Is Scary Movie (2026) woke?

ARCHIVED SOURCE url: https://stephendaisley.substack.com/p/myers-remorse canonical: https://stephendaisley.substack.com/p/myers-remorse captured_utc: 2026-11-03T03:37:24.709Z http_status: 200 method: direct extractor: scrut-extract-2 truncated: false --- Stephen Daisley Subscribe Sign in Ticket Stubs #22: The nights he doesn’t come home, in “Halloween III: Season of the Witch” and “Halloween Ends”. Plus, the “Scary Movie” remake and “Hack-O-Lantern”, which is certainly… different. Stephen Daisley Oct 29, 2026 2 1 Share Ticket Stubs is a movie column reviewing new and not-so-new releases, Hollywood classics, nostalgic trash, and more obscure cinematic fare. This is Ticket Stubs #22. Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy) is the proprietor of Silver Shamrock Novelties, a Halloween mask manufacturer with a questionable business model: its masks are rigged to kill its customers on Halloween night. The original screenplay was penned by British horror writer Nigel Kneale, though he ultimately had his name taken off the final product, which he deemed excessively gory. Tommy Lee Wallace, who reworked Kneale’s script and directed Halloween III: Season of the Witch , said he intended it to be ‘a pod movie’ rather than ‘a knife movie’ and that is what we have here: an occult take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956). Cochran heads up a production line of human replacement robots who double as heavies against anyone who stumbles across his plot, which also involves pilfering a column from Stonehenge and somehow transporting it to northern California undetected. If you’re wondering what all this has to do with Michael Myers or the events of Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) and Halloween II (Rick Rosenthal, 1981), take a seat because this is a long story. After the success of those two slasher movies, John Carpenter and Debra Hill wanted to drop the Myers storyline and turn the Halloween franchise into an anthology series with a different Samhain-themed film every year. The problem was no one told the fans, who turned out in 1982 for more of the night he came home and got instead, in the words of the Season of the Witch poster, ‘the night no one comes home’. The film bombed and it would be another six years before Halloween returned to the big screen, with Michael Myers not just pervasive in the marketing campaign but specifically written into the title of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Dwight H. Little, 1988). The opprobrium directed at Season of the Witch has lessened in recent years and it has come to be seen as a cult classic. That’s an overcorrection, for Season of the Witch is a deeply flawed movie, yet it is encouraging to see a film that at least tried to do something different get some credit for it. Myers fans might prefer endless retreads of the same story but it’s possible to enjoy that character while appreciating what Season of the Witch has to offer. What that is is mood — eerie, dark, cynical — and an atmosphere that brings the sensibilities of Fifties sci-fi to bear on a very Eighties paranoia about corporations and capitalism. In some ways, Season of the Witch is a test-run for the ideas Carpenter marshalled into his satire of Reaganism, They Live (1988), although that is more tightly directed and better focussed than Wallace’s effort. In a shift from its predecessors, Season of the Witch offers up a final dude, hospital doctor Daniel Challis (Tom Atkins), a divorced, absentee father who drinks during the day, swats nurses on the butt and beds every woman in sight. If that horrifies you, remember this was the Eighties. By the standards of the time, he was practically a feminist. Atkins, a regular on Carpenter and Carpenter-connected projects back then, is a B-movie Jimmy Cagney, his full, handsomely creased face held up by a robust jaw and a broad set of shoulders. He is as close to an authentic blue-collar lug as Hollywood got at the time, neither a smooth pretty boy nor an improbably political stand-in for the ideological preferences of an over-colleged L.A. screenwriter. He was very American in a more American time. Challis helps (that is, shtups ) Ellie Grimbridge (Stacey Nelkin), whose father was murdered by one of Cochran’s robots, seemingly after learning about the infanticidal mask conspiracy, and the couple infiltrate the Silver Shamrock factory in search of the truth. The rest is race-against-time territory as they try to get word to the outside world that the microchip embedded in the Halloween masks will be triggered that night when Silver Shamrock’s commercial (a nerve-shredding earworm composed to the tune of “London Bridge is Falling Down”) plays on television. As that description telegraphs, the whole thing is downright silly but it’s fun-silly, in the tradition of the Fifties sci-fi flicks and creature features that Tommy Lee Wallace grew up watching. If you want to nitpick, there is a veritable buffet here. How did they rob and transport a chunk of Stonehenge without anyone noticing? Wouldn’t someone have linked the