Film Review : Scary Movie (2026)

Scary Movie (2026) sees the Wayans Brothers finally return to the franchise they helped start and instead of bringing in a fresh start to the horror spoof world we get a boring, bland, and often painfully unfunny mess.

Our main story here mostly follows the plot of Scream 5 with Ghostface attempting to lure Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) out of hiding by using her daughters. We throw in a mix of Halloween 2018 and the latest Final Destination movie in here for good measure, but the Scream formula is the still the main stay for our plot here. From here the movie is just a mix of random gags thrown around, bringing in as many old faces from the franchise as possible, and tons of attempts to show off how smart they think they are.

Now spoof films aren’t exactly high brow. For every Naked Gun that nails it there are 10 that fail miserably. The main issue with Scary Movie ties back to even its first preview that dropped. The film wants so badly to be edgy and show you it doesn’t care about being politically correct or anything of the sort that the humor just falls flat.

Instead of getting clever jokes done about topics such as pronouns we get bland cliche bits (like the ones seen in previews) that aren’t even set up story wise. So much of the film feels entirely outdated as well. Our cold open mentions Judd Apatow, who hasn’t wrote or directed a major theatrical film in over a decade. We get COVID jokes followed by bits about how its 2026 and why COVID. Throw in references to decade old interview memes, stuff like The Wire, or even them referencing ‘It Follows’ before saying the movie is too old and niche to reference.

At so many moments it feels like bits of this was wrote years ago and just never updated. Regina Hall returns as Brenda playing a spoof of Ma (a film from 2019). Chunks of the movie just feel like Family Guy cut away gags to either shoehorn in another horror spoof (Terrifer, which was fully shown in previews, or The Substance) or to bring back an old character for no reason whatsoever (Longlegs moment).

Its sad because the final 15 minutes or so of the movie actually work pretty well when they drop the bad gimmicks. The Wayans use it to break the fourth wall fully (as done several times throughout) and we get a slightly funny and well done end to the movie.

The film has a few laughable parts and some of the visual gags work. It just quickly takes that laugh and buries it under some terrible one liner that doesn’t deliver. If there is a part 7 maybe they can try to not be edgelords and instead craft out a solid spoof instead.

Score :

1 / 5