Like an irksome stinging insect nonetheless vital to controlling excess animal population, the Scary Movie franchise serves a worthy function in a greater cultural ecosystem that continues to churn out multiplex fare begging to be spoofed. It’s been thirteen years since the last send-up – which, with its distinct lack of Wayanses as well as series leads Regina Hall and Anna Faris, did not leave loyalists craving more – and Hollywood has bred a bumper crop of sacred cows ripe for slaughter, the past decade-plus taking us from the genesis of “elevated horror” through the present reboot-mania (the strongest raison d’etre for the revival at hand, readily conceded by the film itself as not quite the subject of public clamoring). Between Monkeypaw’s rise, Octavia Spencer’s mycological bob in Ma, and the zeitgeist-devouring of Sinners, Black cinema in particular has a lot to show for itself, and accordingly affords a great many juicy targets.
The sixth and latest Scary Movie gets off on the right foot by nixing the number in its title, locked onto the current industry best practice of resetting the count to freshen up the IP. And one can see how its central conceit held water in the pitch meeting: in keeping with the trend of new-gen youths battling a familiar menace with help from legacy characters, the mask-clad Ghostface is back to slice and dice a handful of unmemorable Zoomers – identifiable as such for doing Woke and Trans and Pronouns – soon joined by the returning Brenda (Hall), Cindy (Faris), giggling weed casualty Shorty (Marlon Wayans), and the barely closeted “Gay Ray” (Shawn Wayans).
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Less welcome is the reappearance of mentally disabled Officer Doofy (Dave Sheridan), unseen since the first instalment, that film’s concluding reveal of the character as a homicidal maniac merely pretending to be a hideous caricature evidently forgotten. The stubborn logic behind his needless reinstatement mistakenly equates offence with provocation. The less e‑ink spilled over Doofy, the better.
Because the Scary Movies have always drawn their disjointed, bit-to-bit structure from the Wayans family’s background in sketch comedy, the ultimate merit of any given instalment comes down to the simple yet highly personal accounting of how many jokes land and how many don’t. Mileage may vary, for instance, on the screenlifed scene in which internet personality Kai Cenat makes a cameo on Shorty’s stream only to get summarily beheaded. On one hand, the redundant announcement that “You just killed Kai Cenat!” gives away just how thin this gag really is beyond the recognition of its reference; on the other, there’s a weirdly moving intergenerational poetry to how Shorty’s taunts that he’s getting rich being a no-talent who does nothing echo the In Living Color clip making fun of ‘Gypsy Woman’ singer Crystal Waters for the same thing.
Academics graphing the quality of the Wayans brain trust’s overall output will notice a decline beginning in the early ‘10s, right around when they cast their lot with director Michael Tiddes. The closest predecessor to Scary Movie in their collaboration would be 2016’s Fifty Shades of Black; I often think back on that film’s stand-in for the real 50 Shades’ theme crooner The Weeknd, a gyrating smooth operator identifying himself as The Weekday. It’s stupid, by any measure, but the actor’s commitment makes the moment just stupid enough to work. A lot of Scary Movie’s shots at this sweet spot fall short of the mark, only some recapturing the daffy Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker magic that turns name-checks into demented non sequiturs. Some of the best touches in that particular MAD-Magazine-type register are incidental, like the nod to Final Destination that sees an entire theme park collapse out of focus in the background to liven up some early exposition.
The franchise’s backbone and greatest asset has always been the duo of Hall and Faris, two of the century’s most prodigiously skilled – if criminally neglected – comic performers, and this film has the good sense to foreground their genius. Forever one step ahead of the dumb blonde archetype, her speech slightly woozy, Faris suggests Marilyn Monroe if she had existed ironically; Hall is a master of gesture and expression, her performance here as finely detailed as her weightier work in career-best Support the Girls. Their abundant talent provides a reminder that in the parody subgenre, there’s no substitute for strong fundamentals. The faint, pleasing ding of recognition cannot be passed off as a punch line; the extent to which the writing here is guilty of such can only be adjudicated on a case by case basis, verdicts violently clashing from one line to the next. You decide: Is the purely tangential in-movie trailer for a Michael parody called “Jermaine” the good or bad kind of groaner?