Last time we checked on girl-next-door Cindy (Anna Faris), pothead Shorty (Marlon Wayans), soul sister Brenda (Regina Hall) and her not that ambiguously gay boyfriend Ray (Shawn Wayans), they had barely survived being stalked by a ghost-faced madman with a cell phone and a butcher knife in and around their high school. It’s now one year later and they’re all in college and enjoying quieter, more normal lives…. That is until they, along with horny dude Buddy (Christopher Masterson), bodacious babe Jamie (Kathleen Robertson) and slutty dimwit Alex (Tori Spelling), are selected by Professor Oldman (Tim Curry) and his wheelchair-bound assistant (David Cross) to take part in a study on sleep disorders that’s actually a front for an attempt to document paranormal phenomena. So here they are again running for their lives, secluded in Hell House, a mansion said to be haunted by its former owner and his mistress, who were murdered here long ago…

Or, simply put, the Wayans brothers, hot off “Scary Movie”, their 270 M$ grossing “Scream” spoof, are having another round of satire, gross-out humor and goofy scares, this time using “The Haunting” as backbone for their crazy shenanigans. Of course, the classic haunted house flick (or most probably its 1999 remake) is only one of the movies director Keenen Ivory Wayans and his seven writers (!) poke fun at: “What Lies Beneath”, “Hannibal”, “Charlie’s Angels”, “Titanic”, “M:I-2”, “Twister” and “Poltergeist” are some of the movie’s other targets. A lot of the gags that ensue are obvious and not very funny, but the filmmakers keep throwing so much absurd stuff on the screen that some of it is bound to steal a laugh from even the most jaded viewer. I liked James Woods (“F**k this!”) and Andy Richter in the extended “The Exorcist” spoof which opens the movie, the trash-talking parrot and the cameo by Beetlejuice (the creepy black midget from Howard Stern’s Wack Pack) are a hoot and the scene with the possessed basket-ball is quite something to see.

I also enjoyed most of the comic performances, especially Anna Faris, who proves once again that she’s cuter, funnier and definitively more game than the starlets of the movies being parodied, and Marlon Wayans doesn’t fail to crack me up as the perennially high Shorty. Chris Elliot also has his moments as the henchman with a deformed hand. In the not-so-good department, I could have lived a fulfilled life without ever seeing excrements, urine, semen, vomit and other bodily fluids on the big screen but hey, it gets reactions. Overall, I’d marginally recommend “Scary Movie 2”. Obviously, it’s not what one would call a good movie, a smart movie or a decent movie. Heck, it’s hardly something you’d call a movie at all. It’s more of an 80 minute sketch comedy freak show, and a clumsily crafted one at that. You can tell that this is a purely commercial product hastily put together to get some more quick dough out of the teenagers who made the first movie last year’s surprise hit before they outgrow their penchant for juvenile comedy. Yet I still kinda liked the stupid mess. If you didn’t like the first one, stay away, but if you got a few good chuckles out of it, you’ll get more of the same with the sequel. I guess it’s a matter of personal (bad) taste.