Released: 4th June
Seen: 9th June
In the year 2000, the Wayans Brothers decided it was time to spoof the horror genre that was just entering a boom period (thanks to the movie Scream), so they released Scary Movie. The film was a broad, offensive and ultimately hilarious piss-take of not just Scream but the entire horror genre as it was then. Now, at the time I was too young to watch that movie in cinemas, but once it hit video store shelves, I rented that film at the local Blockbuster so many times that I almost wore the tape out. It was hilarious, one of the funniest films I’d seen at that point. Sure, I can look back and see the parts of it that don’t age particularly well (no comedy ages well, it’s just a matter of time before a joke will die of old age and offensive humour is particularly susceptible to that) but it was still a formative experience so naturally when news of the Wayans Brothers returning to the franchise came out I was excited, surely a new Scary Movie would be just as hilarious and biting as ever… surely.
Scary Movie riffs on a few major films, the main one being Scream (2022) by focusing the story on the kids of the old main characters. In this case, we have Sara Campbell (Olivia Rose Keegan) and her boyfriend Jack Kirsch (Cameron Scott Roberts) going to check on Sara’s younger sister Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif) after Tuesday was attacked by Ghostface. Yep, it’s been 22 years but Ghostface is back and he’s out here killing everybody and since Cindy (Anna Faris) has dealt with him before, she’s pulled out of her home to try and help. Brought along for the comic misadventures are Brenda (Regina Hall), Shorty (Marlon Wayans), Ray (Shawn Wayans) and a few other side characters who are riffs on the remaining members of the main Scream cast.
Now at first things seem to actually kind of go well, the opening scene (a parody of the Scream 6 opening) works well, thanks in no small part to a pretty great cameo by Teyana Taylor. For a moment you can feel the magic, the modern take on this genre that could work… and then things quickly devolve and suddenly it’s the year 2000 again. Before you know it, you’re watching spins on the same jokes that we saw in the first movie but with slightly worse timing and delivery from almost everyone involved. Shorty’s laugh is no longer charmingly stupid, it’s become grating. Ray’s gay joke (he only has one, it has never and will never change) is no longer subversive, it’s just annoying. Things that pushed the boundary of good taste 20 years ago now feel ancient and offensive without being funny enough to make up for that fact.
Let’s be clear, there’s nothing wrong with an offensive joke if it’s done well. I still state my favourite film is Pink Flamingos so believe me when I say I can handle a good offensive joke, but there aren’t any of those in there. There’s either old offensive jokes that are so overdone that it’s honestly just offensive that someone thought they were still funny and then there’s just saying offensive things and expecting a laugh… you know, shit that hacky comics do when they don’t want to work on their act and evolve with the times. It seems like these guys are still writing like it’s the early 2000’s but times have changed, humour has evolved and at no point did it feel like this film was keeping up with the audience’s sensibilities. It doesn’t make jokes, it ticks off a checklist of groups to offend and assumes that’ll do the job. It’s apparently cool to be anti-DEI now so just have a character mention the phrase in an annoying way, that’ll be the joke.
Sometimes, some of what they say doesn’t even count as a joke. It falls into that classic ‘Just say a hateful thing and don’t mean it” style of comedy that idiots enjoy. One of the worst moments in the film involves the non-binary character Dei Meeks (Sydney Park), and no it’s not just that their name is literally DEI. The film spoofs a scene from Scream 6 where Dei is stabbed on the train and you see in the trailer after this that Dei calls someone out for saying “He stabbed her” because Dei’s pronouns are they/them… not a great joke, but it’s delivered well enough. Then everyone on the train starts stabbing Dei (so, basically the scene from the OG Scary Movie where Brenda gets stabbed by everyone, so this is already unoriginal) and somewhere deep in the mix you hear someone say “Fuck your pronouns”… so, the film thinks it’s funny to murder a non-binary person because of their pronoun use. That’d be a bad joke in general, but let’s not forget that Marlon Wayans has a trans kid so he should fucking know better. What honestly makes it worse is that there is a trans character in the film who is pretty well written, Jess (Benny Zielke) is actually a clever way for them to have some of those jokes and not cross that line… but again, they want to offend everyone so they get lazy and throw in that line about pronouns that isn’t a joke. This kind of thing happens a few times, but the worst offender was this one moment.
Then there’s just the fact that the film at times feels less like a cohesive parody and more like a sketch show sewn together based on availability. There’s a Longlegs parody you could cut entirely and lose nothing; a Substance parody that makes no damn sense in context; and several moments that just feel like they’re there because someone saw a popular film and felt the need to shoehorn a bad joke in without it relating to the plot. One of the great things about the first two Scary Movies was that they were cohesive stories, they picked one movie to parody for the bulk of the story and then threw in the other references around that story that still fit the core story structure. This film just randomly has a full Sinners parody in the opening moments for no reason other than Sinners being popular even if doing so makes no sense, it randomly has Bobby from the first movie turn up in a Smile parody that has no impact on the plot but has to be there because Smile was popular. This isn’t a sketch movie, it’s meant to be a parody of modern horror films just like the first one was but this film has none of the self-control that first film had because it wants to show that the Wayans are still funny and still relevant, even if they haven’t made a film anyone is actually interested in since 2004.,
Of course, not every part of Scary Movie is awful. It’s fair to say that there were some laughs when the movie went meta and made fun of the absurdity of the movies it was parodying. Calling out the obvious killers, making jokes at the camera being too far away from the action, some of those jokes worked because it felt like it was a joke about this specific film and not just a random edgy joke that the writers wrote 15 years ago and finally found a place to put it. The cast is also, mostly, pretty good with Anna Faris and Regina Hall bringing the magical chemistry that made Cindy and Brenda comic icons. Regina Hall especially is still the absolute best, she always has been because she’s a goddess of timing and reactions. A scene might not be working right until the camera cuts to Regina and then it works like gangbusters. Also the new kids mostly pull off the over-the-top characters they’ve been handed and make for a few funny moments here and there but it’s nowhere near as consistently funny as the original Wayans-led films were.
Scary Movie isn’t a complete waste of time, but it’s absolutely the worst of the Wayans-led entries in this franchise. It’s stuck in the year 2000 and all it could be bothered to update was the movie references that were being made. When the jokes aren’t funny, they can go from just feeling old to being downright harmful. In an attempt to offend everybody (the movie’s literal advertised goal), they forgot they had to make everyone laugh while doing so. So, sorry Scary Movie, you didn’t really offend me (except for that one specific joke that I’m sure you know you shouldn’t have done)… you did bore me though, and that’s the worst crime of all
Movie Meister Reviews 