Scary Movie review
The Wayans family returns with a love of what they created…and a shocking lack of comedy.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Scary Movie
Directed by Michael Tiddes
Written by Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Craig Wayans and Rick Alvarez
Starring Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Olivia Rose Keegan, Dave Sheridan and Savannah Lee Nassif
Scary Movie Review
Although I’m not a big fan of parody movies…which I blame completely on the quality of the genre…I was excited to see the Wayans family get creative control of the Scary Movie franchise back. If it’s controversial to say that the original Scary Movie is the best of the series…I don’t know what to say to that. The toothless David Zucker films may have their fans…but come on. While it’s no masterpiece…Scary Movie at least had some bite to it. The advertising for 2026’s Scary Movie hammered on the idea that the bite would return to the franchise kicked off 25 years ago. The advertising lied.
It’s worth considering for a moment how weird it is for a parody movie to get a legacy sequel to begin with. Scary Movie reunites as many cast members from the original story as it can get its hands on. The franchise has never treated death as permanent…but these characters are directly continued from that original film 25 years later. That doesn’t mean that the rest of the series is ignored. On the contrary, the way Scary Movie makes its story about itself, and its sordid history is one of the few redeeming things about it. Unfortunately, a somewhat inspired idea surrounding Chris Elliott’s small handed creep from Scary Movie 2 as this film’s stand-in for Longlegs is reduced to a predictable one note joke. At least there was a joke in there. A surprising amount of Scary Movie forgets that part.
So, what is 2026’s Scary Movie if it isn’t funny or meanspirited? Pretty much nothing, to be honest. It follows the beats of Scream (2022) so closely without much comment on it…or the genre…or legacy sequels…or anything, really…that you’d just be better off watching that movie instead. This feels more like Gus Van Sant’s ill advised Psycho remake than a parody of the movie anyway. Sure, Scary Movie takes time to throw in references to Terrifier 3, Sinners, The Substance, Weapons and a somewhat fun sequence on KPop Demon Hunters…but they come off more like a “remember this” moment than an observation.
That said…Scary Movie does do one thing better than the franchise its obsession returns to has done in quite some time. The climactic killer reveal here blows away anything done in the trio of 2020s Scream movies. It’s so much better than the reveal in Scream 7 it’s honestly kind of stunning. It allows Scary Movie to end on a homerun after topping out on infield groundouts for the majority of its runtime. The problem is that homerun only made the score roughly 25-1 by the time they hit it.
If you’re a huge fan of the original Scary Movie you might take some delight in seeing almost its entire cast returning to that world. Some only get a scene or two…but it is somewhat wild to be doing this for a parody movie. Like all legacy sequels…Scary Movie brings in a new cast of characters to represent the next generation. It’s mostly a miss here as well. The actors are willing…but they don’t have the material they need to make something work. The Jenna Ortega stand-in character is named Tuesday and dresses like Wednesday Addams? Ok. There’s no second idea there. She’s just playing Tara from Scream 5 and 6 with braided pigtails. Aside from one someone humorous copyright infringement reference…there’s no other reason for this.
There’s not much of a reason for any of this, to be honest. The Wayans family was surely excited to get the creative reigns of the franchise back. And they clearly care about these characters. They just seem to have forgotten that parody movies are supposed to try to be funny. They treat the original Scary Movie here the same way that Scream (2022) treats its iconic original. There’s something funny in that idea…but it doesn’t translate to the screen. We’re left with a legacy sequel that has a surprising amount to say about itself…but nothing much to say about the genre it’s aiming to parody. A running joke about how obvious the love interest is as a suspect mostly works. But it’s the only memorable bit of actual parody here. That’s a problem when you’re supposed to be a comedy.
Scare Value
If Scream (2022) was a love letter to Scream, Scary Movie is a love letter to Scary Movie. That’s the part of this near debacle that genuinely works. The problem is that it isn’t funny. Sending a love letter to yourself when it’s the same creative team returning to their franchise where they lampoon other people’s franchises is a weird choice to begin with. But it’s a choice that could have been fun if Scary Movie had been at all funny. It almost never is. The excellent killer reveal at the end of the story highlights what was, otherwise, a disappointing return for the family that started the franchise in the first place.
1.5/5
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