REVIEW:
Scream 7 wasn’t great, by any means, but it knew what it needed to do and knew what it needed to be. This 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 and nostalgia. Here’s the thing, when a series goes for a really long time (let’s say five or more movies,) it gets pretty hard to keep the thing afloat, alive, and relevant. With action movies, they give us new stunts and attempts at new stories, but even that is tough.
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 film 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 brought beck always adds to the fun. Here’s betting in the next movie they’ll find a way to bring Randy back.
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 the third movie making a set of the house that the characters ran through.. Well, in this movie, the house has been turned into an Air B and B type of rental place, complete with posters and gimmicks from the Stab films (fake movies within this universe that referenced the events of these movies.). 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 friend 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,) then a Scream 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 entrails fall out in the first movie, but just heard the sounds and saw the killer moving his hand above what we could actually see. But here, everything is on full display. 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 out of the way of itself. For example, there’s a scene where the killer shows up in Sidney’s house. Now this would be really cool if not for one thing… the police just swept that house going room by room. Literally. It’s so close in timing that while the killer was in there chasing our heroes around, I was wondering if the police were still there too.
Another example of the movie stepping on its one toes, (and this is a big one,) is that Sidney refuses to tell her daughter anything about her past. She won’t even teach her daughter how to protect herself, how to fire a gun, or what to do when there’s a killer after you. Now I get that everything that happened was very dramatic to Sidney, but it’s one thing not to tell your daughter the stories of how your friends died, and a whole other to not prepare your daughter for the future. This movie makes the mistake of looping these two things together and doing both.
And here’s the thing… we as fans of the series would love to see Sidney talk about these characters. We’d love to hear her talk about Randy’s funny quirks, and how she and her friends used to sit around the school fountain. Even if she just gave one line per character. For a movie that understands nostalgia bait so much, how did they miss this?
The truth is, the movie doesn’t just miss it, but goes out of its way to point out that it’s not telling us. The main storyline here is that Sidney doesn’t and is unwilling to tell her daughter anything, including details about the friend who her daughter is named after. All of this is at its worst during an interview between Sidney and Gail on the news. The characters discuss how this is the interview they (and we,) have been waiting thirty years for. It’s setup beautifully. The two characters sit down, across from each other in the news studio, and then…nothing. Gail asks some stupid questions about Sidney’s daughter and Sidney walks. It’s all over just like that. Not even a question or mention about Cotton Weary, the wrongfully accused character (played by Liev Schreiber,) who Gayle championed all those years back.
So the movie makes a whole lot of mistakes. And the biggest and most unforgivable of all of these has got to be who the killers are. Not that we really get to know any characters in this movie well, but the killers are like the least interesting characters they could have possibly chosen, and the motivation makes no sense at all. It’s a mess. This is the movie that started off pretty good, (with Stu’s house and the references, and the high school auditorium stage murders,) and then falls apart more and more as it goes on.