So I decided to binge-watch the entire Scream series to build up to reviewing Scream VI. 1 and 4 are my favorites, 2 is decent, 3 is wildly unbalanced and 5CREAM is so needlessly annoying. So here’s the nitty gritty of it all: for a franchise that continually pushed the boundaries of what a horror film could or could not do for over a quarter of a century…..
…..this sixth installment was surprisingly ok. It’s a slash above 5 but no more.
I want to believe Matt Olpin and Tyler Gillett have true reverence and love for this franchise as their direction is one that grows very weary of film-culture commentary but tries way harder than it probably needs to to justify its own existence.
Never mind the fact this was filmed in Montreal and not New York, I feel as if the production design wasn’t used to the full extent it could’ve been. For all the various scenes using city-specific spaces to drive up tension, only THREE set-pieces come to mind that actually use enough of the setting to its advantage. Everything else has limited usage. With that being said, Brett Jutkiewicz’s cinematography occasionally captures many macabre images that gel with the grittiness of what’s supposed to be a new setting and the editing does its damnedest to compensate, its pacing doesn’t overstay its welcome at any point and the main cast of characters are solid enough to where I completely forgot Sidney wasn’t in this one.
It’s gratuitously gory enough in its kills to feel like it fits in this franchise, living up to its R-rating and the films ensemble cast has quality to it, with all the major players utilizing their roles to a T; Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega have believable chemistry together and the former’s performance is a vast improvement from the previous film.
But that leaves us with the biggest elephant in the room: the story. The script is almost exactly the same as the previous film: serviceable enough on its own but fundamentally surface level…..and yet, this one is just moderately more tolerable than 5CREAM while also being just as annoying.
It’s nothing more than a homage to Scream 2 but it is too beholden to its own formula and keeps falling strictly into the meta when the structure calls for some kind, any kind of subversion and the few subversions that do come along are few and far in-between. The rest involves, again, either lazily telegraphing and reusing a lot of the tropes they called out on to move the story along or constantly bringing up interesting ideas or concepts without ever following really up on them. It does mention the foreboding effects on trauma and how characters try to cope differently to move past that, but those concerns almost immediately evaporate into nothingness near the end because one, this is something the previous films did much better and two, nothing really matters in this film, unfortunately.
Yes, I know there’s always a formula. “A VERY SIMPLE FORMULA! EVERYBODY’S A SUSPECT!” But this installment with its new environment, returning characters and the very idea of legacy would’ve been the best opportunity possible to divert away from that formula and diverge into a new direction while sticking to the basics of what made it work. They do take Sam’s family connection in an interesting direction that I feel like could definitely be expanded upon in the next Scream film and the plot tries to explore the nastiness of online culture seeping into the real world but that gets surface level treatment also despite the supposed thematic weight it’s meant to receive by the end; it wants to move forward but has to piggyback on its past to make any traction for that.
Again, SCRE4M does it a lot better.
Characters are either specifically there to be red herrings or pad out the roster because they don’t have much purpose, the stakes once again are relatively low because apparently, the writers are now hesitant to kill anyone off, it’s use of dark humor still isn’t as sharp as the others and there’s a little bit of tonal whiplash that constantly halts the films momentum heading into the last act.
What this means for Scream going forward I have no idea but I’m happy to have been caught up on all these movies, even if these final two really show how lacking they are without Wes Craven or Kevin Williamson around.
