It’s almost hard to describe how astonishingly bad “Scream 7” is — though it isn’t entirely surprising considering the circumstances surrounding the film and the lead-up to its production. In 2023, Spyglass Media Group summarily dismissed franchise reboot star Melissa Barrera, who anchored 2022’s “Scream” and “Scream VI,” for posting on social media in support of Palestinians. Shortly after Barrera’s firing, co-star Jenna Ortega departed the film, as well as new director Christopher Landon.
In the wake of the shake-up, Spyglass eventually lured original “Scream” queen Neve Campbell (who had co-starred in the 2022 “Scream” but sat out the New York City-set “Scream VI”) back to the franchise in which she has played Sidney Prescott for three decades. Also returning is Kevin Williamson, the original film’s writer, who was tapped to co-write (with Guy Busick and James Vanderbilt) and direct, his first directorial effort since 1999’s “Teaching Mrs. Tingle.”
Usually all of this extra production context isn’t necessary to explain how and why a film doesn’t work, but here it seems relevant in grappling with why “Scream 7” is such an incoherent mess. Perhaps they were stuck scrapping for parts, or rushed, or working under the dark cloud of the backlash to Barrera’s firing (there have been calls to boycott the film). Whatever the case, the result is easily the franchise’s worst effort, riddled with muddled motivations, inconsistent characters and a serious identity crisis.
The fifth and sixth installments are loosely connected to this seventh film by the presence of the unusually tenacious twins Chad and Mindy Meeks-Martin (Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown), who are inexplicably interning for Sidney’s longtime frenemy, journalist Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox). There are also several references to Sid “skipping New York,” and questions if a Ghostface attack even counts if she’s not there.
Because Sidney Prescott, now Evans, exists only in relationship to Ghostface, the costume worn by many different knife-wielding maniacs over the years, starting with her high school boyfriend. Much like Laurie Strode in “Halloween,” who shapes her existence around surviving Michael Myers, who is Sidney without the Halloween mask donned by so many of her nearest and dearest? She doesn’t seem to know. Her day-to-day life is defined by her trauma — she’s a heat-packing woman with a high-tech home security system married to a cop (Joel McHale) — but oddly enough, she doesn’t talk about her past with her teenage daughter Tatum (Isabel May). That doesn’t seem like Sidney at all.
Instead, she tries to live a semblance of a “Gilmore Girls” life in the bucolic town of Pine Grove, where she runs a cutesy coffee shop and is a wife and mom to three kids, whom she wants to protect from the world and her pesky ghosts. Still, it makes little sense that Tatum (named after Sidney’s best friend, played by Rose McGowan in the first film) would know so little about her mom’s past. But there’s very little about this film that makes sense.
It doesn’t help that Campbell and May have all the chemistry of two colleagues who met right before cameras started rolling, and the rest of the cast feels like a hastily assembled group of random actors tapped for their turn on the “Scream” ride. McHale, Ethan Embry, Timothy Simons, Mark Consuelos and Anna Camp are the familiar faces as various teachers, neighbors and news reporters; May, Celeste O’Connor, Mckenna Grace, Sam Rechner and Asa Germann make up the new generation of high school screamers that we barely get to know or care about before Ghostface’s blade starts swinging.
Legasequels often try to contend with the larger ideas and evolutions of these iconic properties, and “Scream 7” half-heartedly attempts that. An opening salvo featuring Jimmy Tatro and Michelle Randolph as a horror-obsessed couple seems to set up a cautionary tale about murder tourism, but that theme is quickly abandoned. In the series’ characteristic — yet now obligatory — bit of self-reflection on the genre, characters thumb their noses at “nostalgia” and the “retconning” of the Sidney Prescott story, only for the script to toy with just that, introducing a deepfake AI subplot. For such a self-conscious series, “Scream 7” doesn’t manage to impart any kind of insight about itself. It’s nothing more than an episode of “Scooby-Doo.”
Distracting from the void at its core are the extremely gory kills, splashed with pixelized blood and guts that are indeed successful in making an audience squirm. But there’s no escaping the nagging feeling that it seems like Williamson fed “Scream” into an AI chatbot and the machine spat this wretched thing out — it has all the familiar components but doesn’t move right, sound right or feel right; it’s not funny, or scary, or suspenseful. “Scream 7” is an unfortunate tarnish on this otherwise sturdy franchise’s legacy.
‘Scream 7’
1 star (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for strong bloody violence, gore, and language)
Running time: 1:54
How to watch: In theaters Feb. 27
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