Scary Movie

Grade: C

My best friend and his older brother (who lived next door to me growing up) were back in town for a couple days in the early spring of 2003. The three of us and my mother spent about an hour sitting on the front porch of her house at the time, catching up. Somebody said “life is a long, interesting road, and it’s not over.” I view the current moment of life like when you’re watching live TV on your DVR or TiVo, and you look at that line that shows your progression. You might be near the beginning of a show, but since you’re watching in real time, it’s always showing you at the far right of the line. That conversation 23 years ago felt like the end of the line at the moment, but now it’s significantly further back.

Scary Movie arrives almost 26 years after Scary Movie (2000), which I saw in the theater on opening day. It made fun of Scream, which was already a satirical commentary on horror tropes. I didn’t like it, but I owned it on VHS and watched it as recently as 2008 – presumably if I wanted a trip slightly back in that on-demand progression line. I also didn’t like Scary Movie 2, out the following year, but I was impressed by how quickly they were able to collect and shoehorn in all the new film references from 2000 to 2001 – like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Dude, Where’s My Car?

That became what the franchise was known for – finding some way, no matter how forced, to acknowledge the popular new releases since the last installment. Those references would soon be dated, but at the time, it was a fun snapshot. Scary Movie (2026) manages to parade on a subplot – or at least a passing wink – to Sinners, Weapons, Terrifier, Smile, The Substance, Heart Eyes, M3GAN, Longlegs, Michael, Ma, and more. Five Nights at Freddy’s doesn’t get a sendup, in a disappointing missed opportunity. I had an idea for a segment. Maybe somebody working at a Chuck E. Cheese type place would be alone on a late shift and hear the sound of rusty metal scraping against itself, starting slow, getting louder and faster. The employee turns the corner to see one of the animatronics going to town with himself, causing sparks to fly.

The paper-thin plot is basically that Ghostface is back – but any narrative consistency is abandoned in favor of whatever joke or sight gag they could possibly throw in. Anna Faris, Regina Hall, and Marlon and Shawn Wayans are the returning cast members we expected to see, and it’s nice to see them again. Marlon is still never too far away from a joint, blunt, or bong, and Shawn’s character is still denying that his sexuality is what it so obviously is to the rest of the world. I was delighted to see Jon Abrahams (Faris’s boyfriend in the first film) again, even if it was brief. Within a year, I saw him in four movies (Bringing Out the Dead, Boiler Room, Scary Movie, Meet the Parents), then he dropped off the face of the Earth.

I enjoyed a few people from the new cast. Some of them weren’t born yet when the series started. Olivia Rose Keegan and Savannah Lee Nassif play Faris’s daughters. The latter’s name is Tuesday – a riff on Wednesday Addams. She convincingly looks like and emulates both Christina Ricci and Jenna Ortega. Cameron Scott Roberts, as the boyfriend Jack, does a good job mimicking his counterpart from Sinners when that parody comes.

Any semblance of plot cohesion or development has completely gone out the window by the third act. Don’t even worry about what happens. They haven’t. It’s a waterfall of references and meta dialogue. This movie doesn’t work as comedy or entertainment, and I’m not recommending it – but catching up with these people made me ruminate on the quarter century that has been since they started this. The “you are here” bar on the TiVo marches on. In a strange way, I got what I went for, and I’ll go again if they make more.

Grade: C