Review: ‘Scary Movie’ Just Isn’t Funny
There’s a lot to root for with the sixth entry in the Scary Movie franchise. The Wayans are back for the first time in a real way since the second film, Anna Faris and Regina Hall are back for the first time since the fourth, and there’s a real charm in watching this talented team find each other again after all these years. Marlon, Shawn, and Keenen Ivory Wayans share script duty with Craig Wayans and Rick Alvarez, while Michael Tiddes, Marlon’s longtime comedy director, takes the chair. The trouble isn’t charisma, it’s the material.
It all comes down to what Scary Movie lives or dies on: it isn’t funny. To quote the wise words of one Trinity the Tuck, I kept finding myself asking: “Where are the jokes?” The franchise has always been uneven, but even at its worst, it usually had a few base-level, no-frills laughs, especially the first and third films.
The series splits pretty cleanly into eras. The first two are the Wayans films, three and four are essentially their own canon under different hands, and the fifth was a preemptive 2010s reboot that didn’t land but had, in hindsight, a little more heart than what’s on screen here. This one gets close to a joke or two, mostly when the original ensemble is just having fun together, but the jokes themselves are still almost always dead on arrival.
What keeps things from completely bottoming out is the cast. Everyone is committing, with Faris and Hall once again representing its MVPs. Cindy and Brenda back in the same room is the closest the film comes to working, with small and precise comic timing that survives even inert material. The younger cast does well, too. Olivia Rose Keegan, as Cindy’s estranged daughter Sara, has obvious star power despite the script. Her ability to fold herself into being Faris’ daughter is uncanny, an impression that’s also genuinely nuanced, and given the words on the page, it’s close to miraculous. Savannah Lee Nassif’s Tuesday is the requisite Jenna Ortega type, a quiet joke in itself since Tuesday is stitched together from Ortega’s greatest hits, Tara Carpenter, and Wednesday Addams both.
Performances aside, nothing here lands. One of its most glaring disappointments is its inability to meaningfully push boundaries. The marketing wants you to believe this is a no-holds-barred swing at cancel culture and the politics of the moment. It isn’t. There’s plenty of cringe but very little sting. To its credit, it’s less mean than you’d brace for. But harmless and funny are not the same thing, and this lands much closer to the first.
The deepest problem with this satire is its backbone of requel references, and it’s where the movie gives itself away, starting with the title. Calling it simply Scary Movie, no number, is itself a requel move, the same naming reset as Halloween (2018) or Scream (2022), and the film builds its whole spine out of that era: Cindy as a battle-worn Laurie Strode, the daughters as the Carpenter sisters, the entire legacy-sequel machine. The knock isn’t that those reboots are lesser than the originals. Of course they are, there was no way they wouldn’t be, and it’s barely a critique to say so. The problem is that they’re middle of the road. They’re adequately made, they land fine on arrival, and then they evaporate, because they have no camp. Without memorable cornerstones to target, this entry arrives without purpose or weight.
Scary Movie 5 hit the same wall mainlining Mama. You can’t build a durable parody on source material with no staying power, and Scary Movie (2026) keeps choosing exactly that source material. The first Scary Movie will outlive all of us because Scream did. This one feels dated on arrival because the films it’s riffing on already are.
-
Scary Movie
Summary
The sixth ’Scary Movie’ gets the team back together, then fails to give them material that’s worth the effort.
Categorized:Reviews