It should come as no surprise that many horror films are funny.
Whether people are sat in a cinema chuckling or screaming, audiences pay to be viscerally moved either way. Laughter and terror are close cousins, and the best horror filmmakers understand the power of both.
There's a reason why ex-sketch comedians Jordan Peele and Zach Cregger have taken the world by storm in recent years, chilling bones and shaking bellies with situations that blend the macabre and the absurd. There's room for both in the horror landscape, and that's something that Scary Movie creators Keenen Ivory, Shawn and Marlon Wayans have never understood.
In parodying Scream in their 2000 original, they said the same joke as Wes Craven's winking satire, only louder, drawing attention to the silliness of slasher films and their arbitrary rules, but adding more stoner comedy and fart jokes. Their brand was eventually taken away from them when disgraced Hollywood moguls Bob and Harvey Weinstein lowballed them on a pay offer for a third film, and spun the franchise over to another parody pioneer: David Zucker.
With diminishing returns, Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4 spelled a slow death for not just the Wayans Brothers' original idea, but the entire genre of parodies altogether, leaving something as deathly unamusing as Scary Movie V as a lone revenant of a time long past.
Yet on the cyclical, cannibalistic factory floor of Hollywood, once the Scream franchise got a shot in the arm and returned with three new installments, so must follow Scary Movie. Much in need of a hit, the Wayans Brothers return with as much self-performed fanfare as they can muster, with director Michael Tiddes bringing back the 'core four' cast members (Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Marlon and Shawn Wayans) for a sixth film, but deliberately in the style of all legacy sequels and reboots of the past decade: they're there, but only because their fictional kids are.
Heading up the younger generation are Olivia Rose Keegan and Savannah Lee Nassif as Cindy's (Faris) kids, with Gregg Wayans and Sydney Park as Brenda's (Hall), bringing with them a bunch of diverse friends who are there for jokes about wokeness and dumb red herrings. To say there's any plot holding their characters together is charitable; Ghostface(s) are hunting them, but that's about it.
Each young performer is evidently grateful for the exposure and the work, and throwing them into loose, loud pisstakes of recent horror films is essentially what the film consists of after a brash cold open starring none other than the Oscar-nominated (and, crucially, Golden Globe-WINNING) Teyana Taylor.
Since Scary Movie has been away for a solid 13 years and the Wayans away for 25, they have a pretty ripe crop of horror to choose from. Although Scream remains the backbone of the structure, we get Anna Faris as a stand-in for the frizzy-haired Jamie Lee Curtis of the new Halloween trilogy; Regina Hall adopts an Octavia Spencer bob in a rather straight evocation of Ma.
There's a body horror bit where Cheri Oteri's Gail Storm (weather girl-turned-right-wing news pundit) takes a large vial of neon green goop called The Stuff in a Xerox copy of The Substance, a reappearance of Scary Movie 2's little-handed Hanson (Chris Elliott) in a Longlegs riff completely disconnected to the main plot, and a brief interlude where trick-or-treaters on weed gummies run through the suburban street à la Weapons. Marlon Wayans' Shorty meanwhile does a double-header joke of getting stuck in a K-pop-hole following a Get Out-style hypnosis, turning the film into a K-Pop Demon Hunters music video to justify one tiny pun.
If all that sounds positively unfunny, guess what? It really, truly is. There's a head-spinning stretch in the middle where there's not a single moment that links to the next, and has the uncanny feeling of watching a compilation of the worst Saturday Night Live sketches of the past 15 years, already having curdled like milk from a culture that has moved well beyond its punchlines.
It reaches a point where the gags are so dated that it even tries to erase its own choices; a moment deep in the film cites It Follows' chaste car sex scene with an extremely wet punchline, then psyches the audience out five minutes later by saying no one would understand an It Follows gag because it's too obscure.
That lack of cohesion extends to its 'no-holds-barred' sense of humor where the Wayans Brothers and co. punch up, down and sideways at everyone they can spot, leading to an abyssal nihilism that has contempt for almost everything. There's racially-motivated police brutality slapstick, whole sequences of gross-out gags involving the developmentally-challenged, and a ludicrously extended gospel confessional about definitely, certainly, 100% being not gay.
The trans community takes a particularly mean battering, not simply content with teasing 'jokes' about misgendering, but eventually ending up with a non-binary character being stabbed to death by a queue of other minorities tired of being corrected over pronoun use.
Yet there's one glaring omission from the tagline's threatening guarantee of 'Every Line Will Be Crossed'...what about Harvey Weinstein? There's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it Me Too reference, yet for all of the Wayans' misdirected bitterness, there's not a single mention of the man responsible for having their brainchild snatched from them at the height of their careers. For all the monsters invoked, resurrected and slaughtered on-screen in Scary Movie, its worst one is suspiciously absent.
As the comedy wears thinner and thinner as the clock ticks by, the final reveal of just who Ghostface is hits with the most clear meta edge of the entire picture. Without going into a minefield of spoilers, there's the first piece of remarkable honesty from the filmmakers as it reaches a climax, violently and boldly resetting the table with scant little respect for the concept of a legacy reboot (or 'rebootycall' as Shorty stoned-ly states).
Accusing Hollywood of running out of ideas is a joke it both indulges in and casts aside, taking cake for the original creatives and leaving any hangers-on dead in a ditch. A genuinely jaw-dropping declaration of war, at least Scary Movie ends with a proper satirical swipe, even if it's arrogantly unearned.
While Keenen Ivory, Marlon and Shawn might be excitedly showering themselves with champagne and biting their medals for such a return, the bad timing of their revival is quite impressive. Arriving after an unprecedented May box office that has seen low-budget horror that blends legitimate scares and proper laughs be lapped up by audiences, it's been called into question the Scary Movie franchise's need to exist anymore.
It's all very well and good taking potshots at sociopolitical things you're frustrated by, or hacky tropes you're tired of, but when your contemporaries are serving up full meals, who wants a low-calorie edible that leaves you with an icky tummy? The best we can hope for is that the Hollywood machine learns to forget it once again, ushering in a period of peace and quiet, uninterrupted by Shorty's incessant, screeching laughter.
The film opens today (Friday, June 5, 2026), only in movie theaters, via Paramount Pictures. Visit their official site for locations and showtimes.