Comedy | Movies

‘Scary Movie’ (2026) Garners Few Laughs in Limp, Outdated Reboot

The return of the Wayans brothers to ‘Scary Movie’ should be a glorious comeback, but instead feels like another tired effort by Hollywood to reboot a dormant franchise

A still image from ‘Scary Movie’ — Image credit: Paramount Pictures

Over a quarter of a century after the original film’s release, the Scary Movie franchise is back, undeterred by the striking time gap between its entries. If anything, this return after a decade plus of radio silence is the film’s selling point, as nostalgia and legacy are being mined endlessly in today’s mainstream cinema, so reboots and sequels can be churned out ad infinitum. The drought of new ideas in Hollywood has long been nauseating, especially for the mid-range budget film that Scary Movie slots into. But Scary Movie’s $30 million budget may appear frivolous given the film’s lean runtime of 96 minutes.

However, fans of the franchise will know that the jokes-per-minute ratio is always operating in favour of the latter here, with frequent cutaways to new sketch ideas. The Scary Movie entries follow a rough story, but zigzag constantly around it, snaking their way along a haphazard approach to plot that prioritises a new joke above all else, no matter how crass or low-brow it may be. The original film is the best, though you’ll have to take that recommendation with a grain of salt, as I tapped out of the franchise a few minutes into its third entry, by which point its quality was already unrecognisable from the first film.

What worked so well in Scary Movie (the original, not the confusingly-titled sixth film in this franchise) was that it used Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s Scream franchise as its primary inspiration. Scream provided a suitable entryway for Scary Movie’s absurdity, blending comedy and horror against the backdrop of a high school setting. It wielded horror movie tropes as deftly as it poked fun at them, but its semi-seriousness left plenty of room for a horror parody to mine those tropes even further.

Should it be described as mining the comedy even further, or punching down for the comedic equivalent of the lowest common denominator? The first Scary Movie was often crass, with plenty of jokes to offend those with sensitive sensibilities, but it passed the golden rule of comedy films, possessing more hits than misses. It also packed a litany of jokes into its runtime, with quick cutaways to different parodies and comedic tangents that would make the rapid-fire pacing of adult animated sitcoms like Family Guy proud.

Repurposing plot beats, motifs and iconic imagery from contemporary horror films and pop culture media pays off in dividends, even when an excuse for it to make sense in the plot is hastily conjured (like when protagonist Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) does her best impression of a mystical, mythical martial arts expert as she effortlessly evades a hail of gunfire, a tribute to the iconic slow-mo bullet dodging sequence in The Matrix).

A still image from ‘Scary Movie’ — Image credit: Paramount Pictures

There was an absurdity to the humour that, for as much as it prided itself on being low-brow and trashy, shielded it from ever appearing hateful. Its opposition to political correctness came less from a desire to buck any social trends than simply to tell the best possible jokes, and the Wayans brothers are at their best when they let themselves be uninhibited. While the quality of their output as of late has dwindled, their re-emerging presence across Scary Movie (the most recent version) is easily the most positive development regarding the franchise in decades, with each successive entry from its first to fifth film boasting an impressive ability to downgrade in quality according to critics and moviegoers.

Horror provides an endless well of creativity to shamelessly borrow from, but it is also a comfortable area of parody. I have suffered through too many shoddy moviegoing experiences with insufferable horror film audiences, usually comprised of teenagers eager to show they’re not scared of what’s unfolding onscreen by talking and laughing with their friends. The issue isn’t solely that some teens (and I confess I was guilty of this, too) view a cinema screening as a social event. There seems to be a reflexive urge — of a weakling mentality — to figuratively puff out your chest and refuse to let the movie bother you.

Horror films are meant to bother us, but frequent laughter dispels any chance of unease. With that in mind, there’s a certain satisfaction in how horror parodies strip these source materials of their terror. They demystify the eerie and the fantastical, figuratively unveiling these villains in harsh fluorescent lights, when we all know their deadly games are better waged under the shadowy hush of nightfall. Scary Movie’s opening scene plays right into that urge, as actress Teyana Taylor, playing a fictional version of herself, appears to be the next hapless victim of Ghostface, the masked killer of the Scream franchise. But, for all her seeming naivety, she subverts her would-be murderer’s plans, assembling an unofficial Black Avengers of ragtag New Yorkers through bird calls, all of whom smack Ghostface upside the head.

