By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans and Anna Faris
Directed by Michael Tiddes
Written by Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Craig Wayans and Rick Alvarez
Paramount
In a flashback scene fairly early in SCARY MOVIE 2026, a faux Art the Clown, costumed as a shopping-mall Santa, gives a bunch of little kids wrapped gifts that turn out to be body parts—something that Art might actually do in a TERRIFIER movie (including the organ—or pair of them—that also made an appearance in the first SCARY MOVIE). Earlier than that, there’s a FINAL DESTINATION takeoff whose punchline is pretty much identical to the one in the last film in that franchise. These are just two examples of how SCARY MOVIE parodies a bunch of recent horror hits without really parodying them.
Potential hot take: I found the David Zucker-directed third and fourth SCARY MOVIEs to be a lot better and funnier than the Wayans Brothers’ first and second (let’s all just pretend that SCARY MOVIE V never happened). If you disagree, you might want to stop reading here, since my reaction to the Wayanses’ return to the franchise is pretty much the same as it was to their originals. There are a few inspired, even hilarious bits here and there, but too much of the film is content to ride on humor-of-recognition and crudity rather than cleverness.
For all the promotion claiming that this SCARY MOVIE pushes boundaries and crosses lines, there’s really nothing here that transgresses any further than what we saw in the original 26 years ago. And applying torrents of profanity and sexual references, genitalia shots of both genders and plenty of drug humor to familiar fear figures still isn’t the same thing as creatively spoofing them or playing off our memories of them. Some of the best gags here are the little details: The department-store name on a shopping bag in that Art the Clown setpiece, a bit involving a sign on a hospital wall, the stuff that comes out of a body in the SUBSTANCE parody. The latter also builds to a funny reveal, though here and elsewhere, the Wayanses and director Michael Tiddes follow it by having someone explain the joke that just happened, which doesn’t make it any funnier.
The plot is kind of beside the point, but for the record, it frames the movie with a parody of 2020’s SCREAM (beginning with the title, which indicates this is a requel by not adding a number or subtitle to the original moniker). Teenager Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif), who’s two Jenna Ortega parodies in one, is brutally attacked by Ghostface and hospitalized, eliciting the concern of sister Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan), her immediately suspect/possible red herring boyfriend Jack (Cameron Scott Roberts) and their friends. It also inspires the return of Tuesday and Sara’s mom, original heroine Cindy (Anna Faris), who’s been in self-imposed Laurie-Strode-in-the-HALLOWEEN-requel-style exile, Officer Doofy (Dave Sheridan) and newswoman Gail Hailstorm (Cheri Oteri). Marlon Wayans’ Shorty, Shawn Wayans’ Ray and Regina Hall’s Brenda are also on hand, there are more murders and…well, that’s all you really need to know.
Another issue with SCARY MOVIE is that a lot of the people in it act like they know they’re in a comedy. One of the secrets of the success of past spoofs like AIRPLANE! and I’M GONNA GIT YOU SUCKA (still the Wayanses’ best movie) is that no one on screen acts like they’re in on the joke, and their seriousness in the face of the silliness adds to the humor. Too many in the SCARY MOVIE ensemble overdo it in an attempt to wring laughs out of the material, which might not have been as problematic if that material was stronger.
Instead, there’s a succession of variations on familiar faces and scenes that aren’t given amusing enough twists; a LONGLEGS parody with Chris Elliott as “Shorthands” (which continues during the end credits) is particularly uninspired. There’s a subway scene à la SCREAM VI in a car populated by favorite villains, which is a promising setup, but then M3GAN appears, does a dance like she did in her first outing and…that’s pretty much it. Instead, there’s an exchange involving pronouns that proves, like numerous other moments here, that having the characters bring up social/racial issues isn’t the same thing as satirizing them. A sendup of MICHAEL gets a few chuckles when it should have been laugh-out-loud, though it does demonstrate that this team was working on the movie right up to the last minute. (Which makes it odd that they left in an Oscars joke rendered null and void by this year’s awards.)
SCARY MOVIE is one of those comedies that contains just enough jokes that land to make you wish that more of them—a lot more of them—worked. It does admittedly rally for a climax that makes some good fun of the convoluted motivations behind the killing sprees in some of the SCREAM films, and even makes a lot more sense than the reveal in SCREAM 7. Too often, though, the Wayanses and Tiddes set up a funny idea without sufficiently paying it off, like a scene involving nitrous oxide during which Ghostface says, “I’ve gotta get better writers”—and even though there were five of them on this script, you can’t help agreeing with him.
