It’s the curse of any successful intellectual property in the world of Hollywood; the temptation to push it a little too far is unavoidable…

Unfortunately, Scream 7 has the emotional resonance that is the equivalent to someone passing gas in church.  Despite series star Neve Campbell doing her best to give her character some strength and closure, the material doesn’t do her any favours in giving us a sequel that telegraphs too much, borders on self-parody and devolves into gory set pieces that don’t give is much reason to care.

When a new Ghostface killer emerges in the quiet town where Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) has built a new life, her darkest fears are realized as her daughter (Isabel May) becomes the next target. Determined to protect her family, Sidney must face the horrors of her past to put an end to the bloodshed once and for all.

To be fair, this sequel has been pretty much doomed from the start given the whole sale rewrites that were required in the wake of Melissa Barrera being fired in the wake of making Pro-Palestinian comments during pre-production which were interpreted as Anti-Semitic in late 2023.  This ultimately gave series original Neve Campbell the leverage to return with a healthy pay hike after bowing out of Scream VI due to a pay dispute.  Combine that with the departure of director Christopher Landon who received death threats after Barrera’s firing, the franchise had to turn back to its roots with franchise originator Kevin Williamson taking the director reigns.

While Williamson and his co-screenwriter Guy Busick are both experienced writers, this script is leaning on the formula and it’s forced attempts to evolve it just a little too much with an underdeveloped story and simply not enough reasons to actually care about anything that is actually going on.  It telegraphs the action and drives us into a myriad of predictable moments as it tries (in vain) to swerve us and keep us going in this franchise that while always violent has always had a solid spirit of ‘whodunit’ and ‘mystery’ about it.  It trades that in for gore that feels more akin in a Friday the 13^th movie then here in this franchise.  Combined with a myriad of cheap cameos under the plot point and guise of the “evils of Deep Fakes and Artificial Intelligence” so much of this film just felt fake, which ultimately misses the point with the reveal of the killers landing like lead balloon.

It more or less abandons the trope of following the horror movie tropes and devolves into a midlevel cat & mouse game where we don’t care who the bad guys are as long as our heroines or “Final Girls” get their moments in the sun.  This ultimately highlights Williamson’s weaknesses as a director who hasn’t sat in that seat since 1999’s disappointing Teaching Mrs. Tingle.  This film rushes us from set piece to set piece and relies on us being invested in Neve as Sydney Prescott and Courtney Cox as Gale Weathers to advance the story and barely gives us anything with the new cast members.  It’s just rushing from story beat to story beat that are all mostly pretty tired (with logic gaps and plot holes that you could drive a truck through) and do nothing that was ever in the spirit of the original films.

Isabel May as Tatum is actually decent here as the heir apparent to the legacy of Sydney as her daughter and the dynamic of the story between the two with Sydney’s desperate attempts to protect her daughter from the crazy world that she has lived in is actually an interesting one.  Unfortunately it all falls off a cliff as the new youngsters are just forgettable (for good reason) and any of returning characters are just window dressing for Sydney and her daughter to find their collective grooves.  When the supporting players in the film basically feel like filler, it’s not a good sign.

However, with all that being said the one genuine positive to pull from this movie is actually Neve Campbell.

She does her darndest to give her character back that “Final Girl” backbone that got somewhat stripped away from her in Scream 5 and when you marry that with her reported 7 Million Dollar salary for the film (which is a huge bump from previous installments) you’ve got to appreciate it when a talented actress (who’s in her 50’s) extracts a well over due payday from the Hollywood system that made A LOT of money off of her work.  Assuming she clears around 3 Million dollars after taxes, lawyers and agents she can buy herself a very nice house or invest this comfortably enough so that she can do whatever she wants be it The Lincoln Lawyer on Netflix, a play in London or anything else in-between.

If for some reason they decide they want to green light a Scream 8, seeing the studios back up a Brinks truck for a woman in her 50’s in Hollywood will always make me smile.  No matter what they put in front of her, Neve Campbell as Sydney Prescott is in the same pantheon as Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode when it comes to the horror genre.  She’s the heart and the soul of it all, which is what ultimately makes the lazy cash grab that, is Scream 7 so disappointing.