It makes sense that the era in which movies are constantly dissected, parodied, and memeified through Letterboxd logs, Instagram Reels, and TikTok videos also marked the death of satirical meta-films. Because why would you shell out money for a film ticket when the best jokes at the expense of popular culture are already online for free and directly at your fingertips?
As one of the most successful parody series of its kind, the Scary Movie franchise belongs to the heyday of the video rental epoch, a time in which flexing your pop culture knowledge was slightly more special than it is today, thanks to the mere cultural osmosis of simply being online. And while derided by tastemaking critics, the early Scary Movie installments were, in fact, genuine cultural touchstones, eagerly digested by audiences as highly quotable and 420-friendly riffs on Scream (1996) and the many modern horror classics that followed suit. The smoked-out “Whazzup” phone exchange between Marlon Wayans and Ghostface even deeply entered the common lexicon, becoming one of those instantly recognizable signifiers of the burgeoning stoner humor of MSN’s and AOL’s halcyon instant messenger days.
It’s indicative of how the Wayans Brothers had their finger on the pulse when they unleashed these movies, riddled with abrasive humor and tasteless sketches in global multiplexes. With the exception of their somewhat solid Paranormal Activity spoof A Haunted House (2013), they surely also felt that by the end of that same year’s Scary Movie 5, their ability to take a crack at the dominant pop culture was waning — or, at least, becoming less lucrative. Surely, the disastrous critical and commercial flopping of the infamous Movie 43 (2013) was seen as the final nail in the coffin of a micro-genre fated to become a cringy footnote in the annals of recent film history.
It’s then almost admirable that the Wayans revived the Scary Movie franchise in the year of our Lord 2026, to stubbornly take a piss on beloved horror films one more time. Helmed by A Haunted House director Michael Tiddes, this sixth installment is simply titled Scary Movie, undoubtedly a wink at the countless serious legacy reboots that run amok in the multiplex. In the same vein as the serious reboots this satire aims at, Scary Movie reads as a somewhat desperate attempt at re-capturing our attention by reviving a stale format that noticeably has a lot of catching up to do with the cultural touchstones of the moment.
Clearly inspired by the relatively boring reboot of Scream (2022), Scary Movie eagerly props up a goofy version of Ghostface again as the franchise’s villain, who once again preys on the original cast members in silly vignettes that take cues from various recent horror highlights. There’s something to be said for sticking with the classics, but propping up Ghostface in itself feels like a relic from the past, especially in this age of “elevated horror,” where the kids are not really vibing with the masked serial killer anymore. By being so pointedly retro, Scary Movie feels stale from the get-go. And this persistent sense of datedness is the biggest enemy this film has to grapple with, as it continuously reads like a movie out of the past, with barely enough meat on the bones to justify its existence in our modern film landscape.
With Chris Patrick’s trappy “Bigger Than Ever (We Back)” blasting on the final credits, the biggest flex Scary Movie seems to offer is that the old troupe of actors is, indeed, so fucking back. Anna Faris and Regina Hall are always a delight to watch on screen, even if their material can be grueling, lowbrow work, while Marlon and Shawn always deliver some amiable physical comedy. And it’s evident that all these oldheads in the same frame take visible delight in what hopefully was a well-funded reunion. The new additions of Olivia Rose Keegan, Cameron Scott Roberts, Ruby Snowber, and Savannah Lee Nassif offer plenty of corrosive humor of their own, mostly because Scary Movie gleefully takes aim at the Zillennial mindset, but it remains clear that the juice lie with the OGs, who arguably offer the best moments of the film.
But “arguably” does a lot of heavy lifting here, as a parody film like this is completely dependent on how well the countless jokes land. In lieu of a press screening, this writer saw the film on its first day during a regular screening, where the packed room could barely offer a chuckle at the barrage of jokes thrown on the screen. The film’s best moment probably comes when Shawn Wayans is throwing it down during a sexed-up gay conversion sermon in a local African American church, next to a vulgar riff on The Substance with a Wayans Brothers cameo that genuinely riled up the crowd. Otherwise, it’s somewhat slim pickings in 2026’s Scary Movie, which has mostly to do with the identity crisis of a spoof film that also has to take aim at an Internet culture that has absolutely nothing to do with what we watch on the silver screen anymore.
So, the hypnotized kids of Zach Cregger’s Weapons (2025) are presented here as party-drugged youngsters during Halloween who do the Naruto run while stoned and screaming “6 7” — probably a first for a mainstream film to acknowledge this final boss of Internet memes about nothing. For the same reason, Kai Cenat shows up to livestream with the Wayans and Ghostface. It all reeks of “how to reach these kids,” and it doesn’t help that the “uncs” are also liberally taking the piss with zoomers, whose depictions here run the gamut from annoying trans wokesters to insane nymphos — their take on the gay son versus thot daughter discourse.
As these films are obliged to cram as many jokes as possible into any given scene, a kind of flattening effect is quickly achieved where the relatively more inspired horror parodies are sandwiched between edgy jokes at the expense of the soy and the woke. Even in its most offensive registers, though, Scary Movie is tame compared to what the Internet offers now in terms of outré humor. In general, online spaces have made comedy much weirder, allowing it to rely less on logic and more on vibes. Scary Movie is inadvertently doomed to an old format of recognizable spoofing that even Family Guy couldn’t keep up with anymore in its late years. It’s hard then not to think about the bygone toilet humor joke books that would literally sit next to the loo and which have since filled landfills, replaced wholesale by the phones in our pockets. By spoofing the horror canon once again, Scary Movie mostly resembles the resurrection of a dead medium. Now, that would be a cheeky meta-layer to play with, but to demand such wit of a gleefully self-referential dumb movie is unfortunately asking way too much of its blunt jokesters.
DIRECTOR: Mike Tiddes; CAST: Marlon Wayans, Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Olivia Rose Keegan, Cameron Scott Roberts; DISTRIBUTOR: Paramount Pictures; IN THEATERS: June 5; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 36 min.
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