Critics buried it, audiences showed up and the Wayans family reminded us that sometimes being stupid is the entire damn point

By Rory Jackson

Comedy may be the only genre in which two people can watch the exact same movie, see the exact same jokes and leave the theater wondering what the hell was wrong with the other person.

That brings us to Scary Movie.

Or Scary Movie 6, as virtually everybody calls it because asking audiences to pretend five other movies do not exist is precisely the kind of ridiculous behavior this franchise was created to mock.

Horror-Fix has already published a wonderfully merciless one-star review of Scary Movie 6. That review describes the movie as a desperate act of franchise grave robbing filled with predictable jokes, exhausted references and returning characters who have become watered-down versions of themselves.

It is brutal, it is funny, and it is also wrong.

Not objectively wrong, because comedy does not work that way. You cannot place a joke beneath a microscope, count the laughs per minute and prove that somebody enjoyed it incorrectly. Our original reviewer watched Scary Movie 6 and saw a franchise struggling to justify its resurrection.

I saw a group of talented idiots having an absolute blast desecrating the corpse.

And I mean that as a compliment.

The Franchise Is Not Being Robbed—The Family Came Home

Calling Scary Movie 6 an act of grave robbing makes sense until you look at who is holding the shovel.

The Wayans family did not wander into somebody else’s franchise and start removing the jewelry. They helped build the damned thing.

The original Scary Movie was released in 2000 with Keenen Ivory Wayans directing and Shawn and Marlon Wayans starring and writing. It was vulgar, chaotic, juvenile and frequently hilarious. It had no interest in behaving like a respectable comedy because respectability would have defeated the entire purpose.

Then the Wayans left after Scary Movie 2.

The franchise continued, sometimes successfully, but it gradually became a different animal. The later sequels offered plenty of jokes and recognizable parodies, but they lacked the particular energy that made the first two films feel dangerous. The early movies did not merely reference popular horror. They attacked it with the enthusiasm of children who had discovered that the adults had left the house.

Bringing the Wayans back is not Hollywood hiring strangers to perform a Weekend at Bernie’s routine with a dead franchise.

It is a homecoming.

Yes, nostalgia is part of the sales pitch. Of course it is. Nobody is pretending otherwise. Anna Faris returning as Cindy Campbell and Regina Hall returning as Brenda Meeks were always going to be major reasons to see the movie.

Nostalgia, however, is not automatically a creative crime. Sometimes people want to spend another ninety minutes with characters who made them laugh twenty-five years ago.

That is not cultural regression.

That is Tuesday night.

It Is Not Toothless—It Just Is Not Interested in Giving a Speech

The original review argues that the new film promises offensive comedy but delivers something sanitized, cautious and hopelessly behind the curve.

There is some truth buried inside that criticism.

Scary Movie 6 is not as shocking as the original. It probably could not be. The first movie arrived when audiences were less accustomed to having every possible boundary violated by strangers on the internet before breakfast.

What felt dangerous in 2000 may now feel like an average group chat.

The new movie also lives in a culture where every joke is immediately removed from its context, clipped for social media and marched before a jury of furious people who have not seen the movie. Anyone making a broad studio comedy today is working beneath a cloud of corporate anxiety.

You can occasionally feel that anxiety in Scary Movie 6.

But calling the entire movie toothless ignores how frequently it still chooses bad taste over good judgment. The Wayans are not attempting to deliver a carefully constructed political manifesto disguised as a horror parody. They are trying to make an audience laugh at bodily fluids, celebrity vanity, franchise desperation, influencer narcissism and the inherently ridiculous behavior of people in horror movies.

It is not satire designed to be discussed at a university symposium.

It is satire designed to make somebody spit soda through their nose.

That remains a legitimate artistic goal.

The Frantic Pacing Is the Point

One of the funniest observations in the negative review compares the film to a magician frantically jingling keys in front of a baby.

Fair enough.

But sometimes the baby enjoys the keys.

Scary Movie 6 moves at the speed of somebody who has just realized the rental car is due back in twelve minutes. Jokes collide with references. Cameos interrupt other cameos. A parody may begin before the previous parody has completely finished bleeding out on the floor.

That approach can be exhausting.

It is also how this franchise has always operated.

The early Scary Movie films were not restrained comedies in which carefully developed situations slowly blossomed into elegant punchlines. They were cinematic shotgun blasts. Some jokes hit the target, some hit the wall, and some may have accidentally killed a neighbor.

The pleasure came from the barrage.

The new film understands that a parody of modern horror cannot spend fifteen minutes politely establishing every target. Audiences already recognize the imagery, the music, the camera movements and the familiar rules. The movie can drop Cindy into a recognizable nightmare and begin dismantling it immediately.

The pace is not always graceful, but grace has never been the Wayans family’s preferred weapon.

