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The knives have been out for Scream 7 since well before its Ghostface was cast. They were unsheathed years ago when an entirely different version of this movie, starring a different pair of actresses and with another director at the helm, imploded into a million angry tweets. Given the controversy around Melissa Barrera’s dismissal from the series, and the online acrimony that followed, being able to evaluate the movie which was hurriedly made in its place with a murderer’s row of returning faces—and we do mean murderers—might on paper be a tricky thing.
But in practice it’s turned out to be painfully easy. While Neve Campbell makes a welcome and spirited return as the central star by which most Ghostface killers orbit—after she sat Scream 6 out over a pay dispute—the new movie they have built around the star proves to still be quite beneath her worth. Even with the director’s chair now filled by no less than Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter who started it all by writing the clever words “Scary Movie” at his typewriter during a long weekend in ‘94, there is nothing particularly scary or clever in Scream 7.
The sequel largely does away with the story threads of the last two movies, with “the killings in New York” mentioned often but the Carpenter sisters played by Barrera and Jenna Ortega not at all, yet what also has been disposed of is the wit, metatextual irony, and visual flair that’s marked nearly every other installment to date, including the first two films Williamson wrote solo 30 years ago. I would argue that until now, there has not been a bad Scream movie, but the ones a cut above had something pointed to say about either their genre, their industry, or the fan culture such long running series invite.
Scream 7 has none of that, not even the ability to descend into navel-gazing camp like the previous weakest link in the chain, Scream 3, or the self-consuming, ouroboros that eats its own tail, a la the movie-franchise-within-a-movie-franchise, Stab. The opening of Scream 4, which was also written by Williamson, sharply satirized how unwieldy such-referential sarcasm can be when characters die at the beginning of a movie by watching characters die at the beginning of a movie within a movie.
Still, even that imagined smugness seems better than something as flavorless and banal as Scream 7, an off-the-shelf, stock-itemed legacy sequel that previous Screams would’ve skewered for its timidity. A carbon copy of the original 1996 movie except where it counts, Scream 7 ultimately plays closer to other ‘90s knockoffs that faded into obscurity. It’s the Halloween H20 of Scream movies, a heartless cash-grab sequel that brings back a genre legend in something that wants so badly to be Scream that it bleeds itself dry.
That becomes clear during an opening sequence which returns for the fourth time to Woodsboro, and the third time to the Murder House used by Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) and Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) in ‘96. Previous reprises had a wink and nudge that this is what fans and studios want in their legacy sequels, or “requels.” This time, however, it’s really just pro forma as we watch a pair of generic Stab fans get, uh, stabbed by a killer who promises he’s going to be different by burning down the old haunt for good.
And yet, 30 seconds later we are in another small, privileged Californian suburb, following a new group of teens with a presumable serial killer in their midst—this one likewise fixated on Sidney Prescott (Campbell). After only having hints of what her home life is in recent installments, we get a real good sense in Scream 7 of what Sid has been up to in the 15 years since Scream 4. She’s a happy wife to the local sheriff Mark (Joel McHale) and mother to Tatum (Isabel May), her moody 17-year-old daughter with a boyfriend who likes to come in through the window. You’re probably not supposed to dwell on the math with a daughterless Sid in Scream 4.
She also is keeping things low-key as a small business owner who doesn’t talk about her past when a phone inevitably rings. It’s Ghostface. And he promises he’s changing the game by using FaceTime and MAYBE deep-fake AI tech since he looks a whole lot like someone who died a long time ago. This has the potential of being a canny twist on the formula, but the setup ultimately is window-dressing, an affectation while Campbell runs around interchangeable houses with creaky garage doors, and Courteney Cox returns—this time with Scream 5 and 6’s Mindy and Chad (Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding) as her assistants—to point the finger at the usual suspects of sketchy teens.
Scream has never been a saga above formula. It’s in fact famous for broadcasting it, beginning in the original movie when Mindy and Chad’s long-departed uncle screamed about it while discussing “the rules” of surviving a slasher movie. Yet in that film, it looked damn good while both making and breaking those rules under Wes Craven’s direction. In the running for the greatest filmmaker to play in the slasher sandbox, Craven made the original Scream a sleek, charming little studio daydream that could at times resemble a John Hughes teen comedy.
The two more recent installments, directed by the Radio Silence wunderkinds behind Ready or Notab and Abigail, had a slightly darker and more sinister presentation (as well as amount of bloodletting), but that also meant they could feel incredibly fresh when they put Ghostface in a Harlem bodega, wielding a shotgun.
Scream 7 conversely has the flat, desaturated aesthetic of a thousand streaming films you might spy on Netflix or Paramount+. While Williamson is the mind who birthed Scream, it should be noted the only other film he directed before now was Teaching Mrs. Tingle nearly 30 years ago. It shows in a horror movie where the set-pieces wither and drag until the inevitable fake-outs and jump scares fall into place. One special exception involves a sequence where Williamson dabbles with his inner-Argento in a high school auditorium that also makes, perhaps, an unintentional gag out of young Mckenna Grace being rumored for various Disney princess roles. She certainly checks off another franchise box here after already adding Ghostbusters, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and soon the Hunger Games to her repertoire.
The rest of the younger cast who stick around for longer than a cameo don’t enjoy enough screen time or, perhaps, presence to make much of an impression at all. There is some lip-service paid to Isabel May’s Tatum becoming a Final Girl like her mother, but there isn’t much onscreen to prove it. And by having Brown and Gooding make glorified cameos after Scream 6, one further appreciate how good Radio Silence’s casting was—keep in mind, those directors also hired Ortega and Anora’s Mikey Madison years before their breakouts. Comparatively, the list of suspects here don’t amount to more than a Core Snore.
McHale has a few nice moments with Campbell, but only enough to make you wish they had more scenes together, and there are a couple of monologues Cox dines on while passing through on her way to the bank. But this is ultimately Neve Campbell’s show, and it is genuinely nice to see her again. She was the emotional heart of the original three movies and she still can deliver lines with as much steel as the Golden Gate Bridge when the occasion arises. So getting her back prevents Scream 7 from being a total waste for longtime fans of the franchise. But it will only be the most diehard who go along with the third act revelations of who the killer is and what their motivation turns out to be.
By the time all the cards are on the table, and the last Ghostface mask is removed, it’s pretty evident Sidney’s storyline ended decades ago, and it’s almost an unkindness to the character that we’re still doing this after all these years. If the closest thing Scream 7 has to a thesis is true—that this series is Sidney Prescott—maybe it’s time to leave the poor thing alone.
Scream 7 is in theaters Friday, Feb. 27.
The post Scream 7 Review: They Finally Made a Bad One appeared first on Den of Geek.
