Scary Movie in 2026 Is a Mess, But We Need It Anyway

SCORE ★★½☆☆ 2.5 / 5

Scary Movie (2026) is doing CPR on a corpse it's not sure is actually dead. The Wayans — Keenen, Marlon, Shawn, Craig, the whole crew — are back in the writers' room for the first time since 2001, and they have made a film that throws everything at the wall: M3GAN, The Substance, Get Out, Longlegs, Terrifier, even a riff on Sinners. Most of it slides. Some of it sticks. And the stuff that sticks matters more than it probably should.

The structure is frantic. Ghostface returns 26 years later to terrorize the Core Four — Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans — except the film abandons that premise roughly every eight minutes to chase a new parody target. The editing is choppy, the ADR in the third act is so obvious you can practically see the actors in a booth three months later staring at a clock, and the digital colour grading drains all warmth out of the practical gore gags. One more draft, or one less studio note, might have fixed it. Maybe both. Director Michael Tiddes is juggling 14 different horror trends at once and drops more than he catches.

A lot of it does not land. The Get Out riff, where Shorty gets pulled into the sunken place and launches into some weed-fuelled anime tangent, dies on contact. The timing is wrong and it keeps going past the point where anyone is still waiting for a punchline. Doofy Gilmore is back too, and when Ghostface finally kills him, the guy two seats down from me at Cineplex in London actually started clapping. That is not a good sign for your comic relief.

But the Ghostface phone-call sequence works. Cindy Campbell — Faris, doing that wide-eyed panic-acting she owns completely — picks the killer apart in real time. He runs his classic slasher intimidation routine. She dismantles it. Word choice, phrasing, implied assumptions — she works through all of it while he backpedals, clarifies, defends his "woke" credentials over a dead phone line. It is not elegant. It is not subtle. But it is Scary Movie doing what it was built to do: finding the thing everyone is pretending not to notice and screaming it at full volume. The marketing promised the film would "cancel cancel culture," and in this one scene, it earns that billing.

Regina Hall is the other reason this thing stays upright. Brenda gets into a full physical brawl with a malfunctioning AI doll that keeps trying to upstage her with dance moves, and Hall commits like her career depends on winning. Later, the film swings at The Substance, with older and younger versions of characters violently trading places in a sequence that is all prosthetics and screaming. Gross. Too long. Exactly the kind of over-the-top nonsense this franchise was built to traffic in, and Hall makes it work through sheer refusal to half-do anything. Newcomer Olivia Rose Keegan, playing Cindy's daughter, does a pitch-perfect impression of Faris's famously vacant line delivery and is the film's biggest surprise.

The audience score is sitting around 66%. The critics are somewhere around 22%. That 44-point gap is the actual story. This is a film failing on craft and winning on desperation. People want it to work. At the Cineplex screening in London, you could feel people start a laugh and then swallow it — not because nothing was funny, but because they weren't sure yet if the person beside them was going to laugh too. That split-second check is something new. It didn't exist in 2000.

The original had a magic this one cannot touch. In 2000, parody was a viable theatrical genre. Scary Movie opened against The Patriot and cleared $278 million worldwide on a $19 million budget. The humour was meaner, faster, less self-conscious. You could not make that film today. It would not get rated. It would not get financed. The culture has calcified around certain topics in ways that weren't possible 26 years ago, and the Wayans know exactly which minefield they are dancing in. So they made a movie about dancing in a minefield. That is either the smartest choice available to them or the only one.

It is self-referential to the point of exhaustion. The film mocks itself for being a "rebootiquel," repeats its own catchphrases until they curdle, and closes on a cameo parade that feels like someone ran out of ideas and called in favours. The new characters — Sara, Tuesday, Jack — are barely sketched, existing mainly to set up gags the Core Four could have handled without backup. The second half collapses into loosely connected sketches where the reference is the punchline and there is nothing behind it. Recognition stopped being a joke sometime around 2008.

Here is what nobody writing about this film wants to say: we have gotten bad at laughing. Not unfunny — bad at it, the way you get bad at something you stopped practising. Somewhere in the last decade, every laugh became a decision, a small risk assessment, and Scary Movie (2026) is 96 minutes of someone telling you to stop doing that. It is messy and obvious and tries too hard. If the 2000 version dropped today, it would be cancelled before lunch. These are different times. And this film, rough as it is, knows that.

So no. It is not the original. The craft problems are real and the missed jokes are frequent. But this is the movie 2026 produced, and it is more honest about what 2026 feels like than most films that are trying to be. We need to laugh again. We need to let our guards down, if only for 96 minutes. Scary Movie (2026) is not a great comedy. It is a necessary one.