movie review
SCREAM 7
Running time: 114 minutes. Rated R (strong bloody violence, gore, and language.) In theaters.
In the middle of the stupefyingly bad seventh “Scream” movie, Sidney Prescott asks her daughter’s boyfriend, “Do you know anything about AI?”
Oh, I screamed all right.
Noooo! Anything but another slapdash horror film with a lazy plot that hinges on artificial intelligence!
But that’s all “Scream 7” is — the same old regurgitated slasher mush Hamburger Helper’d with a dash of AI. It’s a near-lethal dose of nostalgia to anesthetize sad, sad millennials.
The acting, even by the standards of the formulaic “killer on the loose” genre, is anemic. Neve Campbell again coasts on the fumes of dwindling affection as Sid. And Isabel May, as Sidney’s personality-free kid Tatum, is a Jennifer Lawrence without the spark. Call her OK-Law.
Both appear to have prepared for gory stabbing scenes and intense peril by taking a bubble bath and sipping chamomile tea. Even the basic jump-scares don’t work. There are more frightening Enya songs.
And at the end when we find out who Ghostface is — an increasingly random reveal I stopped caring about 20 years ago — the expressed motive is so garbled and nonsensical that the villain actually loses their train of thought mid-speech.
That telling mental hiccup turns out to be a metaphor for this entire overstretched series that lost its way ages ago after it became the target of its own mockery and has been stuck repeating itself.
Bland “7” stands as the worst chapter in the 30-year-old franchise, which should have been killed off already.
Alas, original writer Kevin Williamson has returned to reclaim his baby after the duo of reboot films starring Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera he was uninvolved with. Those weren’t any good either, but at least they had pep.
Williamson, whose only new idea is “um, Chat GPT!,” borrows the model of director David Gordon Green’s very good “Halloween” reboot trilogy except with an unusual twist — it’s boring and cheap.
Sidney becomes an older-and-wiser Laurie Strode type who must protect her spawn against her mortal enemy.
Of course, Sidney’s never-ending tiff with Ghostface is rather less compelling than that of Laurie and Michael Myers, considering that Ghostface can be pretty much anybody with a grievance who drops by a costume shop. In truth, the masked loser hasn’t been freaky in forever.
Sid and fam now live in pretty Pine Grove, Indiana, where she runs a coffee shop. However, she’s far from anonymous. The woman is still mercilessly hounded by true-crime fans.
The rise of real murders as entertainment is just one longtime trend Williams is awkwardly late to.
The opening slaying takes place at a novelty AirBnb that’s been made to look like the house from the “Stab” movies. Yawn.
And Sidney’s husband Mark (Joel McHale), the local police chief, earnestly asks, “Isn’t Ben a computer junkie?” as though in 2026 PCs are mysterious new inventions.
What’s Tatum’s deal? Well, she plays a dog in the school play and is probably the sole member of Gen Z who has a Duran Duran poster hanging in her bedroom.
She soon has a view to a kill.
Sidney gets the usual ring from Ghostface and within minutes Tatum’s castmate from the high-school play is sliced from top to bottom as her intestines cascade onto the stage.
“We don’t even have an understudy!,” bemoans the drama teacher.
Williamson drops lame jokes like that in all the wrong places, and I can’t recall a less funny “Scream” entry.
Courteney Cox’s reporter Gale Weathers arrives in Pine Grove with a camera and Chad (Mason Gooding) and Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown), brother-and-sister characters from the last two movies who are now her “hot interns.”
Unlike the last two flicks, where the old cast made cameos, “7” treats the younger characters as totally dispensable mouthpieces for exposition.
As the dull teens and cash-checking adults are slayed in routine fashion, our attention wanders to more exciting things, such as TurboTax and spackling paste.
And, when the situation in Pine Grove gets desperate, Williamson writes his best and most important line of the entire film: “This must not continue!”
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