Scream 7
Director: Kevin Williamson
Cert: 16
Starring: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Anna Camp, Joel McHale
Running Time: 1 hr 54 mins
“You’re lucky you sat that one out,” someone says to Neve Campbell. “It was brutal.”
Of course, nobody, in the latest addition to the Screamiverse, is talking to the actual Neve Campbell. The always-welcome Canadian star is again playing the dogged, fearless Sidney Prescott. First a pin-cushion to the Ghostface killer some 30 years ago, she has now settled down to life as a coffee-shop proprietor in some leafy corner of Indiana. Let us see how long that lasts.
We know what’s going on. We know how Scream works. The line is a reference to the fact that Campbell, to some hissing from the cheap seats, stepped away from Scream VI and has now come crawling back for another two hours of meta-textual bloodletting. Irish readers can enjoy pretending “brutal” is being used in the domestic sense of “utterly useless”, but, alas, the filmmakers are not quite that self-aware about their creation.
Anyway, the last episode, though a little out of puff, wasn’t all that bad. The new one, directed by Kevin Williamson, writer of the original 1996 film and several sequels, struggles to find fresh ways of snarking at slasher conventions. Indeed, for 20 minutes on end, the film will forget its high-concept before suddenly shaking itself awake to make a half-baked quip about, say, Sidney now being a little old for a “final girl” (the nerve!). But it is surprising how much juice there still is in this middle-aged beast. Much of that is down to the returning duo of Campbell and, as ruthless telly reporter Gale Weathers, spirit-of-the-1990s Courteney Cox.
As happens so often with anti-heroes in long-running series, Weathers has softened with the passing years, but Campbell remains fatalistically robust as our key protagonist. The film’s internal mythology looks to have become the stuff of history. The inevitable prologue has a couple spending the weekend in a property themed around the Stab movies – the franchise within the franchise – much as others might stay in a property modelled on Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin.
[ The Movie Quiz: How many Scream films have a number in the title?Opens in new window ]
What follows is a reasonably ingenious meld of new-generational tomfoolery and the unearthing of ancient characters whose identities we shan’t spoil. There is little original here, but, as has always been the case in this treatise on repeated tropes, that is precisely the point. They can have that get-out clause on me.
In cinemas from February 27th