mass child deaths on the East Coast in time to foil the plan at least before it got to the mountain states or the West Coast? Who does Challis call at the climax who seems to have control over multiple TV networks (and is willing to take them off the air on the say-so of a raving caller)? If you approach a movie like this with an attitude like that, you’ll get nothing out of it but a list and a sense of superiority. Season of the Witch may be absurd but, for all its faults, it is more interesting and enduring than most other Halloween sequels. Halloween Ends is mostly terrible but terrible in a way that you can’t help but admire because this thirteenth instalment in a by-the-numbers slasher series takes huge, dick-swinging risks that many a low-budget indie horror wouldn’t dare. For almost forty years, Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Tommy Lee Wallace, 1982) was the redheaded stepchild of the Halloween series, reviled by fans for ditching the Michael Myers plot in favour of a standalone tale of a warlock industrialist plotting to massacre America’s children via Stonehenge-powered microchips in Halloween masks. Season of the Witch has since been reappraised and embraced for its eerie mood and apocalyptic cynicism, and perhaps the same thing will happen to Halloween Ends , which is surely the Halloween III de nos jours . The filmmakers are conscious of this: the movie’s electric blue titles are modelled after those of the 1982 flick and while Halloween Ends does not forgo the Myers character entirely, it does something arguably more scandalous, having the baby boomer babysitter-butcher usurped by a Gen-Z pretender who beats up the 65-year-old psycho-killer, steals his mask and goes on a blood-soaked rampage of his own. It’s the ultimate indignity: Michael Myers get slasher-mogged. Fans of popular horror series, like followers of superhero and comic book properties, can be frustratingly conservative in their tastes. Every new entry should be a return to the original, an attempt to recapture lightning in a bottle, and originality must not get in the way of soap opera (following the preferred storyline) and fan service (getting the mask or outfit or weapon right). Halloween Ends was never going to satisfy this demographic, not even if it was a much better movie, for it is primarily motivated not by soap opera or fan service, as director David Gordon Green’s 2018 and 2021 productions were, but by an attempt to pitch a fresh way forward for a property of almost five decades’ vintage. This is not the same thing as originality but it is a break from the nostalgic drudgery of previous entries in the franchise. (Note how unthinkingly we have all adopted ‘franchise’ and other terminology of the Hollywood marketing people, speaking about creative endeavours as though they were purely commercial products.) Halloween Ends does not succeed but it is an attempt to do something vaguely different and that brings a slight thrill to its wild and unpredictable proceedings. The something different is Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a dweeby kid with a mother who merits her own chapter in Introduction to Psychoanalysis . One Halloween night, Corey babysits a little horror called Jeremy, who lures him into the attic then barricades him inside until Corey suffers a panic attack and rushes the door, sending Jeremy toppling over a towering staircase to a gnarly, body-mangling death — just as his mother and father return home. For some reason, the parents don’t see the comedy in this predicament and blame Corey for their brat’s demise, causing the teenager to become a pariah in town. The town in question is Haddonfield, Illinois and they are still dealing (badly) with the events of Halloween (David Gordon Green, 2018) and Halloween Kills (David Gordon Green, 2021), when Michael Myers killed a bunch of people, then a bunch of other people got together and chanted ‘Evil dies tonight’, and so he killed a bunch of them, too. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), who wisely kept her screen time in Halloween Kills to a minimum, narrates here, giving us a sneak preview of a book she has written about her experiences with The Boogeyman. Her experiences this time include battling to keep Haddonfield’s most-hated babysitter away from her smitten granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). Something in Corey’s peepers gives Laurie jeepers creepers: when she looks into his eyes, she sees the same darkness she saw in Myers. And she’s right because, and try to stay with me here, one night the high school band kids who are bullying Corey throw him off a bridge, which causes him to find Michael Myers in an underground tunnel. Instead of killing Corey, Myers seems to recognise a kindred spirit and lets him live, which sets Corey off on a killing spree, but not before he returns to the tunnel to beat up The Boogeyman and steal his mask. In between all this, he is wooing Allyson, fending off sloppy lip-kisses from his icky ma, and getting his own back on those band kids. Oh, and he busts out some sweet dance moves at a local