It’s hard to believe that the 2020s is the decade that we’re getting a resurgence in satirical/parody movies. With The Naked Gun releasing last year and delivering a promising start to this new era of film, there was some hope somewhere for the return of Scary Movie with the Wayans family involved once again after originally departing from the franchise following the second film. All signs pointing at the sixth instalment in the Scary Movie franchise being a film that’s worth watching, bringing the joy and laughter that the original two also brought. Unfortunately, it seems like the Wayans truly didn’t care to make a movie that wasn’t just throwing jokes at a wall to see what sticks.
Scary Movie follows Shorty Meeks (Marlon Wayans), Brenda Meeks (Regina Hall), Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris), Ray Wilkins (Shawn Wayans), and Doofy Gilmore (Dave Sheridan) as they reunite 26 years later to face off against Ghostface (Dave Sheridan) once again.
It’s hilarious because Scary Movie seemingly chooses to ignore the plot points of both Scary Movie 3 and 4 (thankfully) for the majority of the movie, making continuous jokes poking fun at the film’s existence, but at the same time, it also can’t help but use it as a major plot point for the movie. It’s one of the main examples that just highlights how it feels like the Wayans didn’t really know what they wanted to do with this movie except to make a return to please original hardcore fans, but unfortunately, that’s just not enough.
This sixth and latest instalment manages to get a few things right. The opening is genuinely fantastic, parodying the opening of Scream 6 with Teyana Taylor playing herself, and it’s impressive how relevant the humour is with jabs being thrown at this year’s Oscars. It’s one of the few jokes made surrounding the Academy Awards that actually works in this film. From that point onwards, the first half of this movie is an absolute pain and struggle to get through as we’re introduced to a set of new characters.
While this is a parody movie, the new cast members feel like they’re acting in a movie that was made for Tubi. It’s largely over-the-top acting and shouting that comes from these new characters, and it’s obvious that they believe that’s all you need to deliver some laughs in a cinema, but it just comes off as cheap, lazy, and pathetic. Once the movie reaches arguably its best moment with the Kpop Demon Hunters parody that parodies “Golden” in a fully animated sequence, the movie starts to pick itself up a bit, but it never holds strong because ultimately, Scary Movie just doesn’t have a cohesive narrative structure.
The original two movies worked because they genuinely felt like films which had a three-act structure with sharp comedic timing. Scary Movie is the complete opposite of that and falls into a category that I love to call the TikTokification of cinema. Both The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and The Mandalorian and Grogu fall into this category of movies that don’t really have any real structure and just have a bunch of random scenes coming at you one after the other with no connective tissue, creating the effect of doomscrolling through your TikTok feed.
Scary Movie is the worst offender of this recent trend in movies because it almost feels like you’re watching a live-action Family Guy film. A lot of the parodies that are made in this movie don’t flow naturally with the story and instead cut away from the main plot of the film (if you can even say there’s one) to have a short little comedic segment that’s usually unfunny before returning back. It almost feels like watching a Saturday Night Live episode on the big screen, which doesn’t help when you cut away to a Michael parody of Kenan Thompson playing Jermaine.
The true test of a comedy is if it’ll be able to make you laugh on a second watch. Admittedly, there were a few jokes in Scary Movie that got a few chuckles out of me, but during a second watch of this movie, I felt like Homelander in that one scene of The Boys, just staring at the cinema screen with no emotion on my face.
The tagline of the film is “Every Line will be Crossed,” and yet for the most part, it only feels like 80% of this movie targets Black people and culture, 10% targets homosexual people and the remaining 10% is for everything else. It’s distasteful, humourless and feels like the Wayans are appealing to a certain crowd because there’s noticeably a certain demographic that’s laughing at these Black jokes that involve the use of the N-word and slavery and lynching harder than the actual Black people.
Scary Movie is the return of the Wayans family to the franchise, and while their return deserves some celebration with them back in control, it’s unfortunate to say that it’s not the movie a lot of people hoped to have seen on the big screen. They have so many horror films and pop culture references to take from that instead of choosing from a select few to create an originally hilarious story, they just force everything into one movie that makes it feel overstuffed, convoluted and, sadly, a waste of time.
With how quickly they were able to produce this movie with its references, they would’ve been able to make a sequel in time so that the jokes wouldn’t have been dated, but instead, they just rushed and used up the majority of their material.
There are some fantastic jokes in this film that genuinely crack me up with cameos that were actually surprising. The film has a better Ghostface reveal than the likes of Scream 7, and spending time with the original cast was always a blast despite it feeling like Brenda didn’t get enough screentime. While I can’t stand Scary Movie and hope that we don’t get to see another one, it’s a film that fans are probably going to have a great time with, which is inevitable.
