I present to you a mortifying scenario: Scary Movie is the funniest and most creatively interesting film of the year. And it’s strange to say that when there are at least five thuddingly weak, barrel-scraping jokes about a closeted gay man assaulting teenage boys, and a character – quite literally called DEI – who is stabbed to death by a crowd of strangers after insisting they respect their gender pronouns. But the return of the long-dormant horror spoof franchise has far more comic hits in it than misses, and is so enjoyably, gleefully stupid at all times that I can’t help but adore the thing.
So why, then, has the new Scary Movie received such a drubbing? Reviews have been unkind – it currently sits at a woeful 24 per cent on critic aggregator Rotten Tomatoes – though that’s no real shocker. The real surprise is that it seems to have gone down like a lead balloon with general audiences too: exit polls at US cinemas gave it a C+ score, which is strange when the deeply shoddy “sad incel and crazy possessed rape victim” thriller Obsession earned an A- audience score last month on the way to becoming one of the biggest movies of the year (it’s grossed $224m at the global box office so far). We clearly dig stupidity right now, but perhaps not the intentional stupidity of yore.