But, for all the satisfaction that can be gleamed from these defanging encounters, where horror’s absurdity is mined for laughs, it takes actual laughter from the audience for these scenes to truly satisfy. Scary Movie’s opening sequence is a blessing and a curse, landing in the better half of the jokes across the film’s runtime, but still failing to elicit much laughter, whether from this reviewer or from audiences. And I think I know why that is.

It isn’t as simple as the scene not being very memorable, or the jokes not being all that funny. That is part of it, of course, but there are some clever lines here and there, while Taylor’s performance offers the same bravado that made her noteworthy in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After the Other, which this opening scene references. Even when Taylor makes all the routine dumb decisions of characters destined to be killed in opening scenes of horror movies, she’s a subversion of a hapless teen victim, as the image of a strong Black woman replaces that of a frail, oblivious white teenage girl (as was the case in the first Scary Movie).

The cover image for ‘Scary Movie’ — Image credit: Paramount Pictures

But this franchise is at its best when it does the exact opposite. Bravado takes away from the comic absurdity. Screen presence is the last thing on moviegoers’ minds when they witness the original Scary Movie cast revel in absurd hijinks. In capitalising off of this quality — which Taylor has in spades — this latest entry gets off to a worrying start by trying too hard. Instead of just trying to make a movie (no small feat), or just trying to be funny (not any easier in this case), it’s as if Shawn, Keenen Ivory and Marlon Wayans, who co-wrote the film with Craig Wayans and Rick Alvarez, are desperate to make this film a definitive statement, an exuberant cry that they are back in control. In the opening scene, you can almost feel a ‘pause for laughter’ chilling effect after each joke, which was awkward to sit through in my oh-so-quiet screening.

The original film was absurd beyond belief, but within that there was a more casual approach to the humour, where it didn’t chase its laughs. When we’re first introduced to Cindy Campbell, she’s probably the most normal character of the bunch, and even then she’s not exactly surrounded by deranged lunatics. The absurd qualities either undercut the ‘reality’ or emotional texture of a scene, or they neatly map onto the plot of the source of parody. Spiny (and spindly) as it may be, there is some semblance of structure in the original film. Its characters don’t need to be deranged messes at every moment for the comedy to be riotous.

The new Scary Movie fails to avoid this pitfall, but it also sidelines its most important characters in the process. The Wayans brothers might be the driving creative forces behind the franchise, but Faris and Regina Hall (as Brenda Meeks in the ‘best friend of the protagonist’ role) are its shining stars. The former’s expressiveness is absent here, both facially — for reasons that aren’t worth speculating on — and narratively, with Cindy having lost her vivacious spirit. Now, she’s a deadbeat mom whose self-medication through booze and descent into isolation ensure she acts as though she doesn’t have a pulse. This sets up her being a terrible mother, helping usher in her damaged daughters as the new heroines of the series, Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan) and Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif), who are often more expressive than Cindy.

The latter doesn’t have any amusing lines, while the former’s constant pill-popping is quite amusing, even if this essential character trait is also found in her mother. Given Sara and Cindy’s tense relationship and shared penchant for substance abuse, a reunion scene centred on shameless, irreverent drug and alcohol use could have offered an amusing antidote to Cindy’s toned-down persona. But there appears to be no antidote for this dopey, lame character work, dimming the creative spark of one of the 21st century’s greatest comedic performers onscreen.

As for Hall, she is still as fantastic as ever, even when Brenda has been relegated to the hopelessly uncool mom role, still trying to kick it with the youngins. Though her efforts will always be in vain, she still tries valiantly to ingratiate herself with her kids, Brad (Gregg Wayans) and Dei (Sydney Park). Gregg, as a member of the Wayans dynasty, is a noticeably weaker actor than the rest of the cast, with natural vocal inflections that would suit a distinctly uncool figure, just like his mother. Instead, he plays Brad as depressingly dull and straight-laced, a character in a broad comedy without a clear trope to fall back on.