They brought a flamethrower to a fencing match.

Predictable Does Not Always Mean Unfunny

Yes, several jokes in Scary Movie 6 announce themselves well before the punchline arrives.

You can see some of them coming from another county.

That does not automatically make them worthless.

We know Wile E. Coyote is going to fall from the cliff. We know the Three Stooges are going to injure one another. We know Leslie Nielsen will say something ridiculous while maintaining the expression of a man delivering military intelligence.

Anticipation can be part of comedy.

The question is not always whether we predicted the destination. Sometimes the question is whether the performer makes the collision funny.

Anna Faris remains exceptionally good at this. She can stare at an obvious threat with just enough confused sincerity to make a familiar gag work. Her greatest strength as Cindy has always been her complete lack of embarrassment. Faris never stands outside the joke and asks the audience to admire how clever she is. She throws herself into the stupidity as if the fate of civilization depends upon it.

Marlon and Shawn Wayans operate with a similar lack of shame. If a joke requires dignity, they surrender it immediately. If it requires dragging a gag past the point of reason, they drag the body another mile.

Do all those jokes work?

Absolutely not.

Some should have been removed from the movie, buried beneath six feet of concrete and denied a funeral.

But the failures are not evidence that the successful jokes never happened. When Scary Movie 6 lands, it produces the kind of large, involuntary laugh that increasingly polished studio comedies seem afraid to pursue.

Sometimes a Dead Joke Comes Back Wrong

The original review is also correct that the movie stretches certain jokes far beyond their natural lifespan.

That is one of its weaknesses.

It is also occasionally one of its strengths.

Comedy can become funny, stop being funny and then somehow become funny again through sheer commitment. The process is dangerous. Many jokes never complete the journey. They simply die in the middle and force everyone in the theater to stare at the corpse.

Scary Movie 6 takes that risk repeatedly.

A lesser comedy might abandon a stupid premise once it receives the first laugh. This movie keeps pushing until the joke becomes uncomfortable, grotesque or completely detached from the logic that introduced it.

That is not sophisticated.

Neither is watching somebody get hit in the testicles, and humanity has enjoyed that for thousands of years.

The movie’s willingness to overcommit gives it a sense of recklessness missing from many recent comedies. Modern studio humor is often assembled to be pleasant, quotable and easily placed inside a trailer. Scary Movie 6 is willing to make a joke uglier, louder and less defensible than necessary.

Sometimes it destroys the joke.

Sometimes it makes the joke.

Anna Faris Is Still the Franchise’s Secret Weapon

Our original review acknowledges that Anna Faris is game but argues that the material gives her little opportunity to recapture what audiences loved about Cindy Campbell.

I would argue that Cindy was never loved because the material protected her.

She was loved because Faris could survive anything the material did to her.

Cindy is a wonderful parody protagonist because she exists somewhere between an innocent final girl and the only sane person inside an asylum. She can be astonishingly stupid in one scene and strangely competent in the next. Faris plays every contradiction without blinking.

More importantly, she understands that sincerity makes absurdity funnier. Cindy never behaves as though she knows she is appearing in a parody. The world around her is ridiculous, but her fear, confusion and determination remain completely genuine.

That skill has not disappeared.

There are moments when the screenplay leans too heavily upon the audience’s affection for Cindy. Recognition is asked to perform work that should have been handled by stronger writing. Faris nevertheless finds small reactions, physical choices and line readings that remind us why the franchise once seemed unimaginable without her.

And whatever anyone thinks of the movie, comments about an actor’s cosmetic appearance contribute nothing useful to the criticism.

Faris is funny because of her timing, commitment and willingness to look ridiculous.

Her face is not the problem.

The screenplay occasionally is.

Brenda Has Changed, but Regina Hall Has Not Lost It

The negative review describes the new Brenda as a diluted approximation of the character—a light-beer version of somebody who once drank directly from the bottle.

That is a terrific line.

It also overlooks what Regina Hall is doing.

Brenda cannot be exactly the same person she was in 2000 because nobody should remain precisely the same chaotic disaster for twenty-six years. The character has aged. The actress has aged. The audience has aged.

Most of us have knees that make noises now.

Hall does not attempt to imitate a younger version of herself. She gives Brenda the confidence of someone who has survived several horror movies, multiple deaths and a franchise continuity held together with chewing gum.

Brenda may be less constantly explosive, but Hall still knows exactly when to hijack a scene. A look, a pause or an unexpectedly aggressive line delivery can redirect the entire joke toward her. She and Faris also retain something impossible to manufacture through references alone: chemistry.

Cindy and Brenda feel like people who have survived a lifetime of ridiculous catastrophes together.

The friendship gives the movie a little heart without forcing it to become sentimental. Their reunion is not merely an advertisement for earlier sequels. It is genuinely enjoyable to watch two gifted comic performers slip back into a partnership that helped define an era of parody.