bar. The movie is, as the kids say, a lot. What it isn’t is a Halloween movie; not really. It’s a Christine -esque revenge-of-the-nerd story crowbarred into the Laurie-Michael mythos and it’s a shame that it gets bogged down in all that ancient history when it has the potential to be something new and fresh and interesting. Where Halloween Ends works, it works because of Rohan Campbell, who shows more range across the 111 minutes than any other actor in the movie. He goes from bashful to self-pitying to resentful to vengeful to sadistic and takes the audience along with the purity of his performance. Campbell captures much that is repellent about evil and much of what attracts us to it. Andi Matichak, whom the filmmakers strained to make badass in the previous two movies, is allowed to loosen up here and give a more naturalistic performance as a young woman smart enough to know she’s making bad choices but making them anyway because at least bad choices make you feel something. Matichak has a dramatic maturity in advance of her years. When she’s not on screen, you want her to be. Amid all this: implausibly intimidating band kids, Michael Myers living in a sewer, a plot-diverting radio DJ, a vigilante vigil with crowd-surfing corpse, Michael and Corey forming a homicidal tag-team, grocery-store flirting, unfathomable character motivation, chaotically swerving tone, and a whole lot more talky-talky than stabby-stabby. Don’t try to make sense of it. It’ll hurt your head in places you didn’t know could hurt. Halloween Ends wraps up with perhaps the most visceral — certainly the most intimate — altercation we have seen between Laurie Strode and Michael Myers. Jamie Lee Curtis’s performance is tremendously physical and she sells the idea of a grandmother able to stand her ground against a hulking serial killer. The confrontation and the scenes that follow it ought to be cathartic but aren’t because we have been here before in a series that has more than once given its characters a definitive conclusion only to snatch it back after the box office receipts rolled in. The title isn’t so much an ironic commentary as a bad joke from a property as interminable as its relentless antagonist. Halloween Ends . If only it would. There is a scene in Scary Movie , which was released in June, in which the old-guard ‘core four’ from the original (Keenen Ivory Wayans, 2000) gather with their Gen-Z replacements to discuss the ‘rebootquel’ they find themselves in, though stoner Shorty (Marlon Wayans) mishears it as a ‘re-bootycall’. The misconstrual is the more appropriate term, for the 2020s Scream reboot (plus its sequels) and this riff on them are the movie equivalent of another fuck for old times’ sake. The chemistry is more residual than reactive; ravenous passion has gorged itself into flabby familiarity. Diminished expectations are willing to settle for diminished returns. The returns here are indeed diminished, though the 2000 Scary Movie was hardly a refined satire. It was a cheapo, cash-in Scream spoof whose humour never rose above the level of dicks-and-tits jokes. But its core audience back then has reached middle age, when nostalgia stalks the psyche waiting to pounce on slower, softer senses, and Scary Movie 2026 aspires to nothing more than tickling those senses. Hey, remember Cindy (Anna Faris)? She became a survivalist shut-in in the vein of Laurie Strode in Halloween (David Gordon Green, 2018) and is estranged from her daughters Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif) and Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan). The trio are drawn back together after Tuesday narrowly survives a Ghostface attack. And what about Brenda (Regina Hall)? She’s got two kids now — Brad and the uber-woke Dei (get it?) — and plies teenagers with booze like Octavia Spencer’s unnerving antiheroine of Ma (Tate Taylor, 2019). Oh, and her closeted boyfriend Ray (Shawn Wayans)? He’s now her husband and an ‘ex’-homosexual who gives unconvincing testimony to their church about how he prayed the gay away. Deputy ‘Smell my finger!’ Doofy (Dave Sheridan) is seemingly on the police force again, which is very understanding of them since he was the killer in the first movie. Shorty — wasssuuuuup? — is a crypto millionaire and still stoned all the time. Ghostface tries to hypnotise him to quit weed a la Catherine Keener and Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017), though it instead sucks him into a K-Pop Demon Hunters music video. Greg (Lochlyn Munro), the jock with the micropenis from the original, is sheriff these days and has a transgender son, Jess (Benny Zielke). Among the movies being parodied this time are Final Destination: Bloodlines (Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, 2025) and Longlegs (Osgood Perkins, 2024). There is a callback to Scream 6 (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, 2023) when Ghostface attacks Dei Meeks (Sydney Park), Brenda’s non-binary offspring, on the subway. (Subway Karen: ‘Oh God! He stabbed her!’ Dei: ‘Not her! My pronouns are they/them! He stabbed them!’ Subway Karen: ‘I’m over forty. How am I supposed to keep up with all of this?’) There are nods, also, to the Candyman remake (Nia DaCosta, 2021), Smile (Parker Finn, 2022), and Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025), the latter involving a vampiric cover of “Movin’ On Up”, which Brenda calls ‘the black national anthem’, though I would question how many Americans under forty, black or otherwise, would get the reference. Triple-masked Reddit shut-ins took issue with mockery of the transgender movement and diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, in particular an incompetent black nurse (Kim Wayans) who refuses to help Tuesday fend off Ghostface because she’s on a break, and gasps: ‘This white girl can’t die on my shift! I’m a DEI hire!’ Progressives have argued that minority-targeted jokes in the movie are unfunny and outdated — it’s Scary Movie ; you were expecting Lenny Bruce? — but their true objection is that their worldview is being mocked and, as with all authoritarians, they can’t bear it. There is no point in protesting, as the Wayans have in the past, that they are equal opportunity offenders, happy to jab at all races, sexualities, and ideologies. Progressivism is a totalising ideology; every word, thought and act must reflect political commitment. A comedian is not a comedian but an activist permitted to tell jokes. Scary Movie 2026 made some decent coin; $108m domestically and $123m internationally off a $30m budget. It is reportedly the most financially successful film in the series after the original, surely a reflection of the return of the Wayans brothers who had no involvement in the previous three instalments amid a pay dispute. Scary Movie is by no means a great film, but no one goes to Scary Movie for greatness. We go, brains disengaged, for sheer dumb fun and crudeness and political incorrectness, and while the Wayans brothers and director Michael Tiddes lean too heavily on nostalgia Scary Movie 2026 is the best this series has offered up since the original. The plot: Creepy Incest Grandpa (Hy Pyke) is head of a Satanic cult. That’s not even the twist. It’s established early on that C.I.G.’s family all know he’s running a homicidal devil-worship sect and they talk about it as if it’s a quirky hobby. Don’t mind grandpa, he’s just off to sacrifice a virgin to Lucifer. They’re not all that bothered when he murders his son-in-law on Halloween, though thirteen years later his daughter (Katina Garner) gives him a talking-to for bludgeoning her husband then burning his body. Plus, there’s the aforementioned incest business. This would make one hell of a “Tough Love” column for Abigail Shrier. The daughter’s more pressing concern is the hold grandpa seems to exert over her eldest son Tommy (Gregory Scott Cummins), who is also a Satanist, which mostly involves listening to hair metal and having a pentagram in his closet. C.I.G. now wants to induct Tommy into the old time religion, which he indicates by splaying his fingers in what Pyke and director Jag Mundhra understood to be the Devil’s horns symbol but is in fact the American Sign Language gesture for ‘I love you’. Before he can recruit Tommy into the service of Beelzebub, the grandson’s vanishingly nondescript friends must be unalived, one every ten minutes or so, until we reach the denouement. This doesn’t pose too much difficulty since they are all fantastically stupid, and inattentive, and horny, and crass. Two of our nominal good characters even have at it atop a grave. If anything, the Satanists are raising the moral tone. Mundhra, who directed in India before emigrating to the United States, seems not to have had the faintest clue about how to make an American teen slasher movie. There is a hint of Bollywood sensibility in a hallucination/dream/interior visual monologue (it’s never made clear) in which Tommy plays bass for L.A. rock quartet D.C. Lacroix. The choice of song — ‘Devil’s Son’ — is a little on-the-nose considering we’re nowhere near the twist yet, but the narrative-defying spectacle is at least a little more adventurous than these movies usually get. Today the film goes by the title The Damning , a self-defeating attempt to pass it off as a classy horror picture. The only thing Hack-O-Lantern has going for it is that it’s called Hack-O-Lantern . That, and the dialogue. Tommy’s sister (Carla Baron) on their mother’s demeanour: ‘Ever since my father died on Halloween night, this day seems to affect her.’ Hy Pike, who is winningly creepy as Grandpa, popped up in horror fare like Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (Richard Blackburn, 1973), Nightmare in Blood (John Stanley, 1977), and Vamp (Richard Wenk, 1986). Outside the genre, Pike featured in Rudy Ray Moore blaxploitation staple Dolemite (D’Urville Martin, 1975), the X-rated The First Nudie Musical (Mark Haggard, Bruce Kimmel, 1976) and the adult costume comedy When Sex Was A Knightly Affair (Raphael Nussbaum, 1976). His only real venture into mainstream cinema was Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). He died in 2006, aged 70, in the city of his birth, Los Angeles.

