When a genre is ‘alive and kicking’ nobody bothers to look into its roots. But judging by the sheer volume and declining quality of spoof comedies, it’s safe to say this kind of movie is mostly living of its past. You ask any cinephile, and they’ll quickly point to Airplane!, the original Naked Gun, and maybe even Hot Shots! as staples and high marks theatrical spoof comedy. Some may even mention the original Scary Movie, released 26 years ago. All will struggle to come up with any relevant title that has hit the screens since.
That’s mostly because there were no easy targets released since. Movies overall, and horror in particular, have started to take themselves too seriously, decimating the demand to laugh about what filmmakers have created. That hasn’t deterred the return of the Wayans clan, namely Keenen, Shawn, and Marlon, from revisiting the franchise they helped to set up. 20 years after Little Man, the Jackson family equivalent of comedy returns to deliver something nobody asked for but that somehow, deep down, everybody needed.
To those familiar with Scream-centric spoof series, you already know what to expect: a collage of sketches displayed in an order that somewhat resembles a plot. An equal opportunity offender that tries to bring structure to low-brow comedy. And yet another nostalgia trap that clearly announces itself as such. For better or worse, the sixth entry in the two-decade-spanning franchise feels like it was released around 2002: the juvenile humor is very much on par with what the brand has always delivered. Whether that reads as a dated time capsule or a breath of fresh air in these uptight, censored times depends entirely on what you walked in expecting.
Ditching most of the quick wins/low-hanging fruits we find in modern “elevated horror”, the sixth Scary Movie sets its sights on a meta-commentary on meta-horror – the kind of elaborate scheme that would give Christopher Nolan a headache. Still, the premise is quite simple: When the likes of Halloween and Scream keep finding reasons and angles to create another chapter, and iconic franchises that have running on fumes for decades (e.g. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) behave like Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees by shocking everyone with the fact that they are still alive, Scary Movie too finds reasons to continue…or at least reap a healthy chunk of that nostalgia dollar.
In fact, the movie does follow the exact template as main titles it mocks: The “villain” from the original returns, reincarnated by a follower with its own motives, forcing the original cast members, Cindy, Brenda, Ray, Shorty, among others, to navigate a minefield of clichés lifted from mainstream horror titles released in the last 10 years. Logic and storyline continuity are equally discarded with no explanation given.
As for the comedy itself, some of it lands quite well, and some of it misses. Gen-Z are the main target of a generation gap-infused collection of jokes, and the movie’s tagline promising “Every line will be crossed” largely underdelivers, something one could expect from a release from a major studio. None of it hurts the movie, mind you. The returning characters deliver: Officer Doofy, Ray, and Shorty all make appearances that reward franchise loyalty, and Greg Philipps’ callback will produce the loudest laugh of the film for anyone who remembers the original. The movie is at its sharpest when targeting elevated horror’s self-seriousness, and at its weakest when it reaches for more obscure references. The Jermaine parody is the film’s most misjudged sequence, a target so niche it generates confusion rather than laughter, and the Hanson lookalike Shorthand arrives with obvious comic potential before being abandoned almost immediately. But if franchise familiarity didn’t prepare you for this, the trailers that promoted the movie for months ensured you were well informed. If you chose to buy a ticket and were still disappointed, then the blame falls on you.
Still, like watching Scream (2022) or Halloween (2018), you’ll forgive all of it because the movie gives you the chance to see the gang back together again and up to their usual schtick. But In a landscape saturated with what can only be described as TaaM (Trauma as a Movie – patent pending), Scary Movie (2026) arrives as an unlikely corrective.
Modern horror has spent the better part of a decade convincing itself that the scariest thing it can do is make you confront your unresolved childhood wounds. The Wayans have spent the better part of a decade watching that happen and taking notes. The result is the most politically incorrect, proudly immature, and gleefully irreverent response to prestige horror that mainstream comedy has produced in years. It doesn’t match ZAZ’s (Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker) finest output and also doesn’t live up to the original in terms of impact.
But in a time when comedy has largely surrendered to self-censorship and horror has surrendered to self-importance, a movie that laughs at both without apologising for either feels like a minor act of cultural resistance. It will not be remembered as a classic. Most likely, it will not be remembered at all. But then again, neither will the majority of titles it spoofs. This is a movie that just needs to exist, loudly and without shame, for the ninety minutes it occupies.
Scary Movie is in limited theaters.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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