If recent spooky box office hits are any indication, there’s never been a better time to resurrect the “Scary Movie” franchise from the dead: “Scream” (the slasher movie that kick-started the parody movies) is still a hit, Y2K nostalgia is stronger than ever, and the horror genre is continuing to push itself into the mainstream.
Those calculations are likely to add up to a successful sixth installment of “Scary Movie”; while ticket sales have languished for years post-pandemic, it suddenly seems this year that audiences are itching to laugh and flinch in a crowded theater. For a crowd that goes to watch “Scary Movie” expecting exactly what that brand has offered, the latest edition might provide enough of an excuse for that, even if the already low-grade franchise has taken a dismaying turn for the worse.
Directed by Michael Tiddes, this one reunites the whole gang (Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Shawn and Marlon Wayans) from the first one, and goes back to the basics, centering, as in the original 2000 film, on a Ghostface killer who is running loose. Now the masked killer is targeting the younger relatives of the original characters.
That kind of bland redo is fine enough when we’re talking about the sixth “Scary Movie.” The more cringeworthy core here is how often, in an attempt to give its throwback humor a dull edge, it leans on the kind of “woke” jokes (pronouns, safe spaces, and the like) that you might find on an uncle’s Facebook.
For better or worse, the first couple of “Scary Movie” films were an emblem and shaper of early aughts humor — the proudly unrefined and the inane, the raunchy and the gross-out. In 2026, it goes back to the much of the same while latching onto a comedic persona that was lazy and boring half a generation ago: that in a supposedly increasingly policed zeitgeist, the stupid and the regressive is in turn radically transgressive.
The irony here is how resolutely inoffensive “Scary Movie” actually is. What you think you’re going to get here is pretty much exactly what it is, only further eroded by its loose idea of a narrative arc. Even by parody movie standards, it falls prey to our age of meta humor, cramming in too many movie references where the reference itself is often the punchline. And especially while balancing a too-large cast, it often feels like watching a stream of bottom-of-the-barrel short form content (specifically, the film shares kinship with a strain of late aughts, early 2010s YouTube sketch comedy sketches) just rolling by, one diversion after the other.
A couple of them are surprising or silly enough to charm, if only for a moment. The only welcome and consistent source of delight is whenever Hall gets to pop up onscreen, to squeal or beam in a way that is always funny, and enough to briefly take you out of the bit she’s trapped in.
Scary Movie Rated R for crude sexual content, graphic nudity, strong violence, and drug content and language throughout. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters.
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