Review: ‘Scary Movie’ Just Isn’t Funny

There’s a lot to root for with the sixth entry in the Scary Movie franchise. The Wayans are back for the first time in a real way since the second film, Anna Faris and Regina Hall are back for the first time since the fourth, and there’s a real charm in watching this talented team find each other again after all these years. Marlon, Shawn, and Keenen Ivory Wayans share script duty with Craig Wayans and Rick Alvarez, while Michael Tiddes, Marlon’s longtime comedy director, takes the chair. The trouble isn’t charisma, it’s the material.

It all comes down to what Scary Movie lives or dies on: it isn’t funny. To quote the wise words of one Trinity the Tuck, I kept finding myself asking: “Where are the jokes?” The franchise has always been uneven, but even at its worst, it usually had a few base-level, no-frills laughs, especially the first and third films.

The series splits pretty cleanly into eras. The first two are the Wayans films, three and four are essentially their own canon under different hands, and the fifth was a preemptive 2010s reboot that didn’t land but had, in hindsight, a little more heart than what’s on screen here. This one gets close to a joke or two, mostly when the original ensemble is just having fun together, but the jokes themselves are still almost always dead on arrival.

What keeps things from completely bottoming out is the cast. Everyone is committing, with Faris and Hall once again representing its MVPs. Cindy and Brenda back in the same room is the closest the film comes to working, with small and precise comic timing that survives even inert material. The younger cast does well, too. Olivia Rose Keegan, as Cindy’s estranged daughter Sara, has obvious star power despite the script. Her ability to fold herself into being Faris’ daughter is uncanny, an impression that’s also genuinely nuanced, and given the words on the page, it’s close to miraculous. Savannah Lee Nassif’s Tuesday is the requisite Jenna Ortega type, a quiet joke in itself since Tuesday is stitched together from Ortega’s greatest hits, Tara Carpenter, and Wednesday Addams both.