“I’m Teyana Taylor, and even my abs have abs”. Scary Movie, the 2026 edition, couldn’t have started in a better way. Seeing the real One Battle After Another actress embracing an even more badass and hilarious version of herself as she takes on Ghostface is such a fun, brilliant piece of filmmaking. This opening sequence shows exactly what this franchise does best. Using recent happenings, such as Taylor’s Oscar loss this February, as inspiration for scary stories that feel authentic, ingenious, and timely. Along the way, several standout guest appearances pop up and twists that genuinely catch you off guard. However, those inspiring and amusing moments are quite scarce in this latest instalment.

It certainly isn’t for lack of trying, though. From Sinners to Smile and from Wednesday (or in this case, Tuesday) to Weapons, there are plenty of horror nods. Mix in a few headline-grabbing controversies, ongoing social debates, and a dash of COVID-era absurdity, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a comedic horror film. Yet those aspects follow one another at a rapid pace rather than forming a coherent story. A story that brings back the Scary Movie OG’s, Anna Faris (Smiley Face), Regina King (Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul.), Marlon Wayans (The Curse Of Bridge Hollow), and Shawn Wayans (White Chicks), to protect their families, friends and loved ones from Ghostface, who’s on the loose again. 

Along the way, they not only get help from friends but also face even more struggles; their past seems to haunt them in more than one way. Reclusive survivalist Cindy (Faris) is trying to restore her relationship with her estranged daughters, Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan) and Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif), while Brenda (Hall) tries to stay young by being a house mother. Meanwhile, Shorty (Marlon Wayans) is emerging as an internet podcaster who lightly engages with the manosphere while earning significant income from lowbrow but enjoyable video content. When Ghostface crashes one of his recordings, it doesn’t only end in a murder (but whose?), but also in one of the few hilarious moments in this feature. 

It’s during the scenes between Shorty and the masked villain that Scary Movie finds its groove. This is largely because of the drugs smoked in the scenes, but also Shorty’s well-known, contagious laugh. It’s great to see Wayans back in his element, grabbing the chance to lean into his weed-loving, eccentric persona and running with it. His co-leads, Faris and King, once reunite again as Cindy and Brenda, who, despite the former being a republican with racial views (according to the packed script), fight evil side by side again.

However, neither Faris nor King is given much to work with in this film, largely due to the abundance of supporting characters and newcomers, leaving them feeling like an afterthought. Because director Michael Tiddes (A Haunted House) clearly tries to pack in as many references and characters as possible — like M3GAN, Final Destination, and even Michael — the story quickly becomes too superficial and moves too fast.

While a horror pastiche like this can certainly be lighthearted and goofy, it also has to have some substance (no pun intended, as Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 work makes an appearance, too). Sadly, that’s not the case. On top of that, the crude jokes, gross-out humour, and self-referential Easter eggs that make up much of the feature barely land. What initially works as satire eventually wears thin through repetition, becoming progressively less amusing and increasingly awkward. Ultimately, the movie feels empty and largely lifeless.

Beyond its horror parodies, the film attempts to use shock value as social commentary. Pronouns (mainly they/them) and gender transitions are pushed to the forefront, alongside ICE-, DEI-, and Epstein-related jokes in an already overcrowded narrative. But rather than provoking a reaction or the intended applause, the shock factor is effectively zero.

Fortunately, the third act finally delivers what we’ve been waiting for, giving Faris her long-overdue moment to shine. In a Ballerina-inspired sequence, she enters the house of murder and horror to take on Ghostface herself. Along the way, she battles other murderous villains while avoiding harm to innocent people, which leads to some hilarious moments. It’s such a shame that she doesn’t get the chance to show those amazing fighting skills and comedy talent in the rest of the movie. 

It’s been 13 years since Scary Movie V nearly brought this franchise — originally starting as foolish yet lucrative — to its end. Yes, despite that painfully unfunny feature, the Wayans creative team certainly think that there’s still some life in this film series. However, if this Scary Movie doesn’t convince them that it’s time to box up this saga once and for all, we don’t know what will. 

Scary Movie is out now in cinemas courtesy of Paramount

The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, dir. Jerry Aronson (1993)

By Jonah Raskin

ALLEN GINSBERG performed his poetry in London, New York, Chicago, Prague and in other cities around the world, but his relationship with San Francisco stood out from all the others, not because he loved San Francisco more than any other place but rather because he wrote ‘Howl’ in San Francisco (and in Berkeley across the Bay).

Published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights in San Francisco in 1956, ‘Howl’ made Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, the bookshop and the city famous and, in some circles, infamous for avant-garde poetry that shouted obscenities, evoked jazz and condemned war, mind control and materialism.

So, it’s not surprising that on the centenary of Ginsberg’s birth on June 3rd, 1926, several of the city’s cultural landmark institutions went all out to celebrate. The events kicked off on May 11th at the Chapel in the Mission District where the Kronos Quartet performed ‘Howl’ and other poems.

Sponsored by City Lights, it featured headliners such as folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Digger co-founder Peter Coyote, Tongo Eisen-Martin, an ex-poet SF laureate, Dominique di Prima, daughter of Amiri Baraka and Diane di Prima, and novelist Kim Stanley Robinson. Tickets sold for $45; registration was required.

The centenary fêtes ended a month later on June 6th at the Roxy Theater, also in the Mission, with a screening of Jerry Aronson’s documentary The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg. In between the first and the last events there were readings of Ginsberg’s work at the Counterculture Museum in the Haight-Asbbury – one of the birthplaces of hippiedom – and at Bird & Beckett, a bookstore in the Glen Park neighborhood that hosts weekly jazz and monthly poetry readings.

Pictured above: Jerry Cimino of the Counterculture Museum reads Ginsberg at a centenary event

Along with Jerry Cimino, Steve Helig and Brandon Loberg, I read from Ginsberg’s vast oeuvre. My selection was ‘A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley’, which was written in 1955 at the same time that the poet wrote ‘Howl’, but that was not published until the 1960s. That event was fun. There was even cake.

On a more serious evening, I attended the screening of Jerry Aronson’s doc The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, along with my brother Daniel and Gloria Alonzo, a Latina, a friend of the family and a long time Ginsberg fan. First released in 1993, Aronson updated his doc when Ginsberg died in 1997.

A DVD was released in 2007 with added interviews with Paul McCartney, Bono, Yoko Ono, Johnny Depp and Patti Smith. Almost everybody in the world of rock and the Beats has wanted to be seen and heard with the poet who defied the state in Cuba, Czechoslovakia and the USA and who was never awarded a major literary prize in the land of his birth.

The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg shows why he was so popular with the folks pursued by the paparazzi, though that was not Aronson’s explicit intention. The documentary moves from Ginsberg’s birth in 1926 to his death seventy years later. Surprisingly, it does not explore the writing of ‘Howl’, the publication of ‘Howl’ or the trial of ‘Howl’ in 1957 when Ferlinghetti was found not guilty of obscenity.

Hey, as most savvy San Franciscans knew, it was the society at large that was obscene, not the poet and his poem. Perhaps Aronson felt that there had already been enough attention to the San Francisco chapters of the Allen Ginsberg story to add it to his account.

The film ends with Ginsberg’s demise, but its emotional and visual crescendo occurs in Chicago in 1968 where the police attacked peaceful protesters, and where Ginsberg chanted and aimed to avoid what he called ‘a bloodbath’. In hindsight, he was clearly prescient. The demonstrations led to the election of Richard Nixon and five more years of the war in Vietnam. Ginsberg was as radical as Percy Bysshe Shelley who called poets ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.

Pictured above: Allen Ginsberg’s gravestone

Aronson includes black-and-white archival footage, plus interviews with singer Joan Baez, Yippie Abbie Hoffman, Merry Prankster Ken Kesey and others, as well as highlights from Ginsberg’s TV appearances with mild mannered Dick Cavett and firebrand William F. Buckley, who seems to have been charmed by the cheeky poet who called the host a ‘conservative’ and described himself as ‘a faggot’.

Aronson’s documentary shows the gay poet as fearless and as an extraordinarily able performer. Ferlinghetti once observed that after his early success with Howl and Other Poems and Kaddish, Ginsberg didn’t develop as a poet, but that he remained a versatile performer of his own work his whole life.

The Life and Times shows that’s so. The film includes emotionally moving clips of Ginsberg’s loving step-mother Edith, his poet/father Louis, and a cast of thousands – the usual suspects – who gathered with him in the streets of Prague, Chicago and elsewhere.

If you want an introduction to Allen Ginsberg, his work and the era that shaped him and that he in turn shaped, you can’t go wrong with Aronson’s well-put together, entertaining documentary. And if you want a journey down memory lane to refresh your own album of Ginsberg’s images this is also the place to go. There will probably not be this many loving celebrations of the life and work of the poet who wrote, in ‘America’, ‘go fuck yourself with your atom bomb’. Not for another 100 years.

This story includes spoilers for “Masters of the Universe.”

He-Man has made his way back to the big screen thanks to the power of Grayskull — and Hollywood’s love of nostalgia.

Now in theaters, “Masters of the Universe” stars Nicholas Galitzine as Eternia’s long-lost Prince Adam. Working a menial HR job after getting stranded on Earth as a child, Adam “(he/him)” dreams of reuniting with his Sword of Power in order to make his way back home.

Spoiler: He does (with a little help from his friends).

Helmed by “Bumblebee” and “Kubo and the Two Strings” director Travis Knight, the movie is “a dopey, friendly comedy about modern masculinity in crisis with a He-Man who openly wonders what kind of a man to be,” according to a review by Times film critic Amy Nicholson.

Much like the first live-action film around the popular 1980s toyline, the new “Masters of the Universe” features a couple of post-credits scenes that tease what could come in the franchise’s future. But for now, fans will have to wait to learn whether a sequel is forthcoming.

Yes, Orko is in the He-Man movie

Fans of the He-Man franchise can rejoice because everyone’s favorite floating wizard (and court jester) does make an appearance after the main “Masters of the Universe” story ends. In a nod to the animated Filmation series in which the character originated, Orko appears in a brief stinger after the conclusion of the film in order to share what lessons audiences could learn from the story they just watched.

The mid-credits scene introduces a familiar hero

The most significant of the bonus scenes comes in the middle of the credits. The scene opens with Prince Adam’s mother, Queen Marlena (Charlotte Riley), sharing a moment with Duncan (Idris Elba).

After the queen mentions she had given up hope for reuniting with “both of them,” Man-At-Arms replies “perhaps one day she’ll come back to us too.”

The scene then cuts to the “she” in question, wearing a red cape and holding a familiar sword.

“Force Captain… Adora?” calls out a voice.

“No, not anymore,” she replies.

Those familiar with the lore of the “Masters of the Universe” franchise will recognize that the mysterious woman is Adam’s long-lost twin sister, Adora. The most common backstory is that Adora was kidnapped by Hordak as an infant and raised on the planet Etheria as a member of his Evil Horde. She eventually learns the truth about her heritage and defects to fight for good.

The Sword of Protection gives her the power to transform into the hero She-Ra.

Is that the last post-credits scene?

Nope. The final stinger shown after the credits are done rolling involves Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie) and Skeletor (Jared Leto). It appears He-Man has not seen the last of his nemesis — as long as a sequel is greenlit.