While the rampage of yet another Ghostface always manages to cause sufficient damage among the cast of a Scream movie, Scream 7 seemed to be carving a different path by having potential victims get nullified before filming even started. There’s already been a ton of press concerning the departures of new series focus Melissa Barrera, on-screen sister Jenna Ortega, Scream 5 & 6 directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett and possible replacement director Christopher Landon, so we won’t cover the body count that occurred before the seventh Scream even went before the cameras, but it has left the franchise in something of a perilous predicament just when it seemed that it was in rude health.
However, when new ideas fail, the past prevails and after sitting out Scream IV after a pay dispute, Neve Campbell has returned to the fold to reclaim the series she helped start back in 1996 and she’s brought original scribe, Kevin Williamson with her to plonk himself in the director’s chair. Can this slasher-themed shuffle keep Ghostface’s latest spree on track, or is it finally time to hang up on the Scream movies for good?
In her continuing quest to live a quiet, Ghostface-free existence, Sidney has tried to shut her past down for good. Her life in Pine Grove, Indiana is simple, she’s married to the local police chief Mark Evans and she has multiple children, the oldest of whom, Tatum, has now reached the age she was when all of her homicidal maniac issues began. This obviously has triggered someone somewhere, because after a vicious murder at the crime museum that once was Stu Macher’s house, a new Ghostface makes their presence felt when they begin a new spate of killings Pine Grove.
However, in an attempt to shield Tatum from the traumatic stab-fest that’s been her life, Sydney hasn’t exactly given her daughter a John Connor upbringing and a rift has grown between them that’s further widened by the teen’s inability to be a warrior woman like her survivor mother. Luckily (or predictably – whichever way you wanna look at it), some familiar faces from the past arrive to lend support in the form of Gale Weathers and Mindy & Chad Meeks-Martin, who are still bearing the scars from the last Ghostface incident in New York.
However, what make this newest Ghostface stand out from the crowd is that various evidence seems to point to it being one of the original killers, Stu Macher, despite the fact that last time we saw him, his face was being crushed by a TV (they were heavier back in the 90s). Has Stu really been alive all this time plotting his revenge, or has the killer (or killers) really turning on the misdirection this time. As a wealth of Tatum’s friends start turning up dead, the race is on to figure out who’s under the mask, shroud and voice changer this time – but can the daughter of Sydney Prescott manage to live up to the survival skills of her near-unkillable mother?
For a while there it looked like the Scream franchise was on a bit of a tear. While your opinion may vary, the new life, drive and brutality that Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett managed to pump through the veins of the fifth and sixth movies really did feel like the franchise had been born anew as it moved the focus of Scream toward newer protagonists while still having something amusing to say about the genre in general. But while I’m of the belief that 5 is a better sequel than 6, while 6 is a far better slasher, 7 arrives to somewhat disappointingly break that streak by taking the franchise backward and failing to deliver on more than a few of the series key points.
To be fair, I was kind of expecting something like this would happen once news broke of all the turmoil behind the scenes that cause the path of the franchise to switch from the Carpenter sisters back to Sydney and that’s no fault of Neve Campbell. In fact, franchise co-creator Kevin Williamson seems desperate to give Sidney Prescott her own Halloween: H20 moment by going doen the Laurie Strode route and examining the life of a woman who has shrugged off multiple conspiracies against her life often perpetrated by those closest to her. Similarly, it also throws in the added stress of having to protect a willful teen who can’t seem to let a marauding killer divert there attention from being frustrated at their mom. On top of all this, Williamson seems to also trying to close the book on the whole thing and unloads a whole boatload of nostalgia on us as he tries to honor the late Wes Craven and the thirty year legacy the series has. All this would be fine and dandy, but Scream 7 doesn’t actually manage to do anything that Screams 4, 5 & 6 hasn’t already done before and it doesn’t even do them better, leaving this newest massacre something of a sluggish postscript to.a franchise that was previously going great guns.
To give the main players their due, Campbell does admittedly bring a sense of Jaime Lee Curtis nobility to Sydney’s sixth outing and Williamson handles the surprisingly graphic murders with a sense of viciousness that would make ol’ Wes Craven proud. In fact, the increasingly gruesome murders actually manage to match the ramped-up gore of the last two installments as knives, winches and even a beer tap are aggressively used to pare the cast down – and as such, the kills prove to be by far the best things about the movie.
Sadly, from here things tend to slide downhill. Williamson can match his predecessors for gore, but his tone and pace is way off, resulting in the film’s autumnal vibes and vast amounts of nostalgia causing things to drag a little. Worse yet, it’s attempt to bring back characters to the series that have long died are a nice thought, but only ends up being something of a cheap gag that cheapens the very legacy that Williamson and Campbell are trying to salute. Even the return of Courtney Cox (the only actor to appear in all 7 instalments) can’t lift matters and while it’s genuinely nice to see Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding show up as two of the “core four”, Chad and Mindy, but the fact that they’re now reduced to comedy sidekicks kind of makes them feel as out of place as a condom dispenser in a nunnery bathroom.
However, the greatest flaw Scream 7 has is a truly terrible final reveal, which not only proves to be a gargantuan anticlimax considering how much they dangled past names in our faces, but actually ends up accidentally pulling up the worst horror reference you can think of – the similarly botched killer reveal from the fifth Friday The 13th.
Probably not as bad as you’ve heard, Scream 7 still proves to be strangely bland when it isn’t reducing its ensemble to bloody piles of offal. But while Williamson throws in the occasional inspired gag (the twist on the old “shoot them in the head” bit is wonderfully overplayed), he also manages to diffuse a lot of the youthful energy that came with the last two episodes. If things could possibly still be patched up behind the scenes, maybe a return of the Carpenter sisters could return some of that vigour, but as of right now, it seems that Scream has lost it’s steam.
🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 