The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C-
I have probably mentioned this before, but Scream holds a special place in my heart. I saw the original Scream on opening night on December 19th, 1996 and expected very little from it. I was blown away and was very happy to see it become a surprise hit based on word-of-mouth. I saw Scream 2 on opening night the following December and the theater experience was completely different. It was now a cultural phenomenon, with long lines to get into the theater and people dressed as Ghostface running though the crowd. It was crazy and it was glorious.
During this time, I was really cool and popular in school and that’s why I spent a lot of time on horror movie message boards debating fan theories about the Scream and Halloween franchises. Every girl in school wanted me, but I was too focused on Scream theories to bother with that.
Anyway, that was actually important context for why Scream 7 pissed me off so much. On the message boards back then, there were two prevailing fan theories: 1. Stu (Matthew Lillard) was still alive and orchestrating things behind the scenes and 2. There was a secret third killer that was actually running things since the first movie. I thought that the first theory was ridiculous (more on that in a minute), but I was intrigued by the second theory. And then Scream 7 told me to go fuck myself.
I’m not going to give spoilers in that I won’t identify the killers, but I am going to, in general terms, bitch quite a lot about the killers. Consider that a mild spoiler warning. The marketing for this movie played directly into the two fan theories that I mentioned earlier and I got excited. In particular, the trailers highlighted the lines “I’m not hiding, Sidney. Not this time.” and also “I’m going to burn it all down” while the killer stood in front of Stu’s house as it burned to the ground. I saw this on opening night and the theater was giving out posters, which included the tagline “Face Your Past” and featured Matthew Lillard prominently in the cast. So, obviously, we were getting a killer reveal that tied deeply into the lore and changed how we viewed the events of prior movies, right? Right?
Fuck no. The killer reveals in Scream 7 are easily, by far, the lamest in the entire series. And that’s saying something at this point. The entire thing amounts to meta commentary about how Neve Campbell wasn’t in Scream VI and it has zero ties to the earlier films. There is no big reveal that ties back to the first movie. The killer reveals and motivations in this are fucking asinine, made worse by the marketing of the film that promised so much more. The last act of this film is a joke and a fucking insult to fans that were on message boards in 1998 because nobody would go out with them. I mean, because I was too cool for them. Yeah.
Oh, and fuck you if you accuse me of spoilers for saying that Matthew Lillard is in this movie. His name is on the poster and his voice is in the trailer. Spoilers, I guess for a character that has been dead for 30 years, but Stu is dead. He is only in this movie in AI videos. I do give the movie credit for making fun of the idea that Stu could be the killer since he has been dead since 1996. I’m tired if hearing that shit. Let it go.
Along those lines, the opening scene of Scream 7 is both solid and infuriating. Stu’s house from the first movie has been turned into an Air B&B for true crime enthusiasts, setting up our opening scene victims. This scene is actually quite good. It’s suspenseful, well shot and has solid misdirection. The problem is that it ends up having fuck all to do with anything. It ends with the killer burning down Stu’s house (as shown in the trailers) and you would think that this would be integral to the plot, right? Nope. Has fuck all to do with anything. Nobody ever even mentions it again in the movie. No idea why these people were even killed. It sets up nothing.
The saving grace, though, is that the kills in Scream 7 are pretty damn good. As much as I love Scream, this isn’t a series known for its kills and this entry definitely kicks it up a notch. It is pretty damn gory for a Scream film, with notable kills including a theatrical disemboweling and a very creative use of a beer tap. Ghostface often seems to be more like Jason Voorhees in this entry and that aint a bad thing.
The characters and performances are also pretty uninspired, though. I love Neve Campbell, but this barely even feels like Sidney at this point. The performance is solid enough, but I just don’t feel like this is the girl that I’ve watched since 1996. The movie is focused on telling us how tough she is rather than showing us. When push comes to shove, she makes some really stupid decisions that the Sidney that I knew wouldn’t have made. The rest of the case is pretty superfluous, even the returning characters. There is no reason for Gale Weathers to even be in this movie, something apparently realized by the screenwriters when she disappears (with no explanation) in the final act. A couple of the characters from the fifth and sixth films also appear, but I just don’t care. It was an increasingly huge mistake to kill off Dewey, because goddamn did this need him.
Scream 7 isn’t an awful movie. It’s certainly better than that god-awful I Know What You Did Last Summer movie from last year. But there is just nothing special or interesting about it. It has the worst reveals in the series, especially in the context of the terribly misleading marketing. As an ongoing record, here is my current ranking of the Scream franchise: 1-4-2-6-5-7-3.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scream_7#/media/File:Scream_7_(poster).jpg
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