Scream 7 <\/p>\n
\ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 <\/p>\n
Director: Kevin Williamson<\/p>\n
Cert: 16<\/p>\n
Starring: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Anna Camp, Joel McHale<\/p>\n
Running Time: 1 hr 54 mins<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re lucky you sat that one out,\u201d someone says to Neve Campbell. \u201cIt was brutal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, nobody, in the latest addition to the Screamiverse<\/a>, 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n We know what\u2019s 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 \u201cbrutal\u201d is being used in the domestic sense of \u201cutterly useless\u201d, but, alas, the filmmakers are not quite that self-aware about their creation. <\/p>\n Anyway, the last episode, though a little out of puff, wasn\u2019t 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 \u201cfinal girl\u201d (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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 the franchise within the franchise \u2013 much as others might stay in a property modelled on Abraham Lincoln\u2019s log cabin.<\/p>\n