{"id":501552,"date":"2026-02-26T20:39:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T20:39:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/501552\/"},"modified":"2026-02-26T20:39:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T20:39:11","slug":"neve-campbell-returns-for-a-back-to-basics-sequel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/501552\/","title":{"rendered":"Neve Campbell Returns for a Back-to-Basics Sequel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe \u201cScream\u201d movies, at their best, are delectable booby-trapped entertainments, and part of that is how cleverly they stay a step ahead of us. But there\u2019s a moment in \u201cScream 7<\/a>\u201d that typifies the sensation this new movie gives you: that it\u2019s leading the audience and lagging behind it at the same time.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe\u2019re watching a homicidal pursuit through the home of Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell<\/a>), who is not only back but once again the central character (let\u2019s call her the Final Girl as Mom). Sidney and her teenage daughter, Tatum (Isabel May), a kind of Final Girl in Training, are attempting to elude the blade of Ghostface. There\u2019s a good bit where they inch along a catwalk behind the living-room wall, with Ghostface stabbing it from the other side. He misses, and they wind up on the street outside, where the killer gets smashed by a car that comes barreling out of nowhere (the driver, in fact, turns out to be an old friend).\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe killer\u2019s costume-shop Edvard Munch mask gets pulled off, revealing his identity, and this is followed by some chatter about how Ghostface often turns out to be more than one person. You don\u2019t say! Considering that we\u2019re only 45 minutes into the movie, that\u2019s kind of a super duh. \u201cScream 7\u201d is inadvertantly revealing its true theme, which is: Does anyone even care anymore who Ghostface is? Once all the obvious suspects have been eliminated, the answer is destined to be as arbitrary as it is forgettable.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe last two \u201cScream\u201d films were nothing if not busy \u2014 nearly antic at times, stuffed to the bloody gills with backstory and mythology and schlock trivia. Yet there\u2019s no denying that that was part of what kept the pulse of the series alive. In the lead-up to \u201cScream 7,\u201d however, the busy quality seemed to transfer over to the drama offscreen: the firing of Melissa Barrera after comments she made that some judged to be antisemitic; the bowing out of Jenna Ortega; the fight over Neve Campbell\u2019s salary (she sat out \u201cScream VI\u201d); the fact that the directors who\u2019d taken over the franchise, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, opted out, and their replacement, Christopher Landon, then quit after he started getting death threats over Barrera\u2019s firing.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs if to calm the waters, the reins were handed back to Kevin Williamson<\/a>, who 30 years ago wrote and created the original \u201cScream.\u201d He was the series\u2019 true auteur: the one who devised the whole concept of a meta slasher movie, a trash thriller maze that would be equal parts straight horror and a hack-\u2019em-up version of Trivial Pursuit.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Williamson returns to the \u201cScream\u201d franchise, now directing one of the films for the first time, with a weirdly restricted agenda. The whole slaughter-movie scholarship side of the \u201cScream\u201d films \u2014 \u201cLook! We\u2019re deconstructing the prospect of our own deaths like horror-film-class geeks!\u201d \u2014 has basically been played out. And the series is all too aware of that. Williamson knows that he can\u2019t just go back to that age-of-VHS \u201990s drawing board. So what he\u2019s done instead is to return the series to its \u201croots\u201d in a straightforward, analog, Jamie Lee Curtis-in-the-rebooted-\u201cHalloween\u201d-franchise sort of way. \u201cScream 7\u201d has enough shocks and yocks to keep the product churning and the audience, at least for a weekend, turning out. Williamson has gone back to basics, but the result is a \u201cScream\u201d sequel that, while it nods in the direction of being seductively convoluted, is really just\u2026basic.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe teenage Tatum, named for Sidney\u2019s late lamented bestie (the Rose McGowan character from the original \u201cScream\u201d), has a boyfriend, Ben (Sam Rechner) who smirks too much, along with a minor circle of friends who could all, theoretically, be suspects. But they get bumped off with a regularity that lets us know the mystery is elsewhere. One of the murders is a grisly piece of showmanship: Hannah (Mckenna Grace), flying around on a harness as she rehearses the high-school play, gets slashed with Ghostface\u2019s knife until her innards fall out. But that scene is the exception to the film\u2019s rule of routine \u201csensational\u201d killings. Simply put, \u201cScream 7\u201d isn\u2019t very scary, and it isn\u2019t very inventively gory (which some of the sequels have been).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film opens with a fun variation on the ritual Ghostface phone call: Scott and Madison (Jimmy Tatro and Michelle Randolph) are visiting the former home of Stu Macher, which has been turned into a slasher museum. Among the nostalgic artifacts is a life-size Ghostface model that turns its head via movement sensors. Roger L. Jackson is once again the voice of Ghostface (the aggro psycho as AM radio DJ), and all of this erupts into a satisfyingly incendiary prelude.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut once \u201cScream 7\u201d settles into its main story, Williamson adopts a tone of mordant sincerity regarding Sidney and the trauma she can\u2019t seem to outrun. Courteney Cox<\/a>\u2019s Gale Weathers shows up, and she too becomes a major player, though the \u201cmedia\u201d commentary is strictly pro forma. The film has better luck reviving Matthew Lillard<\/a>\u2019s Stu, a character we were certain was dead\u201a and he may in fact be. But then how is Stu, with mottled skin, calling up Sidney and conducting threatening live video-phone chats with her? Lillard\u2019s raging performance could almost be his answer to Quentin Tarantino\u2019s dis of him. The actor, like the character, is saying, \u201cI\u2019m still here,\u201d and that\u2019s true even if Stu is just a deepfake.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Mindy, the aspiring TV news reporter who\u2019s working for Gale, Jasmin Savoy Brown gets to deliver the film\u2019s few token snippets of horror-snob geekery, and she\u2019s so good at it that she made me wish Williamson had included more of it. Maybe the reason this stuff got so played out is that the series, creatively speaking, could actually use a more expansive vision of what horror movies are. But that\u2019s not about to happen, because the \u201cScream\u201d films are so successful they\u2019re now effectively trapped in a genre that can\u2019t risk being too smart about playing dumb.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The \u201cScream\u201d movies, at their best, are delectable booby-trapped entertainments, and part of that is how cleverly they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":498545,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,49288,75,50662,78327,50663,38053],"class_list":["post-501552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-courteney-cox","tag-entertainment","tag-kevin-williamson","tag-matthew-lillard","tag-neve-campbell","tag-scream-7"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/498545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}