“Scary Movie 6” doesn’t match expectations The film feels like a patchwork of the best horror movies of recent years but with a few missing pieces

The early 2000s were irreverent. Scary Movie was the perfect example of this, but every genre at that moment needed to shake off the authority of the previous century, even laughter itself — just think that in 2001 alone, a classic of absurd comedy like Not Another Teen Movie was released in cinemas. If Joel Gallen’s film mocked the rom-coms of the Hollywood industry, Scary Movie parodied horror and its rules, which only a few years earlier had been overturned by the arrival in cinemas of an immortal saga like Wes Craven’s Scream.

The disruptive desire to break narrative paradigms was entirely contained in that kind of cinema aimed at dismantling the coordinates that, up to that point, had served as the map for finding the way to make genre films. With two irreverent products that, each in its own way, were preparing to change the vision people had of horror cinema forever, born from the same matrix and yet destined for different purposes — with Scary Movie, moreover, being the direct consequence of the emerging Scream horror series.

In 2026, reclaiming that imaginary, after more than ten years in which the Scary Movie saga had been on hold and with so many titles having enriched the horror imaginary in the meantime, had a narrative and thematic meaning that, however, was not reflected in the success of the sixth chapter. A work that, once again drawing from Scream, follows the structure of the requel released in 2022, which in turn imitated the 1996 original like a carbon copy in order to show the changes and evolutions within the dynamics of contemporary stories and productions, from the lack of new ideas to the nostalgia effect.

A market that, apparently, lacked fresh intuitions and therefore had to return to sagas from the past and historic characters integrated into a story that had to make an effort to find something modern to say and show. A thesis also taken up by the new Scary Movie — which, just like the 2022 Scream that did not include the number “5” in its title, does not add the “6” — but arriving slightly too late and without the irreverence that had characterized the first films.

Scary Movie (6) thus comes closer to the fifth film in the saga, little loved even by fans, suffering from the strain of wanting to be a container for everything that has happened in this decade during which it was absent from screens, becoming a patchwork of titles and situations rather than a linear story in which, naturally, the necessary sketches could then be inserted. The previous titles, in fact, followed an internal logic within their own illogic.

There was adolescence and the secret of I Know What You Did Last Summer — together with the aforementioned Scream — in the first film; a haunted house was inhabited in the second; the arrival of aliens was awaited in the third, and they returned in the fourth in a Spielbergian variation alongside the atmospheres of M. Night Shyamalan’s horror/disaster movies. Even the fifth, the most mistreated one, played with horrific presences and with the auteur cinema of Black Swan by Darren Aronofsky, laying down a carpet on which to insert jokes and impromptu moments — the only solutions that the latest chapter of Scary Movie seems to have found before reaching the big screen.

The film tries to establish a trajectory: it takes Scream 5, adds a bit of the latest Final Destination from 2025 — that one truly a sixth chapter of a saga absolutely worth catching up with — and concludes with a sprinkling of John Wick, but in between it is only a jumble of titles that are more fun to recognize than to see mocked. With the old characters all returning, as in a true requel, one laughs more out of affection than because of the gags, among which Regina Hall’s Brenda dominates more than even the pillar Cindy Campbell, played once again by Anna Faris.

The new entries, then, are the real problem: not only are they so anonymous that they are forgotten, but a semi-protagonist like Olivia Rose Keegan’s Sara Campbell is so unbearable that one hopes she will be Ghostface’s first victim — without seeing that wish fulfilled. And it does not matter if the protagonist is meant to echo the young, rebellious, tough girl who, in the fifth Scream, was Melissa Barrera’s Sam; her performance is intolerable, regardless of the references or echoes in the writing.

There is, however, one factor that, for the writer, should not be underestimated in evaluating the film: having seen it in Italian. From the predictable difficulties of translation to the excessive caricature by those who voiced the characters, one wonders how much the viewing of the sixth Scary Movie is compromised by dubbing, which has a significantly negative impact on the delivery of the screenplay’s punchlines and wordplay. A caricature even more exaggerated than the caricature represented by the story and its protagonists, which cannot help but affect the perception of whether or not the film succeeds — although all the naiveties expressed so far still remain.

In addition, there is the factor of time: since the new Scary Movie is an operation that tries to mock the present, as it has always done, it is inevitable that terms like woke or misunderstandings about pronouns are the order of the day. But the fact that even these elements are merely taken and thrown into the mix instead of being properly satirized shows how the return of the saga is more superficial than one might consider the films of the series to be by default. And who knows, perhaps those few hints will be enough to provoke a laugh when, in a few years, we look back on the first twenty years of the new century.

In any case, even the return of the veteran writers, above all Marlon Wayans and Shawn Wayans — protagonists alongside their brother Keenen Ivory Wayans, director of the first two chapters — did not help the film, nor did opening with a prologue featuring Teyana Taylor, which remains the best thing in it. At least the new Scary Movie reminded us once again how the horror genre continues to be among the most stimulating within the cinematic landscape, and how many unmissable titles have been released in recent years, making us want to rewatch them all — now joined by two global successes such as Backrooms and Obsession.