REVIEW:
Scream 7 was exactly what it needed to be. It was a movie that referenced the series and the classic first movie as much as possible. And that’s a good thing, because with this series it’s become all about the Easter Eggs. Here’s the thing, when a series goes for a really long time (let’s say five or more movies,) it gets really hard to keep the thing afloat, alive, and relevant. With action movies, you give us new stunts and attempts at new stories, but even that is tough. For every Mission Impossible franchise that successfully navigated a lengthy series of films, there’s an Indiana Jones series that didn’t. For every Fast and the Furious series, there’s a Terminator series that fell apart.
So the fact that Scream has gotten as far as it has is an accomplishment, and that’s in large part due to knowing what the fans want to see. They want to see nostalgia. They want to see references. In this movie, the biggest nostalgia bait is Matthew Lilard returning as Stu. In the movie before, or maybe the fun before that, it was Skeet Ulrich returning as Billy. Whether it’s dream sequences, flashbacks, or the use of AI by characters in the movie, however these classic characters are bright beck always adds to the fun. Here’s betting in the next movie they’ll find a way to bring Randy back. And then Dewey after that.
But the references go much further than just the reappearance of Lilard. From the start of the film we are hit with references and tributes. The opening of the movie takes place in Stu’s former house from the first movie, where the party that ended the first film took place. Even this house has been put through the ringer of references at this point, with the fifth movie (simply titled Scream, instead of Scream 5, for some unexplained reason,) using it for their final sequence, as new characters now lived there. And now in this movie, the house has been turned into a pay to spend the night sort of museum. The characters go through the rooms referencing all the different things that happened there over the years. “This is where Sidney hid in the closet right before stabbing Billy with an umbrella.” It all adds to the nostalgia feel.
The movie keeps this going. When we first meet Sidney (Neve Campbell’s) daughter, Tatum (named after her best grunts who was killed in a garage door,) she has a boy sneaking into her bedroom window just like Sid did in the first movie. Funny enough, this is more of a Kevin Williamson thing (he wrote the first movie, as well as penned Dawson’s Creek, where characters did the exact same thing.) This time around, Williamson is not only writing, but also directing.
After the first few scenes of references are over and the new characters are introduced (including Joel McHale from Community as Sidney’s husband,) we are into the new murder mystery. There’s a great batch of murders that take place on the stage of the school theater. When one character gets gutted, it’s showing how far they’ve come in terms of goriness. For example, we never saw Drew Barrymore’s guts fall out in the first movie, but just heard the sounds and saw the killer moving his hand above what we could actually see. There’s another crazy murder later on where a character gets turned into a human beer tap.
Other than the murders, and the references, however, this move doesn’t have a ton to offer. None of the new characters are interesting and the old ones don’t have a whole lot to contribute either. On top of that, the story seems to keep stepping on its own toes, as if it can’t get our of the way of itself.
exsmples: cops at the house before the killer is there, Sidney refusing to tell her daughter anything about her past, the interview with Gayle where it is setup beautifully and then burying comes of it.. How about a mention of Cotton Weary who Gayle championed all those years back?