You either die a satire of dumb slasher films, or live long enough to become one. And unfortunately that is what "Scream 7" is. This is a lame movie, filled with too many characters, too many callbacks, too many conveniences and a chronic lack of intelligence.
Neve Campbell returns as Sidney, who's living a quiet life in a small Indiana town with her daughter Tatum (Isabel May) and her husband Mark (Joel McHale), the chief of police. She runs a coffee shop (like all mass-murderer survivors naturally do), when she gets a phone call claiming to be from Stu (Matthew Lillard), who fans might recognize as the deceased killer from the first film way back in 1996. (And if you think that's a spoiler, then you clearly haven't checked out the film's IMDB page, but I digress.) Then he video calls her, claiming to be at her daughter's school where she's at theater rehearsal. Good thing she's married to a cop, who sends over all available units, her rushing over as well, but apparently this little town is soooo big that Ghostface is able to kill two students before anyone shows up before disappearing. That rascal.
Tatum is distraught that she just lost a friend, and the cops question everyone who was there. This leads to the only clever line of dialogue, spoken by Tim Simons as the theater director: "she didn't even have an understudy!" But please, one cinematic issue at a time.
Sidney immediately suspects everyone, but especially Tatum's boyfriend (Sam Rechner), for no reason other than he's a boy who has an interest in her daughter. Well, that's not entirely true: he's good with computers, and they can't rule out Stu's call being a deepfake. There's a lot of talk of AI in the script, which, instead of being used to seriously discuss its inherit dangers, or do anything interesting with it, just sounds like it wrote the damn thing. I mean, just think of the possibilities: maybe they could have falsified a video of someone killing someone else, or maybe have the good guys use it to confuse the killers? And that's just off the top of my head, and I'm not even a screenwriter!
A lot has been said about Neve Campbell returning to the role of Sidney, which she famously bowed out of the previous picture over a pay dispute. I'm glad they gave her a butt-load of money, but was this dismal entry worth hurting her legacy? At least when Jamie Lee Curtis returned for the seventh "Halloween" entry, "Halloween H20," the film ended up decent. Not here.
Series veteran Kevin Williamson returns as co-writer (alongside Guy Busick) and graduates to director for the first time for the franchise, but boy howdy is the directing shoddy. The camera flailing around during the many attacks so you never have a clear idea what's happening, the only indication that Ghostface plunged the knife into someone being the subsequent shot of him peering over a corpse.
And for a film filled to the brim with murders, only one showcased any inspiration; I don't want to spoil it, but let's just say, I'll never drink beer from the tap again without thinking of it. But the setup is unfocused, and the execution is sloppy, the actual "kill" looking obviously like a dummy. It's not even a good shot, just a good kill. The only good shot happens early and involves a stage play, but that is just one scene in an entire film.
That's to say nothing of the fact that the daughter is in a play to begin with playing a dog, even. Actually, all her and her friends are, despite everyone wearing cool clothes, having perfect hair and skin. I mean, sure, maybe that would happen, but back in my day, those were the kids everyone else made fun of.
And then there is the writing, which relies on nostalgia instead of pushing the medium forward. Old characters are introduced to get a paltry few claps from a certain audience, but man are they running out of legacy cast members to bring back. The first film had characters who were relatively smart, at least intelligent enough to have seen a few horror movies before and learn from them. But fond memories are all he has, unable to drum up any suspense, relying on ye olde trope of having people go where they shouldn't, never calling the cops and never sticking together as a group. You'd think they'd be able to learn from their own damn movies! (You would also think, after so many murders happen, that cops would be crawling all over the place, but nope, nothing to see here, officer. )
I'll give and example: later on, after a few slicing and dicing, Sidney cries over the phone to her daughter, under attack from the masked villain, yelling she needs to "shoot him in the head." Great advice, something I often think characters should do when I watch these kinds of movies, but because it'd all be over too soon, we need to have Tatum hesitate, gun literally in-hand, so that the killing spree can go on just a wee bit longer. It's just all so laughable, the franchise edging dangerously close to toppling over into parody; you could have easily called this "Scary Movie 6." At least I wouldn't feel bad chuckling at it.
And then there's the ending, where the killer's (or killers, I'll never tell!) motives are revealed. This is the franchise's famous trick, and while I admit I did not predict it, it also made absolutely no sense. I sat thinking to myself "who's that again" and then "wait that's the reason?!" The whole thing reeks of rewrites, reshoots and reedits, which of course probably happened given its infamously troubled production history, but you'd think with so many cooks in the kitchen that they'd come up with something tasty, even if accidentally.
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