A still image from ‘Scary Movie’ — Image credit: Paramount Pictures

Park is more convincing, even if her character isn’t, embodying a tired attempt to churn out comedy about wokeness, PC culture and other topics that are largely confounding to older generations (hence her being non-binary).

These topics have been talked about to death. It’s been over ten years since identifying as an Apache helicopter became a popular anti-trans joke online, but Scary Movie still tries to revive an iteration of that joke here. And it’s godawful, in the same way that it’s a pain to watch most Trump impressions. Either you buy into the ideology of its speaker/s wholeheartedly, or you find their language and politics too absurd to ever warrant parody. At least a Trump parody is still relevant; most of the cringey “woke” humour in this film arrives about a decade too late.

Scary Movie is unwilling to be truly offensive, toning down its prior edginess while insisting, more than it ever did in previous instalments, that this will be a no-holds-barred kind of comedic experience, cancel culture mentalities be damned. Is anyone actually enthused by filmmakers insisting on how cool or transgressive their film is going to be? Just because edgy comedy should exist doesn’t mean we need to keep treating it as sacred. It only becomes sacred when it is threatened. And Scary Movie isn’t even edgy! It’s a film designed to half-work for every conceivable group, which is oddly weak-willed for a movie which promised to be anything but that.

The horror film parodies are surprisingly well-shot, with plenty of time and care taken to recreate the visuals of each movie. Some satirical sequences even look better than their source material, while others aren’t far off from retaining the quality of the original film (including an all-too-brief *Weapons parody). The Terrifier franchise, naturally, makes an appearance, as does [The Substance](https://medium.com/theuglymonster/the-substance-revels-in-disturbing-gory-chaos-69ae83c5762f) and Sinners. So why not build this new film around them, instead of lazily latching on to the Scream* franchise yet again?

Scary Movie is in an unfortunate position in that regard, having been made before, but released after, the worst entry in the Scream franchise, the disastrous *Scream 7. That trainwreck was a sign that there is nothing left to give in this cinematic world, yet Scary Movie*, as the sixth entry in its franchise, signs off on its lack of relevance by latching onto a film series currently coasting off of its legacy. Both franchises are wedged firmly in that trap of nostalgia, which is proving to be a blight in mainstream cinema.

A still image from ‘Scary Movie’ — Image credit: Paramount Pictures

If Hollywood keeps churning out nostalgia-bait, what hope do future generations of filmgoers have? In the future, there will be little to pine for from our current era if we’re constantly looking backwards, as financiers have recognised that audiences will pay for any old slop on cinema screens if it’s attached to a pre-existing property.

Scary Movie had the opportunity to reinvent itself, abandoning the original film’s primary influence of teen-based slashers, like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Sinners is the obvious choice, with in-built musical numbers, dance sequences and tie-ins between that film’s vampiric villains and other, more amusing forms of predatory behaviour in wider society.

While I can’t say I was humoured by Scary Movie 2’s emphasis on gross-out humour, the fact that The Substance is parodied without a staggering degree of grotesque practical effects is a severe let-down, especially given that plastic surgery and obsession over beauty isn’t exactly dwindling in popularity — who can forget about Ozempic’s chokehold on public figures’ appearances?

Instead of offering something new, Scary Movie’s grand revival attaches it to a sinking ship, with its middling results at making viewers laugh failing to revive its dull plot. Constant cutaways keep things fresh, and there are a few gems nestled deep within this deeply referential and self-referential film, but they are too few and far between to make this a consistently enjoyable watch. Only the movie’s final act, which tears down its own walls and sets fire to its structure, presents a winning formula. Why? Because it’s willing to destroy its old ways. If it could have crafted new, convincing ones from the get-go, Scary Movie had a chance at success. For a grand revival of a popular film series, it begins and ends with only a faint whimper to show for its efforts.