The best thing about the new Scary Movie isn't the masked killer stalking a reunited cast — it's just watching Anna Faris and Regina Hall share a scene again. Cindy Campbell absorbs chaos with sincere confusion; Brenda Meeks attacks it like it's personally offended her. That chemistry alone briefly makes it feel like the franchise's whole style of comedy has survived the trip from 2000 to 2026 intact.
Then the reference train starts, and the movie becomes a lot more familiar. A recognizable scene starts, the audience clocks what's being spoofed, and the joke escalates through bodily fluids or cartoon violence and moves on. That's always been how this franchise works, and it isn't automatically a problem — the original knew Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer well enough to actually expose what was ridiculous about them. This one too often just points at a recent horror hit and assumes recognition alone is the joke.
Faris never lets Cindy know she's in a comedy, and that blank sincerity does more comic work than half the film's actual jokes.
Faris is still doing career-best committed stupidity, and Hall can flip a scene's whole energy just by walking into it — Brenda's confidence has if anything only sharpened with age. Marlon Wayans throws real energy at Shorty's stoner plotline, though the joke hasn't evolved much in twenty-six years, and Shawn Wayans gets more mileage since Ray's whole identity is still an ongoing contradiction the film is happy to leave unexamined.
There's something almost charming about the film's total refusal to grow up or run anything past a publicist, in an era of studio comedy that's gotten increasingly polished and increasingly scared of its own edges. The best stretch actually spoofs the self-serious language of the modern legacy sequel — characters solemnly invoking "generational trauma" in situations far too stupid to earn the vocabulary, which is a sharper joke than most of what surrounds it. The irony, of course, is that this movie is itself a legacy sequel banking hard on nostalgia.
The editing moves like a scrolling comedy feed: a new target, cameo, or callback every few seconds, which makes the film hard to call boring but also keeps any single bit from building the way the genre's best spoofs (Airplane!, The Naked Gun) always did by taking their fictional worlds seriously for a beat before wrecking them. The smarter move here would've been trusting Faris and Hall more — their reunion is funnier than most of the horror references, and it's the one thing the screenplay didn't have to manufacture.
