Scary Movie review – spoof comedy returns but maybe it should have stayed in the 2000s

The Scary Movie series has always depended on timing. Not necessarily in its gagcraft, which has oscillated between occasional sharp jabs and many beyond-broad blows, but in its position on the release schedule. This was especially true of the first installment, which arrived in theaters just a few months after the 2000 release of Scream 3, capitalizing on the new wave of slashers while holding a spoofy Viking funeral for that just-concluded trilogy. A quarter of a century later, horror endures and there’s no reason to think spoofs can’t endure in parallel along with it as Backrooms and Obsession have ruled the early summer box office.

The sixth Scary Movie, repeating the first movie’s unnumbered title as a simultaneous nod to and act of reboot branding, is releasing too soon after those surprise smashes to incorporate them into its litany of gags (not even some last-minute ADR references, guys?). It’s stuck far further back, doing a composite of the fifth and sixth Scream movies from 2022 and 2023, respectively. On the other hand, with the recent Scream 7 largely abdicating its self-referentiality entirely, Scary Movie arrives as the last horror-comedy holding the torch for in-jokes that its self-serious cousin couldn’t bother with.

Scary Movie also doesn’t have nearly as much behind-the-scenes mismanagement to work around. The studio has simply rehired co-writers and co-stars Marlon and Shawn Wayans after the Weinsteins wrested the series away from them for the third, fourth and fifth entries. They have also brought back Anna Faris and Regina Hall, who held on through the fourth movie, and enlisted various old and new players for cameos, starting right away from an opening sequence that photocopies the city-set opening of Scream 6 on to the super-meta opening of Scream 4. Got all that?

You don’t actually need to. The 2026 Scary Movie is nominally a riff on now-familiar next-gen reboots, with Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan) and Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif), the estranged daughters of previous heroine Cindy Campbell (Faris), stalked by another masked assailant. Cindy reunites with her former sidekick Brenda (Hall), Brenda’s stoner brother Shorty (Marlon Wayans) and the eternally barely closeted Ray (Shawn Wayans) to defend the younger generation against this killer. The series has given up pretending to operate as pastiche and refers to the mystery baddie as Ghostface, just as the actual Scream villains are colloquially and collectively known.

Indeed, despite the recent horror boom, Scary Movie is arguably the Screamiest installment yet. The original Scary Movie paid as much homage to I Know What You Did Last Summer as Scream, and subsequent movies parodied various then recent horror hits and the occasional classic, well outside the slasher lane. Here the fifth Scream in particular provides much of the structure, as well as multiple scenes and lines to tweak. Are the Wayans paying respect to that series’ own resilience, or do they consider themselves on equal footing with it? With this triumphant reclamation of the Scary Movie franchise, it seems clearer than ever that the Wayans’ actual interest in the horror genre is more professional obligation than either deep-dive fandom or wicked satire. They can’t even muster a catty remark about the behind-the-scenes mess of Scream 7, beyond a weak crack about Neve Campbell not being in Scream 6.

Yes, there are some great sight gags – an extended shoutout to the Final Destination series unfolds largely in the background – and funny references, like a joke about “elevated comedy” (though it’s pretty goofy that the highbrow, non-laugh-out-loud auteur that the Wayans take aim at is ... Judd Apatow). And the horror spoofs do go beyond Scream-world, even if they sometimes require non sequiturs to do so. Occasionally, the film-makers run into an immovable object: the Terrifier movies, for example, already go so far that they undermine the Wayans’ strategy of imitating a familiar scene and making it grosser or more ridiculous. All they can do here is essentially quote Terrifier 3 back to itself. But other disparate titles including Sinners, Longlegs, Smile, Ma, Terrifier and Nosferatu all receive attention to better, more amusing effect – a neat tribute to the sheer variety of horror hits from the past bunch of years.

It’s telling, though, that when the movie leaves open an obvious spot for an It Follows riff, Brenda impatiently explains that they won’t be doing that because it’s too obscure. The movie does, however, mount an elaborate and climactic John Wick parody. This still actually counts as one of the more disciplined entries (Scary Movie 2 took time out to goof on … Save the Last Dance?!), but it still doesn’t make much of a case for the Wayans seeming interested in horror, how it works or what’s absurd about it. If the broadest possible audience won’t immediately know It Follows, then to hell with it; it’s the cheap seats or nothing. Every movie the Wayans come across has essentially the same function: an easily recognizable bathroom wall where they can scrawl insults about who’s a slut, who’s secretly gay and who deserves to get abruptly hit by a car.

Some of these hits still work; there’s a Naked Gun-like devotion to the number of times the movie has a character misinterpret a variation on an innocent cry of “You came!” But even in a 96-minute comedy that throws to the end credits around the 85-minute mark, the Wayans, their co-writers and director Michael Tiddes find ways to beat certain scenes into the ground, a tedious Scary Movie tradition. Now 26 years into this series, it’s a little dispiriting that Shawn seems so uninterested in playing anything other than a guy who insists he’s not gay but obviously is, complete with musty gay-panic jokes about sexual assault. Every scene about this seems to last a full 27 minutes on its own.

Marlon fares better reviving his cackling goofball Shorty, who exists outside of the action while somehow remaining central to it. Faris and Hall, meanwhile, can still sell the hell out of a deeply silly joke, and there’s a weird zeal to the way that Keegan, playing Faris’s daughter, looks and acts like a cross between Mikey Madison (the Oscar winner who co-starred in Scream 5) and ex-SNL player Abby Elliott doing her Faris impression. For all the expected (if not all that pointed) mockery of legacy sequels, there is a certain comfort and cheer in seeing this cast back together again in pursuit of dumb laughs, even if the earlier films weren’t especially good either. Yet there are also increasing notes of sourness as Scary Movie goes on – a lack of generosity toward the younger generation that goes past playful ribbing and sometimes feels downright hostile to the very existence of anyone who dares follow them. The Wayans would probably describe this as classic take-no-prisoners comedy, prioritizing belly laughs above satire, horror or any sense of propriety. But honestly? They seem a little scared, too.

• Scary Movie is out in cinemas on 5 June