Scary Movie, 2026.
Directed by Michael Tiddes.
Starring Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Damon Wayans Jr., Gregg Wayans, Kim Wayans, Benny Zielke, Cameron Scott Roberts, Cheri Oteri, Chris Elliott, Dave Sheridan, Heidi Gardner, Lochlyn Munro, Olivia Rose Keegan, Ruby Snowber, Savannah Lee Nassif, Sydney Park, Jon Abrahams, Felissa Rose, Michael Leavy, Kai Cenat, Paige Mobley, Fedor Steer, Chip Carriere, Hasani Vibez Comer, Anthony Anderson, Kenan Thompson, Teyana Taylor, Shaquille O’Neal, Carmen Electra, and Nedim Jahić.
SYNOPSIS:
Two friends find themselves caught up in mayhem involving killers, monsters and supernatural creatures once again.
With politically incorrect button-pushing promised to make a return in a landscape of safer comedies, yes, there is much to say about whether or not that is warranted. This Scary Movie legacy sequel, however, not only fails to live up to that promise, rendering that conversation moot, but simply isn’t funny. The chief problem is that director Michael Tiddes (allegedly working from a screenplay by the Wayans brothers and Rick Alvarez) doesn’t even have a movie here, but rather a string of often-disconnected scenes that feel half-baked in their attempts at horror and pop-culture parody. There is technically a story here, mostly riffing on and mashing together the latest Scream and Halloween movies, but everything is so disastrously and haphazardly edited that it is more akin to cycling between half-formed ideas for skits that sometimes either make no sense within that narrative or just feel… there.
One of the more egregious examples of this is a random cut to Chris Elliott’s returning housekeeper character Harrison, now resembling Nicolas Cage’s Longlegs, at a bus stop where a key scene took place. The joke the filmmakers have here isn’t funny to begin with, but the scene has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. He is never seen again; it’s a dangled plot thread. One can say the same about the ribbing on The Substance, a couple of scenes later. This leads to a bigger problem in that no one on the creative team seems to know how or why they want to parody these movies, other than that they are popular, which results in attempts to cram in so much that there’s actually nothing here. Sure, the bones of a joke are there, but the scenes never materialize into anything worthwhile. To be blunt, it’s all uninspired and lazy.
This is said as someone with a whiff of nostalgia for the series (the first three, anyway, although there is no denying they progressively got worse after the original), which are also loaded with targets for jokes, but at the very least feel like movies with plots. No one is asking for highbrow humor here, but these filmmakers can’t even clear the bar of something that functions as a movie. Why get worked up about jokes taking aim at LGBTQ characters and politics (which, aside from one sequence, aren’t necessarily mean-spirited enough anyway to do so) when what’s here is so tired and flat that there is quite literally no aspect of this worth getting worked up about.
I didn’t care that the Wayans brothers wanted to return, cross lines, and push boundaries; I wanted to laugh. Unfortunately, outside of an amusing K-Pop Demon Hunters (which mostly works because it involves animation and changing around some lyrics) gag, a somewhat funny opening that makes great cameo usage from the always terrific Teyana Taylor, and one or two offhand remarks that might have elicited a reaction, there is very little of that here.
As for what qualifies as a story here, it involves a reunion between the original core four – Anna Faris’ clueless but battle-tested John Wick-ified Cindy Crawford, Regina Hall’s sassy Brenda Meeks, Marlon Wayans’ streaming stoner Shorty, and Shawn Wayans’ religiously converted and pretending to not be gay Ray – as they attempt to help a new generation (which includes some of their children) survive the terror of a Ghostface killer.
There is also no better way to demonstrate the laziness of this movie by pointing out that not only are one of Cindy’s daughters named Tuesday, but that the character (played by Savannah Lee Nassif) appears to only have key role so that others can say her name over and over again, as if the audience is supposed to laugh every single time as if this is a brilliant joke, even though it doesn’t register as funny the first time.
It’s also worth pointing out that Ray announces he is now free of “sin” in a church modeled after the one seen in Sinners, which further shows that these filmmakers don’t know what to do beyond lifting locales and scenery. Everything comes across as a setup for a joke that never comes, or a punchline that’s not funny and lacks a setup. They are desperate for something to be recognized, and that it will be enough to generate a laugh.
That’s where things are with Scary Movie, and as someone who was enthused and even optimistic about its return, if this is what we are going to get, it should stay dead. The only thing that is offensive here is how unfunny, uninspired, and embarrassingly slapped together it is.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder
