‘Scary Movie’ is one of those films where, if you go in with suitably low expectations, you’ll probably have a reasonably good time. There is certainly a nostalgic pleasure in seeing familiar faces return, including Anna Faris and Regina Hall, alongside the involvement of members of the Wayans brothers either in writing or acting capacities. It knows exactly what audiences are turning up for and rarely pretends to be anything more sophisticated than a broad, irreverent spoof.

The problem is that this sixth entry in the franchise never quite coalesces into a satisfying whole. All sorts of contemporary films and cultural touchstones are lampooned here, including ‘Sinners’, ‘Get Out’, ‘Weapons’, the ‘Scream’ franchise itself and even the recent Michael Jackson biopic. But rather than building momentum, the film often feels like a collection of disconnected sketches stitched together.

There are flashes of genuine audacity. A joke involving the Epstein files is unexpectedly bold, while one particularly funny sequence on a subway train has a wounded character correcting Ghostface by pointing out that, in 2026, the killer should be using ‘they’ rather than ‘she’. It’s the sort of throwaway gag that captures the franchise’s willingness to poke fun at contemporary culture as much as horror cinema.

The opening sequence is arguably the strongest part of the film. Teyana Taylor appears as herself, joking that she lost an Academy Award to Amy Madigan for a horror performance, before using her Golden Globe as a weapon against Ghostface. It’s absurd, self-aware and genuinely amusing.

Beyond that, though, the film largely settles into familiar territory. Ghostface repeatedly turns up to dispatch various characters, and the narrative becomes little more than a string of skits punctuated by stabbings. The jokes arrive with relentless frequency, but too many feel underdeveloped, as though the filmmakers were simply working through a checklist of recent pop-cultural references.

The film also suffers from an unavoidable problem: ‘Scary Movie’ was originally conceived as a parody of horror conventions, but the ‘Scream’ series was itself already satirizing those same tropes. Spoofing a spoof inevitably leads to diminishing returns. As a result, this doesn’t work nearly as well as last year’s ‘Naked Gun’ reboot, which found a way to reinvent its formula while retaining its comic sharpness.

Still, there is enough goodwill, nostalgia and occasional inspired silliness to make it passably entertaining. It may not be especially coherent, and it certainly isn’t as clever as it thinks it is, but if you’re happy to treat it as ninety minutes of hit-and-miss sketch comedy rather than a fully realized film, there’s enough here to raise the odd laugh.