Scary Movie

I know that the conversation about comedy today is a little tired because it often falls into woke vs anti-woke framing, but there's still no denying that comedy has changed, at least in certain pockets. Whether it's a mainstream change is a debate I don't want to have. Offensive humour is always going to make someone upset, but you should be able to joke at whatever. The problem only comes when you're just unnecessarily cruel. It's about timing and the joke itself. I like offensive, edgy and dark humour that treats anything as a potential target. I'm almost 41 and I still appreciate a good gay joke. Not because I have anything against gay people--quite the opposite, actually.

A lot of things get absurd once you reach the extremities. Scary Movie understands that. So it pokes fun at everything. It doesn't matter if you're woke, anti-woke, Liberal, Conservative, gay, white, black, trans... there are jokes about all of that here. But you never get the impression that it's bogged down in its political commentary or hatred of any one group, so it's all easy to laugh at. Not that I mind a movie having a stance because I really don't.

Anyway, that's probably a more intelligent analysis than I ever thought I'd write about a Scary Movie so let's just get down to it. I laughed. That's what it all comes down to. I was shocked that I laughed within the first 5 minutes, but I thought, it's probably just a lucky gag. Only it wasn't, because I laughed enough that I consider it a successful comedy. And the absurdity of it reached levels I appreciated. I think the ending is great. Very meta, but I love how they're just like, "Nah, fuck those kids" because they insulted the legacy characters, and they light them on fire.


There were still plenty of gags that don't work. The Kpop Demon Hunters bit was stupid. And I am primed to like that because Kpop Demon Hunters is my favourite animated movie ever (yeah). I won't run through every gag that doesn't work but at its worst, it's just a Family Guy type thing where we're supposed to laugh just because we know the reference. That's why parody movies fail. You still need characters and jokes around the references. I mean, the Terrifier 3 Santa bit was corny too. Also a big Terrifier fan.

Shorty's a microcosm of the movie. Legacy character. Sometimes corny. Sometimes funny. There were times where he'd say something and I wondered why we're still doing this? But then his ridiculousness lends itself to some good scenes, such as the streaming bit.

I just want to remember this one joke so I'm going to include it. There's the gay guy (I can't remember his name) who early on says he isn't gay anymore but obviously we know that's not true so the movie continuously pokes fun at that. Not all the jokes surrounding that work but there's that one Sinners bit where the white people show up to the black party and I can't remember the exact line but the guy says, "We're here and we want to do half-gay shit" and the gay black guy comes on the screen and just calmly goes "Why half-gay?" and then the conversation continues without even acknowledging it, and I laughed quite a bit at that. It's such a small bit but it's probably my favourite one.

Oh, and the White Chicks bit was nice. I hated that movie but it was still nice to see. Also, there was a bit too much dancing in this movie, but after Ghostface kills the character and then dances, I laughed.

I never thought that in 2026 I'd be giving this a positive review but here we are. I know the fact I just wanted something light played into me appreciating it, but it would still work even if my mood was different.