Nate At The Movies

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

If you made me bet at the beginning of the week which of the June 5 theatrical releases I’d see first, I would’ve lost all my money. There was no way I thought Scary Movie would be first off the list, but here we are. Sammy—who I’ve learned watched at least three of the Scary Movies—and I ventured to my favorite Regal to take in what I felt like would be the exact same product as the first one. It was the same and it wasn’t the same, but the end result remained—it was decent.

Though I’ve only seen two of the six Scary Movies, I’ve got my finger on the formula for these movies, and while that formula didn’t really work for me in the first one, I think I released my inhibitions for this one and just enjoyed the dumbness. It helped that many of the references—to both movies and pop culture—were much more current, and I knew about a lot of the stuff they were referencing. Some of the nods to recent movies felt pretty shoehorned in, specifically the references to Michael, The Substance, and KPop Demon Hunters, shockingly. Their effectiveness and humor also ranged, and the clunkier additions were also the less funny ones. I did enjoy the Sinners and Wicked references, though—they were pretty smooth.

Most of the really great humor came from the pop culture references, be it the Teyana Taylor opening or the many political jabs, though some of them—namely the ICE one—were kind of rough. There were still plenty of gay jokes, but at least the Wayans broadened their reach to the trans community. Speaking of the Wayans, they came to play, and the cast as a whole was pretty committed and funny. Bringing back the legacy characters was a good idea, but I do wonder how they’ll make any more of these movies since those legacy characters resigned to killing all their kids in a house fire. Brutal, but hilarious.

Scary Movie was exactly what I expected it to be—loose and shallow narratively, but aggressively funny and meta—and while I probably won’t go back and watch all of the Scary Movies that predate this one, I can surprisingly say that I enjoyed this rebootycall more than the original. Like I mentioned, I think I gave in to the silliness more with this one, and it paid off. The way more incoherent story also played a role—rather than parodying a whole narrative beat for beat, Scary Movie (2026) was essentially a string of raunchy SNL sketches tied loosely by horror movies. I’ll take that, apparently!