ARCHIVED SOURCE url: https://nextbestpicture.com/scary-movie/ canonical: https://nextbestpicture.com/scary-movie captured_utc: 2026-11-03T03:37:16.873Z http_status: 200 method: direct extractor: scrut-extract-2 truncated: false --- THE STORY – Twenty-six years after outrunning a suspiciously familiar masked killer, Shorty, Ray, Cindy, and Brenda find themselves targeted by another mad slasher. THE CAST – Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Damon Wayans Jr., Cheri Oteri, Chris Elliott, Dave Sheridan, Lochlyn Munro, Jon Abrahams, Olivia Rose Keegan, Cameron Scott Roberts, Savannah Lee Nassif, Sydney Park, Gregg Wayans, Benny Zielke, Ruby Snowber & Anthony Andesron THE TEAM – Michael Tiddes (Director), Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Craig Wayans & Rick Alvarez (Writers) Between the recent dominance of horror at the box office and in discourse, and last year’s “ The Naked Gun “ reboot proving that cinematic parodies could thrive again after years of dormancy, it was only a matter of time before the mega-popular “Scary Movie “ franchise was itself brought back to life. The original did come into theaters on the backs of twin slasher successes “ Scream “ and “I Know What You Did Last Summer, “ after all, and those two late ’90s films both had new franchise entries in theaters in the past year. With the horror genre reaching ever greater heights of prominence in the cinematic landscape – last year’s “ Weapons “ even managed a rare genre Oscar win for Amy Madigan in Best Supporting Actress – franchise creators the Wayans Brothers certainly have plenty of material to work with. But does their brand of take-no-prisoners, equal-opportunity-offensiveness stoner comedy play as well in 2026 as it did at the start of the millennium? The “Scary Movie “ films have always felt more like a collection of sketches than a true, cohesive narrative, even though they use a recent horror film as a blueprint. In this “Scary Movie, “ it isn’t so much one recent film as the collective recent “ Scream “ requel trilogy – that is, “ Scream “, “ Scream VI “, and “ Scream 7 “. As in those films, we’re introduced to the new, young cast first: Sara Campbell (Olivia Rose Keegan), daughter of Ghostface survivor Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris), her totally innocent boyfriend Jack (Cameron Scott Roberts), her good friends Dei (Sydney Park) and Brad (Gregg Wayans), children of Cindy’s best friend and self-proclaimed “cool mom “ Brenda Meeks (Regina Hall), and Brad’s sex-obsessed girlfriend Elle (Ruby Snowber). Sara, addicted to pills because of Cindy’s disastrous parenting, gets pulled back home after her sister, Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif), gets attacked by Ghostface. Cindy, who spent her life trying to prepare Sara and Tuesday to face off against Ghostface, is ready for him, but her doomsday prepper ways are too cringeworthy for the young crowd, so they set off in search of other Ghostface survivors. They round up as many previous cast members as were willing to work for scale to fight Ghostface. Now, they just need to figure out how many Ghostfaces there are. While that overarching story makes sense in theory, the film’s sketch-y nature means there are many plot holes in practice. No one really goes to a “Scary Movie “ for the plot, but it would be nice if scenes actually connected to each other and made sense in context instead of just moving on to the next film scene, the Wayanses (along with co-writer Rick Alvarez and director Michael Tiddes) want to spoof. Nothing is sacred to the Wayanses, and they go all in on just about every recent horror hit you can name: “ M3GAN “, “ Longlegs “, “ Terrifier “, “ The Substance “, “ Weapons “, and even “ Sinners “ all get their moment of big, lowest-common-denominator parody. The screenplay doesn’t stop there, also including a golden parody of “ KPOP Demon Hunters “ and a neon-drenched fight scene aping the work of 87North Productions. As with the original, every scene feels exactly like the film it’s spoofing, from the production design and cinematography to the music choices. Unfortunately, even though they’re mostly funny, there’s not much substance to these parodies. The film’s cultural commentary doesn’t go much deeper than a surface-level swipe at Gen Z-led “cancel culture “ that feels several years out of date. The film’s attempts at meta humor have a much higher