Horror fans paraded into theaters to see “Scream 7” excited to see their favorite characters one last time in the franchise’s newest film. Unfortunately many fans, including myself, left the theater having had more laughs and sighs than screams.
The movie opens with a couple on vacation staying at a Scream Killer-themed vacation rental full of murder memorabilia, including motion-activated animatronics with the ability to track you while moving in a stabbing motion. This was a great start that immediately felt like the 1980’s gore, suspense-filled-horror fans of this genre love to see. However, after this scene played out, the audience was tossed into the original storyline of Sydney and her daughter and the horror hit a wall. The jumpscares and plot were predictable, and unfortunately the rest of the film felt poorly strung together; serving only to dish out familiar faces from the franchise.
These familiar faces being Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox reprising their roles as final-girl Sydney Prescott and news reporter Gale Weathers. The supporting cast included Joel McHale as Mark Evans, Isabel May as Tatum Evans, a surprise appearance from growing scream queen Mackenna Grace (coming off of her role in “Five Nights at Freddy’s”) and a much anticipated cameo from Matthew Lillard as Stu Machard.
While this casting sounds phenomenal, I feel the writing failed them. Lillard’s screentime amounted to well under five minutes, with Stu’s cameo speculated to be an AI generated by in-universe Ghostface fanatics, not as the iconic villain we know him to be. The reach to be modern and realistic to our current time hurt this movie far more than it helped. It took away from the fear and just made the entire thing funny. Sometimes relatable doesn’t work well, especially when watching horror movies. We’d rather be scared by the unimaginable, instead of unimpressed by the predictable.
After watching “Send Help” last week and being disappointed with the gore in that film, I was really hopeful for a redemption watch for the horror fans, this was simply not that. With kills happening that felt so forced the story was unchanged by the murders, slow pacing and dialogue that even felt flat, lacking fresh humor and failing to provide any sort of redemption to the story as a whole, I am starting to wonder if the entire genre should be left to the Halloween season and stay out of the rest of the year.
It’s safe to say that the fandom felt spoon fed with this one, it feels wrong to even give this a single pepper on the spicy scale. Let this be a lesson to future franchises, maybe end the score three or four films in. Sometimes too much is possible and the reason we love to watch and rewatch is because we are left wishing we had more.
We are taking a brief break next week, but stay tuned as in the next few weeks I will be diving into the Oscar nominations, and then ending out the month of March with an out of this world collaboration with Eli comparing the book to the film, “Project Hail Mary.”