The summer of 2026 has been dominated by upstart horror films Hokum, Obsession, and Backrooms, so the return of Scary Movie—the genre-spoofing series that began in 2000 under the stewardship of creators/stars Marlon and Shawn Wayans—couldn’t be more opportune.
A reunion that gets the original gang back together following three Wayans-free installments, director Michael Tiddes’ raunchy comedy (June 5) once again takes aim at the slashers, monsters, and malevolent fiends of cinema past and present, all as it simultaneously jabs a variety of modern pop-culture figures and events and, also, its own history.
It’s a familiar stew that’s as scattershot as ever, engineered to appeal to teens who can’t get enough jokes about sex, race, and movies they’ve already seen.
The original Scary Movie mocked self-conscious 1990s meta-nightmares, making its wink-wink humor a natural spoofy fit. Twenty-six years later, Tiddes’ film—written by Marlon, Shawn, Keenen Ivory, and Craig Wayans, along with Rick Alvarez—has a less clear mark. And its lack of a basic narrative and a humorous focus is an immediate sign that its formula may have run its course.
There’s nothing particularly amusing about its cameo-centric opener except for the fact that it features a movie star, and its subsequent concentration on Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan) and her boyfriend Jack (Cameron Scott Roberts) at a Final Destination Theme Park where “everybody dies” furthers the material’s shaky start.
Sara has a sister named Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif) who’s a wan Wednesday Addams riff. When she’s attacked by a killer Ghostface, Sara reluctantly seeks help from her mother, Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris), who now lives in a booby-trapped house à la Jamie Lee Curtis in the Halloween reboots. Sara hates her mom for being a crazy recluse who abandoned her for six years, and Faris, her hair wild and demeanor spacey, is a welcome sight.
So too is Regina Hall, whose Brenda Meeks is now a suburban mother of twins, one a football star dating his high school’s most promiscuous girl, and the other a social justice warrior scold whose main role is to make cracks about pronouns and “toxic masculinity” in a dreary subway-set scene.
Scary Movie’s stabs at timeliness boil down to mocking progressive buzzwords and introducing a trans male character who repeatedly attempts to prove his masculinity. It’s rather weak stuff, and hardly as boundary-pushing as the Wayanses think it is. As usual, though, they shift attention away from their comedic misses by delivering juvenile gags at a blistering pace.
Many of those, unsurprisingly, involve simply referencing, in exaggerated fashion, recent horror hits, such that there’s a bit in which M3GAN dances provocatively and Chris Elliott appears—for a couple of pointless minutes—as a Longlegs-y weirdo. More often than not, it’s humor designed to congratulate viewers for properly recognizing its cine-citations, and only sporadically does it truly hit the bullseye.
Because it’s been crafted for this specific cultural moment, Scary Movie shouts out to, and parodies, a collection of current touchstones, some of which (like a goofy send-up of Michael) are better than others (namely, a random aside about the Drake-Kendrick Lamar feud). More diligently, it turns its gaze inward, rehashing what worked in the first two franchise entries. Thus, Shorty (Marlon Wayans) is a stoner who still has a fondness for screaming “Wazzup!” and getting high with Ghostface (whose mask goes clownish when he’s blazed), and Ray (Shawn Wayans) is a caricature of a closeted man who can’t stop saying and doing homoerotic things while simultaneously denying that he’s gay.
On a handful of occasions, Scary Movie mines internet memes for laughs in an effort to prove that it has its finger on the pulse. At other times, though, it’s downright clumsy, lowlighted by someone bringing up Demi Moore as proof that actors don’t win Oscars for horror—a The Substance-related comment that ignores Amy Madigan’s Best Supporting Actress win for Weapons, a thriller that, shortly thereafter, is overtly satirized.
There’s little reason to expect consistency from an affair that’s predicated on rat-a-tat-tat nonsense untethered to reality and devoted to breaking the fourth wall and ridiculing itself. Nonetheless, Tiddes’ film strains to generate the hilarious momentum necessary to overshadow its shoddy construction.
Faris and Hall are so comfortable in these environs that it’s a shame Scary Movie doesn’t better utilize them, frequently confining the duo to the periphery via a story that’s eventually about the legacyquel tension between old and new series stars.
Alas, that potentially funny avenue gets lost in the shuffle until the sturdy finale, whose pile-up of bombshells results in the very lunacy-on-top-of-lunacy that the preceding action needed. To be fair, you won’t see another movie this (or any) year with a more elaborate and prolonged sequence that reimagines John Wick with sex toys. Yet in the final tally, the blunt-force nature of its silliness elicits more groans and chuckles.
Whereas Marlon never quite recaptures Shorty’s stridently screechy energy, Shawn slips easily into Ray’s shoes, and the longer it goes on, the more Faris finds her groove as the absurd Cindy. Why she and Hall don’t share more screen time is, in light of their prior collaborations, a baffling mystery, and it amplifies the impression that this venture was put together on the fly.
Even so, their gleefulness is mildly infectious, which is more than can be said about Scary Movie as a whole. An indefatigable dedication to stupidity and crassness is a virtue in such a Zucker Brothers-inspired spoof-a-thon, but without cleverness to match its immaturity, it mostly falls flat.
Scary Movie’s failure to live up to its ancestors is all the more disappointing given that it’s arriving in a theatrical landscape teeming with the very types of features it loves to parody. Still, with young audiences starved for big-screen comedies, its hodgepodge of underlined references and dirty sex jokes will likely prove a winning combination.
And if it’s successful enough to earn the Wayanses another sequel, well, at least they’ll get the chance to tackle the contemporary frightfests presently ruling the hearts and minds of their target demographic.
