A Spoof Filled With Blunt Humor

If you want to get your money’s worth from the new Scary Movie, I would recommend seeing it as high as Marlon Wayans’ giggly stoner Shorty Meeks. That seems to be the audience this very shaggy assemblage of blunt jokes and horror-movie references was made for (and possibly by). In a lucid state of mind, it doesn’t add up to much.

A new Scary Movie, the first in 13 years, was probably inevitable from the moment Scream got its big legacyquel in 2022. The Wayans brothers’ mined the original Scream and a bunch of other late ’90s horror titles for the first Scary Movie in 2000; the Scream revival gives them license to make fun of the same tired tropes all over again, and to take aim at a potpourri of modern hits like Weapons, The Substance, and the David Gordon Green Halloweens.

As was often the case in the five previous entries in this parody franchise, the filmmakers’ comic strategy resembles Shaquille O’Neal’s approach at the foul line: Take ten shots and hope to hit three of them. Unlike some of their targets in prior movies, most of the objects of mockery are pretty good films — many far better uses of a viewer’s time than this new Scary Movie. 

Still, give director Michael Tiddes and the returning Wayans this much credit: They managed to bring back a ton of original Scary Movie cast members for their legacyquel — far more, in fact, than Scream did in its own comeback a few years ago. (In fairness, the characters in Scream generally stay dead, while Scary Movie rarely pays attention to such trivial matters as continuity, logic, character stakes, or storytelling fundamentals.)

Tiddes and company make zero attempt to square the events of the new sequel with the five that preceded it; everyone simply reappears when the Ghostface killer returns and begins stalking survivors of his previous rampages, along with their teenaged offspring like Savannah Lee Nassif’s Tuesday, so named because she’s playing the analog for Jenna Ortega in Scream, and Ortega is also the star of Netflix’s Wednesday. Ha.

Mercifully, the returning stars include Scary Movie’s two most reliable performers, Anna Faris and Regina Hall. The gags supplied by the Wayans — Marlon, Shawn, Craig, and Keenen Ivory Wayans wrote the screenplay with Rick Alvarez — lean heavily on sprinkling recreations of other movies with cheap shots at people of various differences. (Dave Sheridan’s Doofy, the intellectually disabled stand-in for David Arquette’s Dewey from the original Scary Movie, makes an unwelcome return here.) I guess some of this stuff is meant to shock audiences with its deliberate poor taste, although given the things people say to and about one another online, on podcasts, on standup specials available on major streaming platforms, this Scary Movie’s not nearly as outrageous as it thinks.

But the Wayans can always rely on Hall and Faris to sell the shaky material. Faris in particular might be the best performer in the history of spoof comedy not named Leslie Nielsen. Like the Airplane! and Naked Gun star, Faris possesses a superhuman ability to play even the dumbest schtick with total earnestness. In one scene, she smacks someone with a bedpan (a full bedpan, naturally) and the disgusted gurgle she uncorks as she drops it to the floor is worth 50 jokes about Longlegs or Kpop Demon Hunters.

I could try to summarize the plot, but why dedicate more time to trying to explain what happens than the filmmakers did? This sequel follows the basic contours of 2022’s Scream, with frequent digressions into other parodies. At one point, Tuesday, her sister Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan), and Sara’s boyfriend Jack (Cameron Scott Roberts) knock on Hall’s front door, looking and sounding like the vampires from Ryan Coogler’s Sinners for no apparent reason. Hall, Marlon Wayans, and Shawn Wayans crack a few jokes at their expense and then the white characters leave. When they round the corner after a cut, Tuesday, Sara, and Jack are all back in their regular costumes, speaking in their regular voices, as if the whole thing never happened.

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It‘s that sort of movie, like the raw notes from a writers’ room brainstorming session transcribed and filmed with no concern for any sort of connective tissue. A smattering of jokes work — I liked the deadpan homage to the Final Destination series, and the broadside aimed at the recent Michael Jackson biopic — and some are absolutely brutal. (If you’re going to make fun of bad Twitch streams, you’d better be funnier than an actual Twitch stream, a bar Scary Movie fails to clear.) I laughed occasionally, mostly at Faris and Hall (who should really make a movie together that’s not a Scary Movie) but not enough to recommend the film. But, again, I was almost certainly more sober than its creators intended when I saw it.

RATING: 4/10