Oh, how do you solve a problem like Scary Movie? Ever since its inception a quarter century ago, here has been a comedy series defined by its crassness; its cruelty; its happy-go-lucky, stoned-out-of-its-goddamn-mind bad taste.Criticizing it for crossing a line too taboo, or a joke too mean, is to highlight a feature and not a bug. I recall rolling my eyes as a kid at the negative reviews aimed at the original while anxiously anticipating every vulgar, four-letter-laced fart joke the 2000 movie could throw my way. And to be sure, in almost just as long a time since Marlon and Shawn Wayans were cast aside from their own franchise, the pop culture landscape has done its damndest to stay the same too. Twenty-five years since the Weinsteins ripped the series away from its creators following 2001’s Scary Movie 2, we’re still getting some good, hardy belly laughs about the metatextual pretensions of Scream. But, perhaps older and more pretentious myself, there’s also some incredibly unpleasant cringes when the Wayans use the avarice of their own backers (first Miramax and now Paramount) to transgress into a realm some might consider obscene. For myself, the real issue is when it stops punching up at Hollywood, and starts punching down at some of its viewers. That’s new.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});I’d be lying though if I didn’t say I laughed plenty during this weekend’s Scary Movie 6 (or, mockingly, just “Scary Movie” on the poster). Even with the long stretches where you could hear a pin drop in my theater, on the metric of a standard joke-bag movie, where comedy is measured by how often you laugh, I’d say the hit rate is about 40/60 against. In baseball, that’s a terrific average, and for a Scary Movie it’s definitely better than most installments (though the best remain the first and the Zucker Brother’d Scary Movie 3).The gist of this one, of course, is making fun of long-in-the-tooth franchises being dragged out of the mothballs for yet another legacy sequel. And appropriately for Scary Movie, the main targets are most specifically Radio Silence’s Scream 5 and VI, right down to mocking those movies’ attempt to make the term “requel” happen. Scary Movie 6 is a “rebootquel,” as Marlon Wayans’ always welcome Shorty enthuses when coming up for air between bong hits.If you’ve seen Scream 5, the skeleton of that movie is pretty much identical, complete with a Jenna Ortega lookalike (Savannah Lee Nassif), here named Tuesday for “legal reasons,” getting stabbed in the opening sequence but living long enough to bring her estranged big sister Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan) back to town alongside a totally not sketchy looking boyfriend (Cameron Scott Roberts). Turns out Sara and Tuesday are the daughters of Cindy Campbell, the OG Anna Farris, who is now in Jamie Lee Curtis’ fright wig from Halloween (2018).At this point, it should be clear this is going to be a kitchen sink approach to just about every horror flick the Scary Movie franchise has missed out on since 2013. Cindy and a delightful Regina Hall as Brenda Meeks are back as the “legacy” characters, a la Scream or Halloween—but NEVER I Know What You Did Last Summer, a movie the olds tell the young kids not to worry about in this movie when they ask if it’s related to The Summer I Turned Pretty— but Brenda is now rocking Octavia Spencer’s haircut and vibes from Ma while living in the house from Get Out; Cindy’s daughter works at the Final Destination Theme Park where “everybody dies!;” and their estranged buddies Shorty and the perpetually closeted Ray (Shawn Wayans) find themselves dragging the kids into parodies of M3GAN and Sinners.Intriguingly, the prevalent trend of “elevated” (or artistic) horror movies from the last decade are mostly side-stepped. There’s a line where Cindy mentions It Follows, but says “that movie’s too obscure for a flashback.” That or perhaps too hard to insert poop, sex, or transphobic jokes into. With that said, there’s a solid gag about Nosferatu during the post-credits—and a flat one about Longlegs.But it is the aforementioned scatological humor that really makes or breaks Scary Movie and the Wayans’ oeuvre in general. Their comedies, especially in this series, are less movies than a series of thinly tied together sketches. It’s R-rated, filthy-minded SNL that’ll dare do a lynching gag. Some of the gonzo bits work, some don’t, and a few are outright hilarious, such as Shawn Wayans revealing Shorty is in his 25th senior year at the local high school. And when it skips horror altogether and swerves into a John Wick parody? The best stuff here. But by design all of it feels antiquated and, um… old.The Wayans would likely say that is because they’re bringing back raunchy comedy and the days where it was fun to offend everyone. Yet it’s noticeable when entire sequences become about “man, kids these days,” such as when Shorty and Ghostface end up getting some killer Twitch content. That one can still get a chuckle because it has a twinkle in its eye, but when the twinkle shifts to malice, and Scary Movie 6 gets blood in its mouth, it becomes something ugly.A lot of it boils down to jokes about trans kids and nonbinary people. The Wayans have always enjoyed making fun of the differences in cultures and classes, and there is something eternally funny about Shawn Wayans’ Ray Ray being a self-loathing gay man who now shows up to a Halloween party dressed as his manly hero, Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain. But those bits, even with their 20-year-old references, use differences and stereotypes to highlight a “live and let live” sense of community in these movies. It’s a party where everyone gets hazed and everyone’s invited.Scary Movie 6, however, pulls up the drawbridge and curls its lip when trans characters walk into the scene. It’s the subtle difference between laughing with someone and laughing at them. Or in parody movie parlance, at some point Scary Movie 6 stops siding with Sheriff Bart and the Waco Kid, and starts giggling with Hedley Lamar’s nitwit followers.That harms the movie, as does the fact that despite parodying Radio Silence’s Scream 5 and VI, those films did a better job of satirizing modern horror trends, including making fun of that “obscure” A24 stuff in the original “Ghostface and Wednesday” scene.Scary Movie has never produced the best spoofs. It’s less focused than Mel Brooks’ 1970s output, and never as narratively committed to the bit as The Naked Gun, both the original and last year’s surprisingly great reboot. Scary Movie aims low and wide, and in its better installments hits enough to be worth the price of admission. Well, if you want to gaggle about gay panic jokes and celebrity cameos—including an admittedly great one in the cold open that I won’t spoil—then the new Scary Movie lives up to its legacy. But it also sinks beneath it too often to give it a free pass.Scary Movie 6 is in theaters now.The post Scary Movie 6 Review: High on Fumes appeared first on Den of Geek.