After more than two decades away from the franchise they helped create, the Wayans have returned to Scary Movie with the promise of restoring the series to its former glory. Instead, the latest in this preposterous paraody franchise has turned out to be a catastrophic misfire that manages to undermine everything that once made this film series successful. This isn’t merely a bad comedy. It’s a painfully unfunny, creatively bankrupt, and genuinely exhausting experience that ranks among the very worst films of 2026.
Directed by Michael Tiddes and written by Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Craig Wayans, and Rick Alvarez, the film attempts to reunite classic characters such as Cindy Campbell, Brenda Meeks, Ray Wilkins, and Shorty Meeks as they confront the return of the masked killer from the original. On paper, that sounds like a nostalgic return to the series’ roots. In practice, it feels like a desperate attempt to cash in on audience goodwill without understanding what made those films work.
The plot follows Cindy (Anna Faris) and her friends reuniting years after their original encounter with Ghostface. That is essentially all there is to say about the story, because the screenplay seems wholly uninterested in narrative structure, character development, or even basic coherence. Scenes begin and end seemingly at random. Characters vanish for long stretches and reappear without explanation. Set-ups rarely have punchlines. Punchlines rarely have set-ups.
The dialogue often sounds less like something crafted by human comedians and more like an algorithm scraping social media feeds and randomly stitching together whatever happened to be trending. Nearly every joke consists of a reference or a painfully forced attempt at internet humour. The film mistakes recognition for comedy, assuming audiences will laugh simply because they understand what is being referenced. put simply, They won’t.
The original Scary Movie succeeded because it parodied horror films with energy, timing, and a willingness to be gleefully ridiculous. This reboot mistakes volume for wit. The jokes arrive at machine-gun pace, yet almost none of them land. Instead of satire, the film offers a relentless barrage of internet memes, TikTok references, celebrity gags, and pop-culture callbacks that already feel outdated.
Worse still is the film’s dependence on shock value – homophobia, transphobia, sexism. Many of the gags are not merely tasteless but actively unpleasant. Offensive humour can work when there is intelligence behind it or when it serves a larger comedic purpose. Here, the offensiveness appears to be the joke itself; the film reaches again and again for crude, juvenile, or outright uncomfortable material, seemingly convinced that crossing a line constitutes wit. It doesn’t.
The returning cast members do what they can with the material, though no performer can rescue jokes that simply do not exist. Anna Faris and Regina Hall remain immensely charismatic, and Marlon and Shawn Wayans still possess natural comic chemistry, yet they spend most of the film trapped inside half-finished sketches that feel barely beyond first-draft improvisation.
What makes the disappointment particularly acute is the weight of the franchise’s legacy. The first 2 films became cultural phenomena because they understood parody. They were silly, crude, and frequently outrageous, but they were also sharply constructed comedies. This 2026 revival feels like a hollow imitation of its predecessors, replicating surface-level elements whilst entirely missing the creative spark that made them work.
The issue is simple: the film just isn’t funny. It isn’t clever. It isn’t even memorably bad in an entertaining way. The fact that the Wayans family returned to the franchise after so many years should have been cause for genuine celebration. Instead, it has resulted in one of the most dispiriting comedy sequels in recent memory.
Every person involved should have looked at the final cut and asked the same question: “Is this really the best we can do?”
