Movie Review: ‘Scream 7’

Director: Kevin Williamson

Cast: Neve Campbell, Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Anna Camp, Michelle Randolph, Jimmy Tatro, Mckenna Grace, Celeste O’Connor, Sam Rechner, Joel McHale, Matthew Lillard, Courtney Cox, Roger L. Jackson

Plot: Sidney Prescott and her family are targeted by yet another Ghostface killer, this one possibly being the still living Stu Macher.

Review: Boy, has this had a rocky road to the screen. Major cast members were fired for dubious reasons, leading to the exit of the director and a couple more performers, leaving the producers to gather together has many legacy names as they can fit on the poster. The controversy following the film never went away with protestors outside cinemas today calling out the ridiculous reason for Melissa Barrera being fired. Then AI gets used in the marketing and everyone lost their minds, as expected, with one bold Redditor declaring it the ‘most evil’ production in film history (just wait until they hear about The Twilight Zone). Whatever the problems behind the scenes, the movie is out and carries the legacy of a major horror franchise.

Some readers would already be raging in the comments because we had the audacity to go see it. If every movie with a scumbag pack of producers got boycotted, the doors would close on Hollywood within a year. I’ve personally grown up with the series, being in school when Scream became a genuine pop culture phenomenon and continued through film school and more than 20 years teaching and writing about film, horror films in particular. We’ve already enjoyed six movies, we’re interested in what they can salvage from this.

What they do pull together turns out to be the worst entry in the series. By a pretty substantial margin.

The biggest problems exist at a script level. We have to disregard the main characters from the previous two films and refocus on the legacy characters of Sidney (Campbell) and Gale (Cox), with the former having a husband and teenage daughter to contend with. A pair of supporting characters from the newer cast also need an excuse to hang around, and there’s a couple of loose ends to tie up before getting into it proper. We know Sidney married a Detective Mark, but we couldn’t get McDreamy back so it’s a different Detective Mark, and their younger kids are quickly explained away as staying with a grandmother somewhere.

At the centre of things in the relationship between Sidney and her daughter Tatum (May). This is the result of Sidney turning into a garbage person who deals with her trauma by getting angry at her daughter, who is kept in the dark about her mother’s history aside from the massive movie franchise based on her life. Tatum has a group of generic teenage friends who turn up in one scene to explain their personality traits and only reappearing for their death scene later in the film. Meanwhile, Sidney is managing a cafe and being a mother when Ghostface begins calling. The twist now being that the Facetime calls seem to be coming from a surviving and heavily scarred Stu Macher (Mathew Lillard).

Now, it’s been a long time fan theory that Stu could make a return. More than a theory, it appears to have been a concept for a Wes Craven sequel that went unused. Lillard’s enthusiasm for the role, and generally appearing to be a rad dude, kept the idea alive for many. This seventh entry riffs on this popular concept with a constant back and forth ‘maybe he is, maybe it’s AI’ question. It’s not a good question to be asking though, because basing the entire twist on a fan theory would be stupid fan service, and hinting at it without follow through will disappoint everyone who pushed for it.

So we’ll do the SPOILER WARNING here, but Stu Macher is not alive in this movie. The killer uses AI to mess with Sidney and Gale. Maybe this could have been a fun idea for a cold open, but it does not work as a main plot point because these characters these characters are supposed to be smarter than that. It’s infuriating how much Sidney and Gale entertain their stalker on these calls – we’re long past the point where Sidney hangs up on these psychos. Maybe it’s something in the water in this small town, because everyone is monumentally idiotic. A couple of other actors pop up as AI skins of these characters but the odd selection of who they used makes it feel like people were not returning calls.

Just to highlight one sequence – Sidney and her family have returned home with the police after learning that there is a serial killer on the loose and they are being targeted. A pair of police officers come into the house and say they’ll make sure it’s safe but they’ll “keep it quick, chief”. Then they vanish from the movie. Literally, with the police chief’s family being threatened by a murderer who is on the run…and the local police act like they’re inconveniencing everyone by checking the house for the murderer, spend maybe a two minutes scanning the place and then leave. Not putting two officers in every single room with roving helicopters. We also learn in these part of the movie that Sidney has a panic room that features a second, open door for them to leave through. For some reason.

Then, the next day when they believe the killer is dead and they have the body in the morgue, the police put the entire town into a curfew. Why? Because the curfew makes the rest of the movie easier. The teenagers need a reason to sneak out you see, so the main characters have decided to all meet up to discuss who the killer might be for some reason. They go to a hitherto unknown bar owned by some character, and start pouring themselves drinks and making pizzas for some reason. Surviving characters Mindy and Chad (Savoy Brown and Gooding) are hanging around during all this time, because they’re now interns for Gale for some reason.

We’ll stop nitpicking here, but you get the idea. This is a shonky-ass script with terminally moronic characters making bad decision after bad decision – yes, even for a slasher movie. Frustratingly stupid things. In the meantime, the script seems to be working backwards from a couple of inventive scenes they’d come up with, such as a theatre set scene and a moment between the walls of a house. What good these moments bring are undercut by the logic hoops they have to jump through to get there.

But maybe you have enough love for the Scream franchise that you can look past the poor script with some good ideas as long as the characters and actors are back. That’s fine, that’s basically Scream 3. The problem is these returning characters are almost unrecognisable versions of who they used to be. Sidney is a cranky, reactive and pretty stupid throughout. Gale has been reduced to ‘well, that just happened’ reactions (but swearier) and the twins are her bumbling sidekicks. Much of Mindy and Chad’s screenplay is spent responding to people asking why they’re here, a discussion all the more awkward because they’re incapable or saying the words ‘Sam’ or ‘Tara’.

Many mistakes have been made here, but possibly the most glaring is the hiring of a screenwriter in the place of a director. After the original director dropped out, the perplexing decision to replace them with Kevin Williamson was made. Williamson was hugely influential in television writing for a very long time and famously scripted the original Scream, but his last and only attempt at directing a feature was the 1999 Teaching Mrs. Tingle, notable at the time for being uninteresting. Williamson’s direction in Scream 7 shows little development in the 25 years since then, with his visuals being bland, the pacing being sluggish, and some of the editing decisions being messy. Jump cutting the action into a jump scare is just unimaginative. The main cast are well familiar with their roles, but feel like they’re limited to their catchphrases for comedic beats than being given the chance to explore anything new.

A disappointing effort to keep this franchise alive after the studio accidentally stabbed it several times. It will be remembered as having the worst Ghostface reveal since the third film.

Rating: TWO out of TEN