I say this with love: lightning doesn’t strike twice, and there hasn’t been a great Scary Movie since the first one smoked up our screens in 2000.

Since then, the Wayans’ horror spoof franchise has been on the steep decline. Despite the four Wayans brothers — Marlon, Shawn, Keenen, and Damon — still working on Scary Movie 2, they were rudely booted off their own franchise by the Weinsteins for Scary Movie 3 and 4. And as for Scary Movie 5 — well, some things are better left unsaid. 

So when the Wayans announced that they were rebooting (or “rebootiqueling”) things with the newest Scary Movie, hope seemed to be on the horizon for the doomed franchise. Could they put horror satires back on the big screen? Could they somehow cobble a bunch of movie-themed skits, sketches, and bits together and turn it into a cohesive storyline, starring the Core Four cast members?

As much of a cop-out as this sounds, the answer is both a yes and a no. The Wayans couldn’t have dropped Scary Movie at a better time: the horror genre is currently experiencing another renaissance (see Obsession and Backrooms), and there’s so much Y2K nostalgia going around that, of course, fans would want to see what Cindy, Brenda, Ray, and Shorty are getting up to now. As of writing, Scary Movie just wrapped up its opening weekend in the U.S. with $105.5 million earned at the global box office. It’s projected to beat out Backrooms for the U.S. box office crown on its second weekend.

What Works: Nostalgia and Toilet Humor

To be fair, some of Scary Movie’s success is warranted. It offers us pretty much the same premise as the first movie, making the nostalgia bait glaringly obvious: Ghostface is back, and Cindy (Anna Faris), Brenda (Regina Hall), Shorty (Marlon Wayans), and Ray (Shawn Wayans) must work together to figure out how to put an end to the killing spree. Our Core Four, however, are a little worse for wear since we last saw them. Cindy’s a Republican doomsday prepper now, à la Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween (2018). Brenda’s trying to be a cool wine mom. And Shorty’s still a stoner, and Ray’s definitely not gay.

Some of the classic Wayans toilet humor is still on full display, and sometimes those are the best parts of Scary Movie. Without giving too much away, stand-out scenes include one character rolling up a pair of vagina lips like a blunt, and another rubbing some dookie out underneath Ghostface’s nose. The Scary Movie franchise has never been the epitome of classic cinema, and we’ve never asked it to be: the movies shine the most when they’re making dumb poop jokes. 

Where It Falls Short: Dated Jokes and Fragmented Parody

But this isn’t true of all the jokes in the latest Scary Movie. Some of them veer towards the side of “bad jokey posts your uncle loves sharing on Facebook,” and it shows. Multiple trans and “woke” jokes are made, and while the franchise has never shied away from a bad, cringey joke, maybe it should have this time around. The one-liners about “confusing” pronouns and “woke liberal snowflakes” don’t land, mainly because these are bits we’ve already heard time and time again. And these aren’t the only jokey repeats of Scary Movie — we have the usual jokes about Shorty getting high (but when is he not?) and Ray telling everyone he isn’t gay (oh, honey), and because they’re repeated so many times throughout the movie, it’s hard to keep laughing at a joke you’ve already heard.

Plus, you’ll be hard-pressed to find the movie’s story underneath all of the parody segments. Although the franchise has never been about the plot, at least the skits it gave us helped to move the narrative forward. But in this Scary Movie, it felt as if the parodies were cobbled together to cram as many movie references as possible. While this is understandable, especially since there’s a lot of ground to cover (the last Scary Movie came out in 2013), the cuts to the parody segments are so frequent and so jarring that you’ll wonder if the Wayans couldn’t find it in them to leave things on the cutting room floor.