THE STORY – When a new Ghostface killer emerges in the quiet town where Sidney has built a new life, her darkest fears are realized as her daughter becomes the next target. Determined to protect her family, she must face the horrors of her past to put an end to the bloodshed once and for all.
THE CAST – Neve Campbell, Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy-Brown, Mason Gooding, Anna Camp, Ethan Embry, Michelle Randolph, Jimmy Tatro, Mckenna Grace, Asa Germann, Celeste O’Connor, Sam Rechner, Mark Consuelos, Tim Simons, Joel McHale, Matthew Lillard & Courtney Cox
THE TEAM – Kevin Williamson (Director/Writer) & Guy Busick (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 114 Minutes
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Kevin Williamson’s screenplay for the 1996 slasher flick “Scream” changed the genre practically overnight. A witty, meta twist on a genre that had grown tired and stale years before, “Scream” became such a phenomenon that every horror film that followed had to live up to it. Given Williamson’s gift for clever, snarky dialogue and tight plotting, that was a tall order, and after a brief boom in the late ’90s, slashers once again started growing tired and stale, only this time they were all aping Williamson’s style. After a script leak while shooting the inevitable “Scream 2,” forced him to rewrite that film on the fly, Williamson didn’t return for the last film of the original trilogy, but he did come back for a fourth film in 2011, promising a bigger, badder, even more self-aware cast of characters. Producers promised the same thing for 2022’s fifth film, a second attempt at reviving the franchise after the fourth film’s divisive reception. “Scream” 2022 managed to one-up the original films’ brutality while keeping their self-aware snark, but the next year’s “Scream VI” couldn’t quite manage the same balance, bouncing back and forth between viscerally gritty kills and ridiculous cartoon action in an unconvincing New York City setting.
Now, for the seventh film in the franchise, Williamson is back, and he’s bringing everything back to where it all began: Woodsboro. At least, that’s where “Scream 7“ (the awkward, constantly changing numerals of the franchise’s titles somehow aren’t the most confusing thing here) begins, in an opening scene that feels like a miniature version of the film as a whole: It has a great premise – boy (Jimmy Tatro) drags girl (Michelle Randolph) to The Macher House Experience, a combination vacation rental and museum set inside the house where the final act of the original “Scream“ went down all those years ago – lots of Easter eggs, some fun dialogue, and performances that are even more fun (Tatro has played this character a million times, but he’s still funny every time), but no real scares (despite some expertly deployed suspense) and no real surprises, either. It feels perfunctory, like a sketch of a “Scream“ opening scene that gets the major beats right but doesn’t fully flesh out any of its many interesting elements.
From there, we catch up with Sidney (Neve Campbell), who is now living in small-town Indiana with her cop husband Mark (Joel McHale) and three daughters. Eldest daughter Tatum (Isabel May), named after Sidney’s high school friend who got fried by Ghostface in a garage door, is as old now as Sidney was when this all started. Sidney’s experiences have left her somewhat overprotective, to the point where she won’t talk to her daughter about anything from her past, including how to survive. That all changes, though, when Sidney gets a call from an unidentified Woodsboro number, which then transfers to FaceTime, revealing original Ghostface Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) on the other end. Is he really back from the dead, or has Ghostface gotten more technologically savvy? And if Stu isn’t behind the murders of Tatum’s friends that follow the phone call, then who is?
Campbell’s Sidney offers a fascinating counterpart to the doomsday-prepper version of Laurie Strode that Jamie Lee Curtis played in the recent “Halloween“ reboot trilogy, someone whose experiences led them to shelter their children too much rather than overly prepare them for a worst-case scenario that may never come. A scene of Sidney talking Tatum through evading and killing Ghostface over the phone while watching her on security cameras is an exciting way of showing us how Sidney deals with this, even if the scene itself plays out more or less exactly as you’d expect. Unfortunately, most of “Scream 7“ consists of scenes with good ideas, but Williamson doesn’t follow through on them. The second the construction tarps in Sidney’s house become visible, it’s obvious there’s going to be a kill scene there, and Williamson (also taking on directing duties) makes good use of the tarps and the diffuse lighting they create, but after the first two Ghostface fakeouts, the scene plays out like a rote slasher scene. Somewhere in the past three decades, Williamson lost his knack for snappy dialogue and clever scenarios. So many scenes here lack the spark that made the original “Scream“ an enduring, groundbreaking classic. Sure, breaking ground again would be nearly impossible, but Williamson has gone from deconstructing slasher tropes to embracing them without a trace of self-awareness.
That’s a far cry from where the series started, and you wouldn’t be wrong if you said that the series has lost its way. The defining trait of the “Scream“ films has always been its meta-cinematic breakdown of horror tropes. Even the other films in this most recent trilogy continued that through the rules of reboots and “legacy sequels,” often tying the individual films’ themes to those rules. That doesn’t happen here. Yes, Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy-Brown are back as the cinema-loving Meeks-Martin twins (thank God, as they both have more fun in their meager screentime than anyone else), but their discussion of the cinematic rules at play only lasts for one scene in which they try to deduce the killer before getting tossed aside and forgotten about completely. Going in a different direction with the killer’s identity and motivations could be a welcome twist in a film franchise’s seventh entry, but not when you abandon the franchise’s defining trait in order to do so. Even at their worst, the “Scream“ films have always had something to say about the state of the world and how movies relate to it, but that’s largely gone here, replaced by baity mentions of trauma and AI that don’t go deeper than their mere appearance.
The film’s refusal to engage with its own material and its franchise’s legacy may not be the only problem with “Scream 7,“but it’s certainly the biggest. For every good element, there’s an equally bad one. The performances are either good (Campbell has always been great as Sidney, but this may be her best performance in the franchise to date) or barely functional (Courtney Cox looks and sounds like she’s sleepwalking through playing Gale Weathers despite getting an all-timer entrance). There’s some striking imagery in the aftermath of the kills, but the kills themselves are executed with dull, straightforward presentation. In the rare moments that Williamson chooses to embrace the ridiculousness, it’s good for a couple of laughs, but the film largely takes itself far too seriously. And yet, despite that self-seriousness, it doesn’t actually have anything to say. The Ghostface reveal might as well have come from pulling a random character name out of a hat for all the sense it makes, even after the big, overblown villain monologue. That’s the least of the franchise’s own worst traits to make an appearance here (sidelining major characters for the last act, going back and forth on Ghostface’s competence and strength, cheap fan service), but its unironic, uninspired presence here speaks to the general vibe of the whole bloody affair: This is the most generic “Scream“ sequel yet, and with the original writer back at the helm, it really should have felt truer to the series’s spirit.
