By Ethan Lee
The Scary Movie franchise has never been a hot spot for sophistication or talent. Now spanning six films, the franchise has never taken itself too seriously with its comedy. Stupid one-liners, childish humour and wacky references are ripe throughout.
Now I’m not going to sit here and tell you that those things aren’t funny. Because when done tastefully, I actually think that kind of humour is hilarious.
Take the original Scary Movie, released in the year 2000, for example.
The comedy in that was great. The relevant (at the time) references, mixed with the fresh new take on parody movies, made for a movie that was so in your face about its level of satire that it created a perfect comedy version of shock value.
However, that’s also what I consider to be one of the franchise’s biggest problems. It has to rely on new shock value humour in each film, along with recent trendy references, to be funny.
This is something which, after the first film, slowly proved to be an increasing challenge for the franchise.
I mean, after all, you can only really be caught off guard once or twice by shock value humour before it gets stale.
Now they’ve got kids
Therefore, before I had even stepped into the cinema to watch the sixth instalment, I already had my suspicions that it wasn’t going to be great.
That being said, I put my preconceived ideas to the side and went in with an open mind. After all, it has been thirteen years since the release of the fifth one, so perhaps they’ve been cooking up something good.
The film opens with a scene of the film’s antagonist, Ghostface.
He manages to ambush actress Teyana Taylor – who has managed to turn quite a few heads in the last year for her performance in One Battle After Another.
Teyana then does a bird call, which summons a group of goons with bats to ambush Ghostface instead. Just before they get to beating him up, however, one thug shows up late on a kid’s scooter and interrupts, apologising to everyone for not showing up on time.
It got a chuckle out of me, and for a split second, I thought: perhaps I pre-judged this film too harshly!
That thought didn’t last long.
The movie reintroduces the original characters from the first film; however, now they all have kids, and obviously, Ghostface is back for more killing. This is all established quite quickly in the film.
Then for the rest of the hour and a half, it consisted of poorly placed references, lame punchlines and overused tropes.
-Video of 2026 Scary Movie poster at Vue Cinema at Cheshire Oaks
Cliché jokes
It sucks because the cliché tropes are only cliché because the franchise themselves have run them into the ground.
For example, there aren’t many films that I can say I’ve seen where horror characters pause their evil doings to get high out of their mind. However, in Scary Movie, this happens once every ten minutes.
It’s the same with the race jokes. I’m not going to tell you what you can or can not find funny, but at least to me, the jokes about race in this film were just plainly unfunny and generic. Not overly offensive or anything, just generic.
Once again, it doesn’t differentiate with the sex jokes. Absolutely nothing new or original.
These jokes are so overused that any comedy that they once had has dried completely out.
Poor and out-of-place references
This was probably the biggest reason why this film sucked – the absolutely abysmal references.
Now, I don’t think anyone is under the illusion that the Scary Movie franchise is known for its sensical or great plots. But this film seemed like the plot wasn’t something they were even slightly factoring in while writing.
Instead, the entire film felt more like a compilation of separate parody skits that loosely tied together.
For example, there’s a scene parodying the new Michael film (a biopic on Michael Jackson released earlier this year), and it literally has no connection to the film. Basically, instead of it being Michael, it was his brother Jermaine Jackson doing a bad attempt at copying Michael’s dances.
That’s actually the full thing.
Another scene had Shorty – played by Marlon Wayans – sink into his chair after being hypnotised by Ghostface during the once again completely random and stupidly placed parody of Jordan Peele’s Get Out.
Shorty shouts, “I’m in a K-hole, son”, while falling. Then Ghostface tells him, “No, you’re in a K-pop hole, son”. Then Shorty becomes animated and has sex with the K-pop demon hunters from the 2025 kids movie K-pop demon hunters.
Yeah, I really don’t know who they were aiming to appeal to with that joke, but, without a doubt, it didn’t hit.
Some of the references didn’t even attempt a joke, such as their parody of Terrifier. In Terrifier 3, there is a scene where Art the Clown dresses up as Santa at a mall and gives kids presents, which are secretly bombs. In Scary Movie’s parody, they just changed the bombs to severed body parts.
Yep, everything else is the same.
That’s the joke.
It definitely gave off the impression that the entire film was centred around how many references they could shove into an hour and a half of film instead of actually having well-placed and funny references sprinkled throughout the main plot.
Some of them weren’t even slightly in date.
There was actually a Worldstar reference in the movie.
Has anyone even heard of Worldstar since the mid-2010s!? (It was a video blog which made street fights viral. Yup. Hilarious).
Verdict
The movie finishes off with a reveal that there had been two groups of Ghostfaces the entire time.
One is made up of the new younger generation, and the other is made up of the original older generation. The original group then takes over the younger group and sets them all on fire along with the house they were all in.
A stupid ending to a stupid film.
Movie Critique and Letterboxd reviewer Josh Walmsley from Greater Manchester said that the film “tries too hard to recapture what made the first ones funny.”
“Nothing new or interesting”, he continued.
With a low score of 24% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s clear many have a similar view as Walmsley.
That being said, as of writing, the audience score is a somewhat different story. Currently sitting at 68%.
To give credit, I’ll admit there were the odd moment or two that I gave an amused huff.
For example, during the scene where Shorty and Ghostface are on a live stream with popular live streamer Kai Cenat (a scene I first thought might be one of the worst of the entire movie), it did catch me off guard when Ghostface randomly decapitated Kai with his knife while playing a game and managed to save the entire scene from irrelevance.
Apart from the not-so-frequent couple of moments of actual comedy, the new Scary Movie failed at pretty much everything else.
I know I’ve seen plenty of people online debate that the film is actually good, with the concept that because it’s poking fun at itself, it’s actually been created to be bad on purpose to be funny.
And to that I say: it doesn’t change a thing. Doesn’t matter if it’s bad by accident or on purpose.
A bad film is a bad film.
-Journalist Ethan Lee and movie fan Karmen Domotor discussing the latest addition to the Scary Movie franchise
