The gist of this one, of course, is making fun of long-in-the-tooth franchises being dragged out of the mothballs for yet another legacy sequel. And appropriately for Scary Movie, the main targets are most specifically Radio Silence’s Scream 5 and VI, right down to mocking those movies’ attempt to make the term “requel” happen. Scary Movie 6 is a “rebootquel,” as Marlon Wayans’ always welcome Shorty enthuses when coming up for air between bong hits.
If you’ve seen Scream 5, the skeleton of that movie is pretty much identical, complete with a Jenna Ortega lookalike (Savannah Lee Nassif), here named Tuesday for “legal reasons,” getting stabbed in the opening sequence but living long enough to bring her estranged big sister Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan) back to town alongside a totally not sketchy looking boyfriend (Cameron Scott Roberts). Turns out Sara and Tuesday are the daughters of Cindy Campbell, the OG Anna Farris, who is now in Jamie Lee Curtis’ fright wig from Halloween (2018).
At this point, it should be clear this is going to be a kitchen sink approach to just about every horror flick the Scary Movie franchise has missed out on since 2013. Cindy and a delightful Regina Hall as Brenda Meeks are back as the “legacy” characters, a la Scream or Halloween—but NEVER I Know What You Did Last Summer, a movie the olds tell the young kids not to worry about in this movie when they ask if it’s related to The Summer I Turned Pretty— but Brenda is now rocking Octavia Spencer’s haircut and vibes from Ma while living in the house from Get Out; Cindy’s daughter works at the Final Destination Theme Park where “everybody dies!;” and their estranged buddies Shorty and the perpetually closeted Ray (Shawn Wayans) find themselves dragging the kids into parodies of M3GAN and Sinners.
Intriguingly, the prevalent trend of “elevated” (or artistic) horror movies from the last decade are mostly side-stepped. There’s a line where Cindy mentions It Follows, but says “that movie’s too obscure for a flashback.” That or perhaps too hard to insert poop, sex, or transphobic jokes into. With that said, there’s a solid gag about Nosferatu during the post-credits—and a flat one about Longlegs.
But it is the aforementioned scatological humor that really makes or breaks Scary Movie and the Wayans’ oeuvre in general. Their comedies, especially in this series, are less movies than a series of thinly tied together sketches. It’s R-rated, filthy-minded SNL that’ll dare do a lynching gag. Some of the gonzo bits work, some don’t, and a few are outright hilarious, such as Shawn Wayans revealing Shorty is in his 25th senior year at the local high school. And when it skips horror altogether and swerves into a John Wick parody? The best stuff here. But by design all of it feels antiquated and, um… old.
The Wayans would likely say that is because they’re bringing back raunchy comedy and the days where it was fun to offend everyone. Yet it’s noticeable when entire sequences become about “man, kids these days,” such as when Shorty and Ghostface end up getting some killer Twitch content. That one can still get a chuckle because it has a twinkle in its eye, but when the twinkle shifts to malice, and Scary Movie 6 gets blood in its mouth, it becomes something ugly.