hit rate, including a winking moment of direct address in the fun opening scene and good-natured ribbing about the Wayanses coming back to the franchise for the first time since “Scary Movie 2 “ in 2001. The more direct critiques of horror tropes usually land, but this franchise ran out of things to say on that front quite a long time ago, so they’re few and far between. The Wayanses’ typical brand of gross-out humor, full to bursting with dick jokes, bodily fluids, and sexual references, fills the rest of the space adequately enough. Still, some of them cross the line between being juvenile and being unfunny. In all honesty, it feels good to have the Wayans brothers back where they belong, even if “Scary Movie ” isn’t quite up to the level of the first film in the franchise. While it maintains that film’s strengths, the humor doesn’t feel as fresh as it once did. For all their willingness to offend, the Wayanses don’t have anything to say with their jokes, rendering them toothless. Sure, it’s fun watching Ghostface dressed up like a doctor, injecting Cheri Oteri’s Gail Hailstorm with a fluorescent green substance. However, aside from having no relevance to anything going on in this film, the scene has nothing to say about “ The Substance “, body horror, or even the state of health care in America. The “Scary Movie “ films have always focused more on easy, cheap laughs than cutting satire, but if you’re gonna put jokes about pronouns and January 6 in your movie, long after all the good jokes about them have been made, your jokes better have a point. The returning cast, as ever, is game to do every wild and crazy thing the screenplay calls for, and the new cast members match them shot for roofied Jell-O shot (special shout-out to Keegan, who channels Faris’s energy and way of speaking with uncanny accuracy). Their infectious energy saves “Scary Movie “ when the jokes fail, which happens often enough to keep this from being top-tier in the franchise. Thankfully, the bits that land do so with the force of a canister of nitrous oxide. It’s a quick, artificial high, but it’ll make you laugh. Next Best Picture is one of the newest leading voices on the film awards season race while also providing commentary for the Tony and Emmy awards. We are on a year long search to find the next Best Picture Oscar winner. We do this through weekly podcasts, reviews, interviews with people in the industry and blog posts expressing our own thoughts, opinions and love for all things cinema. 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ARCHIVED SOURCE url: https://www.avclub.com/scary-movie-6-review-embarrassing-spoof-wayans-brothers canonical: https://www.avclub.com/scary-movie-6-review-embarrassing-spoof-wayans-brothers captured_utc: 2026-11-03T03:37:15.239Z http_status: 200 method: direct extractor: scrut-extract-2 truncated: false --- The funniest and most pointed joke in Scary Movie , the Wayans brothers’ third title in the lowest-common-denominator horror parody series, is suggested in its modifier-free name. This is the sixth Scary Movie and the Wayans’ first in 25 years and the movie’s spartan title effectively sends up genre series filmmakers who suggest that they’re going back to basics by removing numbers from their latest sequel’s title. The rest of the movie, which was co-scripted by ex-franchise stars Marlon and Shawn with help from brother Keenen Ivory, nephew Craig, and regular collaborator Craig Alvarez, only glancingly skewers horror movie trends, let alone current events. A few jokes target whatever the Wayans brothers’ consider to be “woke,” like the WokeWatts electric car pump that sets up a joke without a clear punchline. Is it supposed to be funny because driving an electric car equals woke? Or is the joke on us for expecting the Wayans brothers to say something topical? To be fair, Scary Movie isn’t only bad because its creators don’t know what to do with meme-ready horror characters like Terrifier ’s Art The Clown or M3GAN ’s title character . The movie doesn’t offer much in the way of a plot, though it does sometimes pair up the previous movies’ stars, like Regina Hall and Anna Faris, with younger performers since they’re all being targeted by a newly revived Ghosftface killer. Some jokes land, especially the ones that are at least superficially about the inane ongoing cycle of slasher legacy sequels, or “rebootquels” as one Scary Movie (2000) alum