cut it out.”

No matter how disapprovingly the culture police judged the results, the first “Scary Movie,” once it survived both test audiences and the ratings board, still got plenty of laughs. “Keenen’s sense of humor is kind of surreal,” suggests actor Tim Curry, who’s joined the sequel as a mysterious professor who invites a bunch of college kids to his haunted mansion, Hell House, to take part in a sleep-disorder study--a winking nod to 1999’s thriller “The Haunting”

“He takes things right to the edge, looks quite firmly over the edge,” Curry says. “But it’s all based on human behavior, and it’s all delivered with a kind of gleeful innocence that stops it from becoming vulgar or gross.”

A $19-million production, “Scary Movie’--which took special delight in ridiculing Dimension’s own “Scream” series--debuted last July with a rabid $42-million opening weekend and eventually collected $157 million domestically, $270 million worldwide. But even before it opened, the filmmakers were put on notice that a repeat performance was warranted.

“You could see right at the premiere, the audience was going crazy--you can’t fake laughter,” says Weinstein of his decision to fastrack a sequel. “If you don’t get there first, someone else will imitate you. And so once I got the script from Keenen and we had all the players back, we decided to plant ourselves on the biggest weekend of the year.”

The increased budget for the sequel even included a hefty $2-million payment for Marlon Brando, who was invited to do a brief cameo as a demon-battling priest. Unfortunately, that potentially choice bit of casting never saw the light of celluloid since the actor, suffering from pneumonia, had to send his regrets.

The biggest problem the sequel faced, however, was the fact that “Scary Movie” hadn’t been designed to spawn a spinoff in the first place. Faris was the only actor who was even under option for a possible sequel, since virtually all the other main characters had been knocked off or at least seriously maimed.

Undaunted, Keenen Ivory Wayans and his writers decided they’d bring back their principal cast of characters anyway, even if that meant conveniently ignoring their untimely deaths. Dismissing that slight problem in continuity between the two installments, writer-actor Shawn Wayans, who’ll again play the heterosexually challenged Ray, cracks, “He just looked dead [at the end of the first picture]--he’s still alive.”

Adds Marlon Wayans, who reprises his role as the hapless Shorty in the sequel, “If it bombed, we’d all be dead. But we didn’t die, we just got hurt. That’s what happens when your first movie is successful.”

Coming up with a fresh comic attack proved somewhat trickier. While “Scary Movie” riffed on the high school-kids-in-jeopardy excesses of “Scream,” the Wayans boys decided against making “Scary 2” simply a replay of “Scream 2,” which, itself, was a semi-parody of sequel conventions.

“Instead of trying to parody what we did the first time, because it’s hard to parody comedy, we flipped the genre,” says Marlon Wayans. “We picked a new genre to attack. In the first one we did the slasher movie, in this one we do haunted houses and supernatural movies.”

That forced the Wayanses and their fellow writers (Alison Fouse, Greg Grabianski, Dave Polsky Michael Anthony Snowden and Craig Wayans) to buckle down and fast-forward through a crash course of 130 or so horror flicks--everything from “The Exorcist” and its spawn to an obscure 1981 flick called “The Burning,” which they were amused to discover had been co-written by non-other than the aforementioned Bob Weinstein. (‘That movie showed me what I’m good at and what I’m not good at, and one of the things I’m not good at is writing any movie,” jokes Weinstein.)

“Each genre has its limitations,” says Keenen Ivory Wayans, who, when not pondering the comic potential of sex toys, might almost be mistaken for a lecturer in deconstructionist film theory. “In the slasher genre, you have story with no characters; in this one, you have characters with no real story. In most supernatural films, nothing really happens. They’re just creepy. Whereas in slasher movies, lots of things happen; it’s just the characters themselves who barely exist.”

Is it possible that buried beneath all the expected blue jokes in “Scary Movie 2,” the Wayanses are up to something more ambitious--a subversive critique of the horror-movie genre? Actress Kathleen Robertson, who’s playing a sexpot loosely based on Catherine Zeta-Jones’ turn in “The Haunting,” testifies, “It’s all disguised as stupid humor, but it’s not. It’s really smart. You have to be smart to write the stuff they write.”

But judging by those telltale props, “Scary Movie” fans needn’t worry that the franchise will suddenly get respectable. Laughs “Beverly Hills 90210” alumna Tori Spelling, another new addition to the cast, “There’s certainly a lot of dirty, potty humor, but I trust Keenen and I went for it. And then I thought, ‘Oh my God, maybe deep down, I’m an exhibitionist.”’ *