A long awaited franchise returned to with its original owners, a wait, in my humble option, for a rather mediocre return. Sydney, Ray, Brenda, and Shorty return to the big screen with a whole new cast of younger counterparts. They must all figure out who Ghostface is, this time based on the ridiculously vapid rules of a franchise reboot.
When this movie was first announced, it was one of my most anticipated movies of 2026, anyone who loves a good spoof would have been excited for a return to format. Only, the format wasn't returned to, it was stomped on, turned around, and mixed together with jokes that felt so out of place it made for a start and stall motion.
With no real plot to follow, which both 1 and 2 did have, Scary Movie 6 comes off as more of a sketch show. The modicum, the hint, of maybe a little through line is interjected, littered, with scenes that made it feel like you were flipping between multiple movies of vaguely similar nature. Scary Movie has always been great at referencing, but this film seems to just do this for the simple reason that the thing referenced was popular rather than it can be made funny. The older films spoofed horror, whereas this film seemed to lose track of this.
Then we come to the meta jokes, where the characters start to reference the other movies, eluding to the fact that they know this is simply a movie. A meta joke can be funny if either used little or committed to, but Scary Movie seems to flip between not being meta and then being too meta.
The art of good comedy is to let your audience sometimes finish the joke, keeping it vague, but this movie just slaps you in the face with so many modern culture references that it's hard to keep up. Why was there a K-Pop Demon Hunters song parody other than the reason that it had been popular? This was one of those scenes that just seemed to come out of nowhere, another being the random Michael Jackson scene?
Another issue that this movie had was that it seemed to take scenes from other movies without really working to make them funny. The Terrifier and M3GAN get this treatment. M3gan dances in Scary Movie, in a way no different than she would her own, there was no joke to be had; maybe she could have done the WAP dance instead, taking it to the next level, adding an air of exaggeration to an already rather exaggerated character. It also did the same with Memes, an obvious one being Hawk Tuha. Once again, a rather exaggerated meme just being told as it was, maybe it could have been amplified by Ray simulating it on the priest seen as the whole joke is that he is still gay and not great at hiding it.
Now, do I think it's the worst Scary Movie? No. But when held up against the first two, I didn't find it all that funny. The old ones knew when to pull back, where as this new one just keeps going, going, and going until you can't really see what it's doing anymore. Even things happening in the background of scenes were a little too much, distracting from what was happening with actors.
For a movie that promised in its tagline to not hold back, it certainly didn't work too hard to be funny. If the worst/best it can offer is what can be commonly seen in the comment section of a random TikTok, what's the point in trying?
Writings Of A Queer Mind 