Scream 6 — Review Thread

No one here to judge her acting, sir.

Meh. Different strokes...

Scream VI(3/9/2023)
The Scream franchise is kind of unique among the major slasher series in that it’s never really hit the depths of lousiness that other series hit with movies like Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday or Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers. Just about every installment has been basically competent and they’ve avoided veering off into any stupid directions but it’s also becoming increasingly clear that they’ve in large part because they’ve had little or no ambition and even by slasher movie standards have been willing to just make the exact same movie over and over again. And I’m not just talking about screenplay structure either, even as slasher movies these movies tend not to have many variations in the kills. Say what you will about Jason, but at least he occasionally puts down the machete and finds new weapons to rid the world of horny camp counselors but just about every kill in the Scream movies seems to just be a stab with a hunting knife after a bit of chasing a victim around a room. To some extent they’ve tried to lampshade this by coming up with “meta” reasons to repeat themselves, like in the last film where the villains were fans of the “Stab” series who themselves wanted every Scream movie to be the same and orchestrated “Ghostface’s” action accordingly, but the more of these movies they make the less that excuse really works.

In this latest installment it initially feels like they’re finally going to shake things up, firstly by relocating the action to New York City and the opening scene this time feels different in that it ends with our new Ghostface saying “who gives a fuck about movies,” suggesting that things will change up this time as our killer isn’t obsessed with slasher movie formulas but… at the end of the day I’m not sure these promised changes really amount to much. The killer might claim to not be interested in slasher movies but they’ve basically just replaced this by making him obsessed with the killers from the previous Scream movies, who were themselves obsessed with slasher movies, so the end result is basically unchanged. There is some interest to be minded in a plot development in which the public has turned against Sam Carpenter (the protagonist of the previous movie) because of a conspiracy theory that she was the “real” killer in that previous film in a way that sort of mirrors the public’s blaming of Amber Heard for her own abuse, but beyond that this does feel like business as usual for the franchise. We’ve got stock repeated characters here talking endlessly about movie formulas, the final culprit is even more obvious than usual, and most of the set-pieces are once again just endless attempts to re-create the opening scene from the first movie.

Again, the excuse the film gives for all this repetition is that the movies they’re commenting on metatextually are themselves repetitious… but they kind of aren’t actually. By installment six most of the major slasher franchises had in fact tried to shake things up more dramatically than this… granted this was often to their detriment, but still there are only so many times they can go to this well before the act of commenting on other movies’ repetitive qualities feels less like clever subversion and more like simple hypocrisy. Now, don’t get me wrong, the formula they’re riffing off here was a good one, almost good enough that Scream VI almost gets away with doing it again. The change in setting alone probably makes this a bit more interesting than the last Scream movie but that one had a bit more leeway for technically being a reboot after some dormancy so it got a little more leeway in these matters. This one though is coming out just a little over a year after the last one, which was itself pushing it when it came to doing the same damn thing all over again, and there’s something particularly galling about a franchise being smug about Hollywood formulas while being beholden to one themselves. The last movie’s villains were depicted as being a bunch of chuds who can’t handle movies series doing the unexpected, which is fine but… you’ve got to ask when the producers of these movies are going to stop making their own movies for those very chuds.
**1/2 out of Five