Movie Review: Scary Movie

By John Corrado

The Wayans brothers make their return to the horror spoof genre with Scary Movie, the sixth movie in the comedy franchise that sees them regaining control of the series for the first time since the first two.

Back under the creative control of the Wayans (who left the series before the fan favourite third one), they are trying to recapture the earlier magic of the spoof movie by parodying a decade of horror. The mostly hit and miss results are about as expected.

The Scary Movie series always been in lockstep with the Scream movies, adding an extra layer of meta commentary to them. In keeping with this tradition, much of 2026’s Scary Movie is closely modelled after the 2022 Scream “rebootquel,” which also ditched the numeral in its title in favour of just going back to having the same name as the first one.

Regina Hall and Anna Faris are back from the previous films, reprising their roles as Brenda Meeks and Cindy Campbell, respectively. Cindy is basically who Jamie Lee Curtis was in the 2018 Halloween reboot, living as a hermit in a booby trapped house, waiting for the killer Ghost Face to return so she can get her revenge. Faris, a perpetually underrated comic talent who feels like she is finally getting her flowers, is amusing in the role.

Cindy’s daughter (Olivia Rose Keegan, cast as a Judy Greer lookalike in keeping with parodying the Halloween reboot) is part of a new cast of characters being targeted by the masked killer. This includes her younger sister Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif), a gothic teen who can’t be named “Wednesday” for legal copyright reasons.

But the main draw is seeing the return of other characters from earlier in the franchise. Like Shorty Meeks (played by co-writer and co-producer Marlon Wayans), still a stoner who is now on his 25th year of high school, and has gotten rich through streaming and crypto. A lot of this feels like fan service for the series, but, again, the filmmakers would likely argue that is part of the joke riffing on reboots and legacy sequels.

If you’re expecting much of a cohesive plot, you won’t really get it here, which is pretty par for the course for a Scary Movie. The film plays more like a series of sketches strung together, parodying a myriad of modern horror movies from the past decade, including the Halloween reboots, the Terrifier films, Get Out, Longlegs, The Substance, Weapons and Sinners. We also get parodies of a few non-horror targets, including One Battle After Another and even, in one trippy sequence, KPop Demon Hunters.

Not immune to other pop culture targets or attempts at social commentary, we also get the anti-woke They/Them jokes, and the COVID gags. The Wayans are carrying on in the proud tradition of poking fun at everyone and everything, but it never feels quite as edgy as it wants to be (or would’ve been if it had been released during “peak-wokeness” a few years ago).

These movies aren’t meant to be “good,” per se, they are just meant to deliver a steady stream of laughs. On that note, Scary Movie is sort of successful, but also pretty hit and miss. Some of the jokes do land and some of the bits are amusing. But the joke-to-laugh ratio also could’ve been just a little bit higher. There’s nothing as gut-busting here as entire stretches of last year’s Naked Gun reboot, for example.

The best thing that could probably be said about Scary Movie is that it understands the assignment well enough; these movies are meant to be dumb, and this one is. It delivers enough of the stupid humour that fans of the series want. It’s dumb fun, high on the dumb.