Scary Movie

The Catharsis of Stupid

I did not expect to be in a theater in 2026 wondering what kind of chaos Cindy Campbell and Brenda Meeks would wander into next. It has been almost twenty years since the Wayans brothers were last properly at the wheel.

So here we are. The sixth *Scary Movie* — due in June and already drawing attention because the Wayans brothers are back together after 18 years — turns out to be a loud, sloppy, gloriously unsubtle attack on the way modern movies take themselves far too seriously.



Michael Tiddes is not here to reinvent anything. Mostly, he knows enough to stay out of the way and let Marlon, Shawn, and Keenen Ivory Wayans smash through the last decade of "elevated horror" with a baseball bat. Honestly, the timing feels right. When Alison Foreman of IndieWire recently reviewed the latest *Scream* installment, she astutely noted that the genre's once-sharp self-awareness has "been dulled into self-soothing". That gets at the problem exactly. A lot of current meta-horror wants credit for being clever. *Scary Movie* wants to clobber you with a shovel and keep moving.

The long *A Quiet Place* riff is where the movie really locks in. Tiddes shoots it with straight-faced seriousness, right down to the deadened gray color palette. Cindy (Anna Faris) and Brenda (Regina Hall) creep through a trashed grocery store, and for a minute the scene honestly works as suspense. Then Brenda notices a rack of stale tortilla chips. You can read the whole terrible decision on Hall’s body before she moves: the spine tightening, the eyes widening, the almost spiritual pull of doing the dumbest thing possible. She takes a bite. The crunch explodes through the room. What follows, with a blind creature and one badly placed squeaky toy, is timed so cleanly it starts to feel weirdly elegant.



The cast is what keeps the whole mechanism from falling apart. Faris remains an expert at playing panic like an everyday inconvenience. She hunches into herself, reacts to carnage as if she has just had a mildly annoying morning, and somehow that contrast still kills. But Hall is the one who really takes over the movie. Seeing her bounce into this mode, especially with that heavier dramatic part in Paul Thomas Anderson's upcoming *One Battle After Another* sitting right around the corner, is a jolt. She doesn't simply land punchlines. She fires them.

Does it all really cohere? Not especially. Once the movie starts folding in jokes about Ryan Coogler's *Sinners* and Zach Cregger's *Weapons*, you can feel the stitching. The script moves in chunks, and a few bits just die on impact. (I still have no idea what the intended target was in the *Longlegs* interrogation scene, even if Marlon Wayans in ghostly pale makeup is now burned into my brain).



But chasing structural elegance feels beside the point here. At a time when horror so often arrives dressed up as a grand statement about collective pain, there is something almost medicinal about a movie that is content to watch people wipe out on banana peels while escaping a demon. It's noisy. It's idiotic. It feels weirdly comforting.