John Wick to Inception: The Best Non-Horror Parodies In The Scary Movie Franchise

With 13 years of horror movies to choose from (including some real biggies), there wasn’t a whole lot of space for different genres in Scary Movie 6. The so-called “reboot-quel” did, however, find the time to continue one of the franchise’s oldest traditions.

As I’ll cover a little further down here, each early installment in the franchise (basically the ones that were written and directed by the Wayans) ended on a spoof of the biggest action movie of that moment. The John Wick franchise has now been going for 12 years and counting, but this was the first time that Scary Movie has had the chance to parody it.

There’s (I think) a nod to Everything Everywhere All at Once thrown in for added flavour and a pretty good joke about Ballerina, but the dark suit, neon lighting and routine headshots are unmistakable.

Built around two very odd parodies (Black Swan and Rise of the Planet of the Apes), the fifth movie in the series is objectively pretty awful stuff, but it does feature at least one pretty decent homage — and it’s of Christopher Nolan’s epic, mind-bending thriller, Inception.

I mean sure, the main joke is about as puerile as you can get, but the scene looks pretty bang-on in terms of set design, costume, and lighting — so, credit where credit’s due.

Released in 2005 and parodying that era’s gritty aesthetic, Scary Movie 4 is an odd one, too. The main horror parody is the Sarah Michelle Gellar chiller The Grudge, which means that Cindy moves to a Chicago-type house only to find out that someone named Tom Ryan — a mix of Cruise and Jack, perhaps? — lives next door. 

Of course, if you’ve seen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds it doesn’t take long to recognise the character’s workman’s jacket, his daughter’s mittens, or his uninspiring baseball throw. When the “Tr-iPods” appear, it’s a real groaner, but looks-wise this one pulls it off.

Seeing as the first movie ended with a fight scene, why not repeat the trick with part two? Scary Movie 2 reaches its climax in the basement of a spooky mansion, where Cindy, Brenda, and Theo (Kathleen Robertson) team-up to fight Hanson (the guy with the deformed hand) — at which point everything goes Charlie's Angels style. 

Thankfully, this means that Cindy gets to do a little more bullet time, which leaves Hanson plenty of time to grab a baseball bat to knock her out of the air. It’s silly, but it’s the good kind of silly.

The Angels scene was, of course, an update of an iconic parody from the first movie in which Cindy fought Ghostface with a series of Neo-style kicks and moves.

The movie hit theatres just a little over a year after The Matrix came out, but incredibly, on the same weekend as Shrek, which also did something similar with Princess Fiona. Fair enough, but only the Wayans can claim to have included some Irish dancing. I guess that’s something to be proud of… right?

A year after walking away from the Oscars with four Academy Awards (including for Best Picture, Director, and Actress), Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby really hit the big time when it was honoured with a parody in Scary Movie 4 — and one with an outrageous cameo thrown in. 

Yes, that really is Mike Tyson who shows up in the ring to fight Cindy and yes, he proceeds to bite off a lot of peoples’ ears. This was just six years after he actually did the same to Evander Holyfield, all of which is in enormous bad taste, but the movie’s skewering of Clint’s overly tragic finale is nothing if not audacious.

The parody in the first movie became so iconic that it was only natural the series would come back for another bite when the lore-heavy Matrix sequels were released. The scene with Queen Latifah as the Oracle in Scary Movie 3 is plenty of fun, but casting George Carlin as the Architect was even more inspired. 

It’s just a shame that Will Ferrell beat them to it by a few months, and arguably did it better.

The Mission: Impossible 2 parody in Scary Movie 2 happens so quickly that you almost don’t notice it.

This one comes near the end, when David Cross’ Dwight Hartman and the ghost of Hugh Kane are about to race their wheelchairs into each other — at which point Hartman rolls off a line from Dirty Harry. But, it's the revving, smoking wheels and the slow motion doves that immediately call to mind the great John Woo. Like the best Scary Movie parodies, it feels less like a joke and more of a genuine homage.

The best non-horror parody, and maybe the best parody of all, in the Scary Movie franchise happens at the end of the first movie. It’s great because it’s a parody of the twist from The Usual Suspects, but it also just works as a twist on its own. 

For the whole movie, we’d laughed (I guess) at Dave Sheridan’s Officer Doofy as he dribbled on himself and got seduced by Cheri Oteri’s Gail Halestorm — only for his limp to miraculously heal all of a sudden as he hopped into a convertible and lit a cig just as the credits rolled. An all-timer parody that, shot on 35mm at dusk, still looks incredible.