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.
I wonder if it speaks to Scary Movie missing the moment a little. The most zeitgeisty horror movies of the last few years – among them Get Out, Sinners, The Substance and Weapons – are parodied in quick set pieces, then never mentioned again. For all its low-hanging-fruit silliness, the original Scary Movies – created by brothers Marlon and Shawn Wayans and their father Keenen Ivory Wayans, who were cruelly dumped from the franchise by original producer Harvey Weinstein after 2001’s Scary Movie 2 – felt directly attuned to the pop culture psyche. They spoofed not only contemporaneous horror movies but Simon Cowell, The Matrix’s bullet-time, Budweiser ads and Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery.
The new Scary Movie, though, is overwhelmingly indebted to the recent Scream sequels, with entire characters and lines of dialogue lifted wholesale from 2022’s Scream and 2023’s Scream VI. But the newer Screams – for all their franchise-best box office success – have hardly penetrated cultural consciousness like their predecessors did, making it a curious decision to spend so much of Scary Movie pointing and laughing at them. You half suspect audiences won’t get the jokes.
But it somehow all pays off. Scary Movie ends up working best when it stops merely spoofing a Scream movie and quite literally becomes one. As the film reaches its climax, it’s revealed that stoner Shorty (Marlon Wayans) and closeted jock Ray (Shawn Wayans) – returning alongside long-suffering final girl Cindy (Anna Faris) and her helium-voiced BFF Brenda (Regina Hall) – have been behind the movie’s string of murders, both of them driven to madness after not being invited back for the third and fourth entries in the Scary Movie franchise. Cindy and Brenda, meanwhile, were invited back (“They offered us so much money,” Brenda pleads; “I got to work with the great thespian Charlie Sheen,” adds Cindy, of her Scary Movie 3 co-star).
It’s the sort of self-critiquing, metatextual, peek-behind-the-curtain nonsense that the actual Scream movies used to do so well, before they became poorly made nostalgia-bait. Writing their own professional bitterness into the script is incredibly funny, likewise that Cindy and Brenda both come around to Shorty and Ray’s way of thinking. In Scary Movie’s final scene, the pair realise that they, too, are at risk of being replaced by newer, cheaper versions of themselves in their own franchise: namely Cindy’s own children. So they assist Shorty and Ray in tying them up and burning them to death.
It’s a shocking, mean, and wildly ballsy way to end a movie, and also gestures to how poorly Faris and Hall – two absurdly talented comediennes – were remunerated by Weinstein during the franchise’s heyday, too. They may have been asked back for Scary Movie 3 and 4 but not so much 2013’s Scary Movie 5, remember, which replaced Faris with High School Musical’s Ashley Tisdale and promptly became the worst reviewed and least successful entry in the series.
I suppose it’s a low bar to say that the new Scary Movie isn’t total slop and therefore probably deserves more love, but there’s something incredibly interesting here buried beneath the more groan-worthy gags on offer, like that strange detour in which Shorty has an animated threesome with the K-Pop Demon Hunters. I pledge to watch this thing at least six more times, and you should too. The future of stupid cinema (complimentary) might depend on it.
‘Scary Movie’ is in cinemas
