What’s it about?

25 years have passed since the original movie, and very little has changed. There’s a Ghostface killer doing murders, and the Wayans Brothers are still making jokes from 2001.

What’d we think?

The original Scary Movie may not have been high art, but it used the structure of scary movies to lampoon scary movies and throw in some crass topical references. This rebootquel (their word, not mine) has only the barest semblance of structure and feels more like a loose collection of skits that never made it past a first draft. The Scream franchise has always been the core touchpoint for the franchise, but Scream was self-referential to begin with, and the half dozen sequels have only exacerbated this problem. The Wayans brothers aren’t savvy enough to deal with multiple layers of irony, so they don’t try.

To pile on further, there’s not nearly enough jokes in this comedy. A core tenet of these movies is to throw a constant stream of jokes at the audience, so you barely notice if one doesn’t land. Scary Movie’s gags are too few and far between, consisting of belaboured setups for wafer-thin payoffs, and very few of them are even in reference to horror movies.

The movie’s most glaring issue is that the Wayans brothers are now old, rich men – Marlon is 53, Shawn is 55, and Damon is 65. They don’t exactly have their finger on the pulse of popular culture, and there’s far too much time spent punching down on the younger generation. The fact that they spend the climax of the movie whinging about how they felt unfairly treated during the development of the sequels just makes them come across and bitter and out of touch.

Scary Movie is a loose collection of unfunny skits, mashed together into the rough shape of a movie. It’s the least fun I’ve had at the movies all year.