calls them. It is, admittedly, funny to see the movie’s younger cast members blink uncomprehendingly at an I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) reference. It’s also kind of strange to see Marlon and Shawn Wayans waste so much time reviving their sketchy characters from the previous Scary Movie s, as if there were anything worth remembering about Shorty the pothead (Marlon) or Ray the closeted ex-football player (Shawn). Now Shorty’s a crypto bro who also runs a livestream where he mocks his audience for paying attention to him. And Ray’s still very closeted, only now it’s harder to know why, especially since his character only pops up in scenes that allude to horror movies starring, directed, and scripted by Black artists, particularly Get Out and Sinners . These uneasy and monotonous jokes don’t say anything about those recent milestone hits, but it’s funny to imagine viewers wondering why Shawn Wayans makes so many jokes about gay sex given that it’s been so long since Scary Movie (2000) and its tired riffing on Scream ’s “meta,” trope-filled genre satire, that Ray’s stereotypical hypersexuality is now not only unfunny, but also incomprehensible. Stopping Ghostface eventually seems like a pretext for a series of winking references to dated characters and world events, most of which lack a coherent perspective or concept beyond flattering us for recognizing so many pop culture references. The filmmakers clearly want us to know, with every gay panic and anti-Gen Z joke, that they’re committed to a politically incorrect style of humor . It’s also telling that, while some topics are ostensibly good for a laugh, others are either ignored or downplayed. So there’s a random nod to the Epstein Files during a brief and toothless The Substance parody, but no jokes about Diddy parties—maybe because Marlon has attended some —or Harvey Weinstein, possibly because Scary Movie (2026) begins with a Miramax logo. Instead we get half-assed jokes about they/them pronouns—“I’m over 40 [years old], how am I supposed to keep up with this?”—and the #MeToo movement. That kind of desperate-to-nettle humor says more about the Wayans brothers’ low expectations of their fans, as they even suggest when one character jokes that the Wayans’ audience doesn’t know how to read. The best gags in Scary Movie give charming older comedians enough wiggle room to out-funny their undemanding material. And while Faris doesn’t have much screentime, she still occasionally makes something of the movie’s otherwise dull lampooning of Laurie Strode’s histrionic post-final girl trauma narrative from the recent Halloween sequels. It’s less funny watching her briefly play a “Joan Wick”-style killer, mostly because the filmmakers can’t imagine anything funny about Anna Faris with a gun that isn’t more amusing on paper than it is on screen. Wasting moviegoers’ time with a heap of pandering callbacks wouldn’t be so bad if most of the movie’s jokes were more polished. Then again, tired jokes about Gen Z slang and identity politics may make you wish you knew less about what the Wayans brothers think about modern life. Watching seasoned older comedians target the young for caring too much is bad enough, but seeing them miss even their softest targets makes Scary Movie the most embarrassing movie spoof since Scary Movie . Director: Michael Tiddes Writer: Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Craig Wayans, Rick Alvarez Starring: Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Faris, Regina Hall Release Date: June 5, 2026

ARCHIVED SOURCE url: https://isitwoke.io/movie/scary-movie-2026 canonical: https://isitwoke.io/movie/scary-movie-2026 captured_utc: 2026-11-03T03:37:14.554Z http_status: 200 method: direct extractor: scrut-extract-2 truncated: false --- A short read on tone, themes, and messaging — not a plot synopsis. Scary Movie 2026 continues the franchise's tradition of parodying horror tropes with a comedic lens that prioritizes laughs over ideological messaging. The script leans into genre spoofing and pop culture references, occasionally updating legacy characters and scenarios to reflect contemporary sensibilities. While some characters may feel slightly tokenistic as part of the parody formula, they generally serve the comedic narrative rather than acting as mere symbols. The dialogue is mostly natural to the spoof style, avoiding heavy-handed moralizing or activist tones.