Could the film give Brenda more to do?

Absolutely.

Does Regina Hall still make almost everything she is given funnier?

Also absolutely.

The Wayans Jokes Are Relevant Because the Wayans Are Relevant

The movie repeatedly jokes about the Wayans family and their long absence from the franchise.

The original review considers this a reference trapped in 2004.

That criticism would carry more weight if the Wayans were being referenced randomly. They are not a dusty celebrity punchline dragged from storage because the writers could not think of anything newer.

Their absence is part of the franchise’s history.

For years, fans discussed what Scary Movie lost when the family departed. Whether every audience member cares about that history is irrelevant. The filmmakers care, the returning actors care and a substantial portion of the franchise’s original audience cares.

The self-referential jokes also acknowledge the obvious. Everybody involved knows this is a legacy sequel. Everybody understands that the movie is attempting to revive a style of comedy associated with another era.

Pretending otherwise would be considerably more embarrassing.

The Wayans references allow the movie to admit its age, its baggage and its shameless desire to reclaim something that slipped away. That honesty gives the reunion more personality than another anonymous reboot assembled by people who studied the originals during lunch.

The family is not simply returning to appear on camera.

They are returning to reassert ownership over the voice of the franchise.

That matters.

The Younger Characters Are Supposed to Be Annoying

The younger cast members are accused of possessing the charisma of a sponsored advertisement for meal-replacement powder.

Again, excellent insult.

But influencer characters who were charming, thoughtful and emotionally grounded would be a remarkably poor parody of influencer culture.

These characters are loud, artificial and addicted to attention because that is the target. They experience terror through the language of engagement, branding and content. Every catastrophe becomes another opportunity to position a camera and ask whether death might improve the algorithm.

Are they irritating?

Frequently.

So are the people they are mocking.

The performances become more effective when viewed as grotesque caricatures rather than replacements for Cindy and Brenda. The younger cast represents an entirely different relationship with pop culture. Cindy survived an era shaped by slashers, cable television and physical media. These characters exist in a world where every person is simultaneously the star, director and marketing department of a terrible reality show.

The generational collision gives the returning characters something new to push against.

It does not work in every scene, but the idea is sound.

Reality Being Absurd Does Not Make Parody Obsolete

Perhaps the strongest point in the negative review is that reality has become funnier than Scary Movie.

The internet is more ridiculous. Political discourse is more ridiculous. Celebrity scandals are more ridiculous. Corporations routinely release statements that sound as though they were written by malfunctioning comedy robots.

How can parody compete with a world already parodying itself?

It cannot.

It does not need to.

Parody is not valuable because reality lacks absurdity. It is valuable because it allows us to gather in a dark room and laugh at the absurdity together.

Scary Movie 6 does not uncover some profound truth about modern culture that had previously escaped our attention. Nobody leaves the theater stunned to discover that influencers are narcissistic, horror sequels are repetitive or celebrities behave strangely.

The movie turns those familiar irritations into communal targets.

There is something refreshing about comedy that does not ask to be treated like medicine. Scary Movie 6 does not promise to repair political discourse, expose institutional corruption or heal a divided culture.

It wants to make a theater full of people laugh at something deeply stupid.

Given the current condition of the world, that may be enough.

Not Every Joke Works—Enough of Them Do

Defending Scary Movie 6 does not require pretending it is flawless.

It is uneven.

Some references already feel old. Several jokes continue long after the audience has received the point. A few cameos exist primarily so viewers can recognize somebody and elbow the person sitting beside them. The film sometimes confuses loudness with energy and recognition with comedy.

Those are real problems.

They are not fatal ones.

The movie works because its best performers commit completely, its creators understand the franchise and its shameless stupidity feels strangely liberating. It does not stand outside the culture delivering brilliant observations from a safe distance.

It dives into the sewage and begins splashing.

That will repel some viewers.

Others will laugh.

Neither reaction requires a defense, but Scary Movie 6 deserves more credit than it has received. It is not the corpse of a franchise being manipulated by a studio. It is a messy family reunion held inside the cemetery, complete with inappropriate jokes, unresolved resentment and at least one relative who should never have been given access to the microphone.

The movie is crude, excessive, nostalgic and wildly inconsistent.

It is also funny.

Sometimes extremely funny.

Our original reviewer gave it one star because watching the comedy struggle to justify its existence became the saddest punchline of the year.

I had the opposite experience.

I watched a comedy refuse to justify itself at all.

It arrived, behaved terribly, broke several things and left before anybody could call the police.

Just like the Scary Movie franchise should.

Three and a half stars.

Not because every joke works.

Because enough of them do—and the ones that work hit harder than you have probably heard.
Sorry Ash Hamilton… It’s a 5 star for me