Scream 7
Following the departure of Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega after the last film, the seventh film in the Scream series attempts to go back to well one more time pulling Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) back into a new series of murders involving a Ghostface who may or may not be a character from the original film but is certainly using AI deepfakes for the inclusion of characters killed on screen in previous films.
This version of Syndey is pretty unrecognizable early on. No longer the plucky young scream queen nor the PTSD shut-in, she's moved on with her life with a husband (Joel McHale) and a rebelling teenage daughter Tatum (Isabel May) the same age Sydney was when the first murders occurred. You can almost hear a laugh track play when Tatum cries "Oh, Mom!" (or the modrn equivalent) for shutting down her teenage hijinx.
Refusing to break the mold, or add much new to the proceedings, Scream 7 relies on the lots of killings and the nostalgia of bringing Campbell, Courteney Cox, Mason Gooding, and Jasmin Savoy Brown back one more time to run from, and eventually stand up to, yet another stab-crazy killer.
What the film lacks, perhaps because there's far less structure to the story this time around than the broad strokes of Sydney protecting her family, is the franchise's trademark meta commentary on horror flicks which are usually used both to explain events and remind audiences of the rules of the game. It don't think it's too harsh to suggest writer/director Kevin Williamson struggled to find anything worth commenting on this time around.
In terms of new victims/suspects the film offers us Tatum's core group of friends (Mckenna Grace, Asa Germann, and Celeste O'Connor) and her boyfriend (Sam Rechner). Like so many of the Scream movies, when it comes to unmasking our killer(s) all logic goes out the window for the last prolonged standoff between our hero and Ghostface.
The movie's best sequence, with the possible exception of a death that takes place later on the high school stage, is the opening segment involving a horror fan (Jimmy Tatro) and his girlfriend (Michelle Randolph) visiting Stu Macher's house which has become some kind of B&B/horror shrine complete with body outlines on the floor and placards noting where all the victims died. The segment ends in a grand gesture by our killer, potentially foreshadowing a new direction, only for the story to jump headfirst back into unapologetic nostalgia for the next 100 minutes or so.
In a series with a couple of pretty good flicks, and a whole lot of meh, Scream 7 belongs to the latter relatively indistinguishable from the other middling entries to the franchise. Not great, not awful, it's just another by-the-book slasher flick which has begun parodying itself at this point.
- Title: Scream 7
- IMDb: link
