Every once in a while in “Scary Movie” (which really should have been called “Scary Movie 6,” but never mind), there’s a gag that connects. Like the one where Ray Wilkins (Shawn Wayans) gets up in front of a church congregation to declare that he’s not gay, and then proceeds to rattle off an insanely detailed laundry list of all the gay activities he isn’t going to be doing. Or the one where Jack (Cameron Robert Stock), the love-interest-who’s-so-square-he-must-be-the-killer (he keeps getting compared to Ted Bundy), shows up at a party with his girlfriend, the high-strung Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan), and her sister, the Wednesday-like Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif), and the three try to get themselves invited in — as Remmick the vampire did in “Sinners” — by, in this case, playing a traditional banjo version of “Movin’ On Up” from “The Jeffersons.” Or the one where Sydney Park plays a high-school student who’s so scoldingly politically sensitive that when she’s being stabbed by Ghostface on the subway, an alarmed passenger refers to the victim as “she,” which makes Park cry out that they/them are her correct pronouns — at which point the alarmed passenger is annoyed enough to begin stabbing her as well.
But then there are the jokes that work better in theory than execution. Like the one where Shorty (Marlon Wayans), that nasty stoner wastrel, is pulled down on a chair into a sunken place — a send-up of “Get Out” that becomes the set-up for an anime fantasy where he sings a variation on “Golden” built around the pleasures of weed (it sounds funny, but just kind of sits there). Or the one where we appear to be watching a trailer for “Michael,” and the great Kenan Thompson is playing Michael Jackson, which is a little weird, except the joke turns out to be that it’s a trailer for… “Jermaine.” An amusing idea that doesn’t quite gel. Or take Doofy Gilmore (Dave Sheridan), a lisping geek so unclean he washes with his own spit. He’s a character so ineffectual yet grating that you’re relieved when he’s offed.
At its best, the “Scary Movie” school of comedy — like the “Naked Gun” and “Airplane!” school and all the other parodies that have sustained this genre for half a century — makes witty use of exaggeration, blowing up the clichés you didn’t know were there, taking overfamiliar tropes and inflating them into glorious outsize goofs. What makes a “Scary Movie” sequel hilarious as opposed to merely warmed over? It can be hard to put into words, but you know it when your funny bone feels it. You know it when you laugh out loud.
I didn’t laugh out loud too much at “Scary Movie,” which is a lot less funny than last summer’s “Naked Gun” reboot, though it’s got the relentless energy of a mad-dog comedy. The majority of the jokes come off as more asserted than delighted. And maybe that’s because the film doesn’t feel like it’s discovering anything new about what’s happening between the lines of the “Scream” genre. There have been seven “Scream” films; this is the sixth “Scary Movie,” the first of which came out 26 years ago (and that one was a parody of “Scream”). The new film, which steps up to mock itself for being a “rebooty-call,” is as thick and layered with legacy characters, and also new characters, as the most convoluted straining-for-a-demographic-home-run “Scream” sequel. It’s jammed with spoof-genre history, but that makes it feel more exhausting than exhilarating. It’s a top-heavy satirical party that’s become so meta it’s meh.
These movies have always been catch-all genre spoofs, which in the case of horror means there’s a lot of ripe terrain that “Scary Movie” could have plowed. I liked the nods toward skewering “Sinners,” but why didn’t that movie play a bigger part? “Scary Movie 5” came out 13 years ago; a lot of horror has passed under the bloody bridge since then. So why not expand the film with juicy jabs at “Midsommar” or the “Conjuring” films? “Scary Movie” features a brief skewering of “The Substance” (which somehow becomes an off-center joke about the Epstein files), but the movie is presented, more than anything, as a family franchise that’s riding shotgun on the power of the “Scream” franchise. The script is by Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Craig Wayans, and Rick Alvarez (the film even makes jokes about how many Wayans there are), and they have bound themselves to the Ghostface saga as if it were the only thing that mattered in horror. The killer keeps popping up, as in a “Scream” film, and that sustains the tone of comic aggression. But the knockabout violence has the effect of steamrolling the wit.
As if it needed to be pointed out, the “Scream” films have always been parodies of themselves (that was true of the first one in 1996), and by this point they’ve become mega-parodies of their own decadence. So “Scary Movie,” in ridiculing that quality, just seems to be adding another layer to the schlock-cake of overkill. Teyana Taylor, seated at a bar in the skimpiest of gold lamé, talks to the killer in the opening sequence, but the real joke is that she’s playing a super-brassy version of herself, complete with Oscar jokes. Maybe the reason the film doesn’t spend more time skewering the nuances of contempo horror (though we do get to see M3GAN do a booty dance) is that its real other subject is raunch. The Wayans brothers let fly with sex gags, whether it’s the quivering purple butt plug the lascivious Ruby Snowber character carries around or the incendiary oral-sex-as-rolling-a-blunt session she receives from her boyfriend (Gregg Wayans).
Anna Faris and Regina Hall have been in every movie of this series (except for the misbegotten “Scary Movie 5”), and both are back with good-sport glee. Faris’s Cindy Campbell is now the den mother of the franchise, Hall’s Brenda Meeks the self-described “cool Black mom.” Kim Wayans has a few good moments as an incredibly hostile ICU nurse. The climax, which features more characters playing Ghostface than you can count, is long on unbilled cameos, which I won’t reveal. But that joke is past its sell-by date. “Scary Movie,” which is set to find a big audience this weekend, shows you that a comedy series can be successful even when it’s making a joke of how recycled it is.
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