The New “Scary Movie” Is Out of Touch (Review)

The latest “Scary Movie’ relies heavily on nostalgia while failing to satirize modern horror.

TOP FIVE THINGS ABOUT SCARY MOVIE

5. Why is this Just Scream (2022)?

One of the most confounding things about this new Scary Movie is just how blatantly it relies on the 2022 “requel” of the Scream franchise (ostensibly Scream 5) for its entire structural backbone. The first Scary Movie was a kind of medley between Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer’s plots, but the recycling of those beats was motivated by the film’s clear intent to lampoon them. I even struggle to revisit the original I Know What You Did Last Summer anymore, because so much of it has been so thoroughly dismantled by that first Scary Movie’s jokes and insights.

However, that is very much not the case here. Instead of feeling purposeful, it feels as if this new film recycles Scream 5’s plot out of sheer laziness. There are entire verbatim recreations of scenes with only a single new joke added, and that one joke is simply not funny. As a result, there are entire stretches of this movie where it feels like an unintentional rewatch of Scream 5, which is especially strange given that that film has already been surpassed by multiple sequels in the years since.

4. An Absolutely Incoherent Collection of Skits

The Scream 5 element of it all speaks to a larger issue as well: this is clearly a script that has been gathering dust on someone’s shelf for the past few years, and upon brushing it off, the Wayans and co. simply decided to insert new scenes referencing more modern horror movies. Instead of finding anything resembling a semi-organic way to integrate them, they’ve essentially stapled unrelated scenes onto the existing structure.

The result is that all the moments referencing anything remotely topical stick out like a sore thumb and largely fail to offer anything funny or insightful in their commentary. In this way, the film plays more like one of the off-brand parody films of the late ’00s, such as Epic Movie or Meet the Spartans, where simply referencing a movie, event, or celebrity was treated as a substitute for actual joke writing.

The first Scary Movie works as a story unto itself. It is goofy and full of lunacy, but it has an internal logic that holds the whole thing together. This new Scary Movie feels like a haphazard grab bag of non-sequiturs, compiled into something that plays more like a clip reel in a theater.

3. Some of This Has Aged Like Milk…

Look, I know nostalgia for the ’00s is big right now given the twenty-year cycle and all, but this is a safe space. We can all acknowledge that there were entire swaths of ’00s culture that were an absolute hellscape even at the time and deserve to be left in the past, right? Unfortunately, that feeling is very much evoked by many of Scary Movie’s callbacks to original characters and jokes.

Specifically, characters like Ray and Doofy feel like an absolute chore to sit through here. Not only are these characters revived as one-note, single-joke versions of themselves, but their performers also come across as uninspired, as if they could not be phoning it in more if they tried. Watching these performers return to these roles could have been genuinely fun (just look at Anna Faris and Regina Hall; they’re genuinely great in this), but instead it ends up feeling completely drained of energy.

2. But Some of it Still Works

As mentioned, some of this still works. Farris and Hall are both incredible, and so is Marlon Wayans as Shorty. These are comedic talents returning to familiar characters and genuinely trying to bring fresh ideas to the table, and the film is at its best when it focuses on them.

For my money, Farris is a national treasure and has been an undervalued commodity for decades. She is excellent here, though I wish there was more of her and that she wasn’t so often saddled with tired material. The real testament to her and Hall’s talent is that, even when the writing is uninspired, their chemistry makes the jokes land regardless. They are high-caliber comedic performers, and it shows every time they share the screen.

1. The Finale is Good!

For fear of spoiling the new Scary Movie (what an absolutely moronic thing to have to type), I won’t dig too deeply into the details of the killer reveal here. But suffice it to say, it’s a moment that feels like the clearest expression of what the entire film has been building toward in one form or another, and it’s such a cohesive idea that I wish more of the movie had leaned into it instead of the scattershot skits it spends most of its runtime on.

The final few minutes of the film see it thumbing its nose at legacy sequels and reboot culture as a whole in the way I was hoping the entire film would, while also inadvertently reflecting the shortcomings of itself as a movie and its central thesis. I’m not entirely convinced it was all intentional, but it’s there, and it’s easily the most interesting thing the film has to offer. It’s funny and thought-provoking in a way the rest of the film should have been.

RGM GRADE

(D)

In the late ’90s and early ’00s, the Wayans Brothers proved to have their pulse on the exact right part of cinematic culture at the exact right time with Scary Movie. Released in 2000, the film lampooned popular horror films of the preceding years, such as Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and ultimately served as a sharp skewering of this post-modern iteration of the slasher genre. In the years that followed, the landscape of horror would change substantially due to a number of various factors, and the Scary Movie films would attempt to evolve alongside it.

However, infamously, the Wayans Brothers were unceremoniously booted from the franchise by none other than modern-day goblin and bona fide monster Harvey Weinstein himself, following the second installment. The resulting sequels persisted throughout the decade but became notably sillier (I will confess, I am a Scary Movie 3 defender; that film went quadruple-platinum when it hit cable TV among my classmates, so it has my stamp of approval), broader in their comedic approach, and less effective in actually providing meaningful satire of the horror genre.

So with this new Scary Movie, the Wayans Brothers have returned to the franchise for the first time in over two decades, and from the marketing, seemed to be bringing a renewed focus with them. The trailers for this new film made a conscious effort to showcase just how horror-focused the film was going to be, and how it aimed to comedically interrogate a whole new generation of horror. Unfortunately, the new Scary Movie is nowhere near capable of living up to even the most modest iteration of that promise.

I would love to tell you there’s a great new Scary Movie out that thoroughly examines this new generation of horror with insights, gags, and lunacy, but that is sadly not what this movie is. Instead, it’s a sequel that feels woefully out of touch and carries a fair bit of that unmistakable “old man shouts at clouds” energy.

There are strong bright spots (if this film were just the opening sequence paired with ten minutes of Farris and Hall riffing, it would be an A), but the overwhelming majority of it is painfully dull, uninspired, and thoroughly unfunny. Here’s hoping Scary Movie 7 brings a bit more joy to the table.