There’s a sort of initial gut reaction to Scary Movie 6 (stylised as ‘Scary Movie’) something along the lines of “how does this exist.” But the more you think about it the more it makes sense. For a start, everything else of its era for which there’s even the remotest nostalgia is back, including the series’ primary source material, the Scream franchise. Horror is in the middle of the cinematic zeitgeist again. The formula is inherently perfect for regeneration given each film is essentially the vague plot outline of a recent horror film with current movie and cultural references plugged in. And the Wayans brothers, Marlon and Shawn – back at the helm as stars and writers, after three entries in the Scary Movie wilderness – aren’t exactly occupied with other more profitable concerns. Plus even Scary Movie 5, which lacked almost any of the series’ cast, made four times its budget at the box office. Perhaps the better question is, how did it take so long?

It’s a hard film to talk about without getting the marketing strategy out of the way upfront. The trailer and posters are all desperately keen to position this as an answer to wokeness, which by implication has killed comedy. Fear of sacred cows and upsetting the pearl-clutching classes has been holding back real jokes in movies for far too long. Never fear though, the Wayans brothers are back to save it, bravely “going there” in a way that other filmmakers simply wouldn’t have the chutzpah to do.

It’s fair to say that all of that posturing ends up feeling irrelevant to the end product pretty quickly. The inevitable trans material reads as almost tick-box and quaint compared to much of what is already lazily peppered through every second streaming-era stand-up set, and the heavily signposted Michael Jackson segment can’t feel that transgressive in the shade of the enormous success and controversy of the biopic it’s parodying. The COVID material is more confusing than anything else. And bringing back Doofy is not so much a reminder of an edgier time than it is just a terrible screenwriting decision.

What the film is primarily — and arguably, more interestingly at a time when theatrically released comedies are at a nadir — is the return of slapstick film parody movies to the cinema, following on the heels of Akiva Schaffer’s Naked Gun reboot last year. The format, invented by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker (“ZAZ”) with classics like Airplane! (1980) and the original Naked Gun (1988), went in to overdrive in the 00’s after the first Scary Movie and 2001’s Not Another Teen Movie, with new increasingly cheap instalments released each year, nominally based around whatever topical and increasingly micro genre screenwriters could think of a few jokes for. The Scary Movie series was arguably the strongest in quality of that era, if at least partly due to David Zucker taking over for parts 3 and 4 (something the Wayans poke decent fun of in the script here). The format essentially lost steam around the start of the 2010s and has lain largely dormant since then, with the exception of a few lightly seen outliers (the Wayans brothers’ own Haunted House series among them).

As a return, Scary Movie 6 is neither roaring success nor abject failure. There is little plot to summarise, but the basic bones are taken from Scream 5 and 6 with Ghostface as the notional killer. Fellow ReelGood reviewer Sascha Kenny made the excellent point that for some, Ghostface has as strong a mental association with this series as it does to Scream itself, and it feels like the Wayans know this too.

In the strengths column are the performances of the majority of the original cast (not you Doofy), with Marlon Wayans as Shorty Meeks an undeniable best-on-ground, and some strong moments for both Anna Faris and Regina Hall, who commit earnestly enough to the whole thing to keep the possibility alive that they’re here for the love of the game and not just the paycheque. The segment with Shorty in a streamer crew, complete with Kai Cenat cameo, is the highest energy and most fun of the entire film, and there’s some good background sight gags, particularly in the early running, that hark back to the ZAZ oeuvre. Some of the strongest writing and heaviest hitting cameos are also saved for the climax, which helps the audience to leave the cinema with warmer feelings towards the whole affair than they might have expected.

When it’s bad, though, it’s really bad. There are leaden moments and ideas, especially in the first and seconds acts, where the dialogue seems to lack any rhythm whatsoever, let alone humour, unassisted by an almost complete lack of score. Often the more direct the parody, the less actual jokes they’ve remembered to write for it. There’s also an anonymity to the performances and writing for the new characters that ironically echoes similar issues in Screams 5-7.

The strong opening weekend for Scary Movie 6 suggests it won’t be the last instalment. And there’s a giddy silliness to the highs of this one that give some hope that if there is a slapstick parody renaissance that the Wayans have something more to offer. How much probably depends on which of their various instincts they lean in to.

 

Scary Movie 6 is currently playing in Australian cinemas.