The Wayans vowed to push back against the woke scolds with a sixth “Scary Movie” feature.

That they do.

The new film features trans characters, pronouns, BLM and other culture war topics. Nothing is sacred or off the table, just as they promised.

The problem? They forgot to make any of the above funny. Not remotely so.

It’s an anything goes affair, scampering from meta yuks to gags only franchise devotees will get. The result? An exhausting example of how NOT to do a movie parody.

Ghostface is back, but this time he’s targeting the teen daughter of franchise regular Cindy (Anna Faris). That’s more or less the plot, folks.

The film pings in so many directions you forget you’re watching a feature film. It’s a series of limp sketches and references to recent horror movies like “Sinners,” “Weapons,” “Longlegs” and “Get Out.”

The characters break the fourth wall to remind us what the story is from time to time. Or how Hollywood treats remakes and reboots.

Or the minor details behind the franchise.

The film begins with a whimper and slowly slides downhill. A recent Oscar nominee anchors the prologue, but she proves far from the best choice for this kind of material. That, plus a brief second prologue, come and go with nary a smile, let alone a laugh.

Uh oh.

We immediately sense this movie was a terrible idea, and 20 minutes later, we’re darn sure of it.

Sitting down for Scary Movie 6.

Stay tuned. pic.twitter.com/OWQqdSHNlP

— Worth it or Woke? (reviews) (@worthitorwoke) June 5, 2026

One sequence has a pulse. The three vampire figures from “Sinners” knock on the main characters’ door and perform a TV show theme song. The choice of material is smart, and the reaction to it makes sense. And it’s legitimately funny.

That brief moment suggests what this film might have been. And it’s over in a blink.

You may smile a time or two over a singular quip in “Scary Movie,” especially since the Wayans flood the zone with gags. There’s zero comic momentum afoot. The physical gags are obvious and strained, as is virtually every element of the film.

The newer, younger characters prove forgettable, while the old guard (Faris, Regina Hall and Cheri Oteri) hardly make the case for their return. And while the Octavia Spencer film “Ma” proved a guilty pleasure, leaning so hard on it with Hall’s character makes no sense.

Don’t blame the stars, though.

The ghosts of Gilda Radner, John Belushi and Richard Pryor couldn’t breathe life into this screenplay, credited to Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Craig Wayans and Rick Alvarez.

But will “Scary Movie” trigger the woke scolds as promised? Yes and no. 

That group got triggered by the trailer. Still, it’s hard to find any running gag or joke “offensive” when they’re so poorly written and choreographed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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We’re hungry for comedies that satirize today’s warped world. Yes, this franchise focuses on the horror genre, but a respectable sequel could do both.

Instead, this is a lazy, scattershot dud that delivers the least laughs in the series. A series, by the way, with plenty of dead spots.

“Scary Movie” plays out like a franchise on life support, not one brought back to life to crush the dying woke movement.

HiT or Miss: “Scary Movie” is a sure bet to be on many “Worst of the Year” movie lists. It richly earns it.

The post ‘Scary Movie’ – Laugh-Free Parody Is Crushing Disappointment appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

You can’t say the Wayans didn’t warn us.

The family behind the “Scary Movie” franchise returns this weekend with the sixth installment of the franchise. Just don’t call it “Scary Movie 6.” It’s just “Scary Movie,” thank you.

Their mission? Challenge audiences and bring real comedy back to movie theaters. Critics are greeting the latest film in the comedy series like an unwanted house guest.

Be gone!

The movie, opening nationwide this weekend, has a measly 25 percent “rotten” rating over at RottenTomatoes.com. General audiences have yet to weigh in on the title.

The film reunites key franchise players like Regina Hall, Anna Faris, Marlon Wayans and Cheri Oteri. The targets? “Sinners.” “Weapons.” “Get Out.” And more. Much more.

RELATED: THE USUAL SUSPECTS ALREADY TRIGGERED BY SCARY MOVIE

It’s been 13 long years since “Scary Movie 5,” and there’s plenty of horror fodder to spoof. Except critics aren’t laughing.

The far-Left TheWrap.com played the film’s alleged ideology against it.

The film’s stubborn insistence that nothing about ‘Scary Movie’ needs to change and it’s the children who are wrong now makes its profane and controversial jokes feel conservative.

And? Is that bad? Are the jokes funny or not? Isn’t that the more pertinent question?

The critic’s review reads like a crossover from TheMarySue.com, with talk of punching down and related silliness. This isn’t 2020 anymore.

RELATED: WOKE KILLED COMEDY (AND HERE’S THE PROOF)

And, since it matters, Team Wayans isn’t conservative. Or necessarily liberal. They go where the funny is, which makes them subversive in the modern era.

Toward that end, they’ll happily mock Trump voters and pronouns in a single movie. Just try and stop them.

The Guardian’s negative review also teases with the notion that mocking Millennials and Gen Z for their “safe spaces” and speech codes is, gasp, a bad thing.

Yet there are also increasing notes of sourness as Scary Movie goes on – a lack of generosity toward the younger generation that goes past playful ribbing and sometimes feels downright hostile to the very existence of anyone who dares follow them.

Film critics routinely put their thumbs on the scale of movies that don’t align with their worldview. And, if a project is under fire from right-leaning sources, they take sides.

None of this will impact the box office, most likely. The previous films weren’t critical darlings, and early predictions suggest the film will earn $45-55 million this weekend alone. That’s a big score for a comedy feature, which generally aren’t as budget heavy as other summer spectacles.

What’s your favorite “Scary Movie” character?

The post Is ‘Scary Movie’ Too Anti-Woke for Film Critics? appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

Loren Brichter, back in 2020:

Short story: Google Chrome installs an updater called Keystone on your computer, which is bizarrely correlated to massive unexplained CPU usage in WindowServer (a system process)1, and made my whole computer slow even when Chrome wasn’t running. Deleting Chrome and Keystone made my computer way, way faster, all the time.

Long story: I noticed my brand new 16” MacBook Pro started acting sluggishly doing even trivial things like scrolling. Activity Monitor showed nothing from Google using the CPU, but WindowServer was taking ~80%, which is abnormally high (it should use < 10% normally).

Doing all the normal things (quitting apps, logging out other users, restarting, zapping PRAM/SMC, etc) did nothing, then I remembered I had installed Chrome a while back to test a website.

I deleted Chrome, and noticed Keystone while deleting some of Chrome’s other preferences and caches. I deleted everything from Google I could find, restarted the computer, and it was like night-and-day. Everything was instantly and noticeably faster, and WindowServer CPU was well under 10% again.

Not all Mac users, but many, found that just having Chrome installed slowed down their Macs dramatically. Completely uninstalling Chrome — and its pernicious background agents — solved the problem. This years-old “Chrome Is Bad” saga came to mind when I wrote about Google’s Gemini Mac app’s background agents.

It seems as though Google eventually fixed these Chrome bugs — or Apple changed something in a MacOS update that fixed the bugs for them — but I’ve never seen a full explanation of the problem and eventual solution. Does anyone know what happened here?

The main point is it never should have happened in the first place. A third-party app should just be a third-party app — not add components to your system software just so it can update itself when it isn’t running. Background agents and extensions are sometimes necessary to the functionality of a product. Checking for software updates to a browser or AI chatbot, when those apps aren’t running, is not necessary. The golden rule applies: imagine if every app on your system installed its own background agent to check for software updates. Chrome is a popular browser on the Mac, but it’s just a web browser. Other web browsers do just fine checking for updates from the browser itself when they’re running. If the user is actually using an app regularly, it’ll get plenty of chances to check for updates when it’s running. If the user isn’t regularly using an app, why in the world should that seldom-used app have software running all the time in the background?

This sort of chaos is why Apple keeps iOS locked down. There are no third-party login items on iOS that run in the background — let alone ones with no option to disable. No third-party app can do anything that causes the iOS window manager to consume 80 percent of the CPU while ostensibly idle. There are obviously trade-offs here. I rely on a Mac for my workstation because the Mac gives me the power to potentially shoot myself in the foot. But one major reason why iOS is an order of magnitude more popular than MacOS is because you cannot shoot yourself in the foot with it, even though that means you can’t use it to do things that would require that power.