Review: Scary Movie – One movie parody after another
Directed by Michael Tiddes
Starring Marlon Wayons, Shawn Wayons, Anna Faris, Regina Hall
4/10
It looked like spoof movies were making a welcome return, with the likes of the new Naked Gun and Fackham Hall proving just how funny this almost-lost genre could be. And now we have the new Scary Movie to undo all that good will. It’s not like the other five movies of this franchise were considered masterpieces of comedy, but they at least had jokes here and there; they had some semblance of poking fun at the horror genre and its movies. With this sixth instalment, they’ve become even lazier and unfunnier than ever.
It’ll be quite difficult to really describe the story going on here because the Scary Movies hardly concern themselves with story and are just a random assembly of movie parodies. But the gist is pretty much identical to the previous movies: Ghostface is stalking and trying to kill a number of college kids, starting with Tuesday (get it, a parody of the TV show Wednesday), so the series’ legacy characters Cindy (Anna Faris), Brenda (Regina Hall), and the goofy pot-smoking Shorty Meeks (Marlon Wayans) team up to take him down (but not before passing through one movie parody after another).
And the extent to which they get lampooned is based on a very simple formula: take a character from that movie and have them get hit with a frying pan, or have them take a huge bong hit, or have them make a cultural reference of some sort (there is indeed a ‘hawk tuah’ reference in this). It’s a pretty unfunny formula that gets tiresome real quick.
What seems most troublesome about these “parodies” (or mere references, rather) is that it seems the horror films themselves are actually funnier than this movie. The hysterical climax of Weapons or Nicholas Cage’s horrifyingly hilarious role in Longlegs or the surprising satire in Get Out are all loads funnier, and their humour is more attentively crafted, so it’s embarrassing to see Scary Movie try to mine more out of it with such blunt-headed juvenile comedy.
There’s truly the feeling that they improvised every single joke on the fly, and this means plenty of them don’t even seem to make sense. There’s a quick reference to It Follows, where Faris comments that that film would be too obscure to even joke about—but they already did do a parody of it in an earlier scene. And one character comments on how actors never win Oscars for their work in horror movies—but what about Amy Madigan’s win for Weapons just earlier this year? And there’s plenty of jokes going about how doomed black people generally are in horror films and how they are usually the first to die—but this is pretty much seen as an outdated trope that the likes of Jordan Peele’s films have helped erode.
There is the wish that a Scary Movie reboot in 2026 could’ve been funny. It has a carefree sensibility, there’s nothing preachy or pretentious about it, and even though most jokes don’t land at all, at least there’s a consistent stream of unfunny jokes that don’t land. If only the Wayon Bros had put in a whole lot more work refining the comedy and the parodies here, because no amount of the finest and dankest kush in the world could make this funny.
DAVID MORGAN-BROWN