There’s a lovely running gag in Scream 4 (2011) about the limitations of creatively exhausted movie franchises. Seven seems to be the dreaded number here, as the seventh iteration of Stab, the ironic horror-franchise-within-a-horror-franchise, is deemed to be the nadir. “These sequels don’t know when to stop, they just keep recycling the same shit,” says the outraged film fan Rachel (Anna Paquin) moments before she is brutally murdered. “A bunch of articulate teens sit around and deconstruct horror movies until Ghostface kills them, one by one. It’s been done to death.”

Fifteen years on, Rachel’s analysis is looking more cogent than ever. Scream 7 is a bland and rote bum note, a last-minute patch-up job that was apparently necessitated by the untimely departure of several personnel who made the very successful and quite brilliant Scream 6. They include the co-directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, the co-star Jenna Ortega and the charismatic lead Melissa Barrera. Barrera was fully established as the new “Scream queen”, replacing Neve Campbell, until she criticised the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza and was fired in November 2023.

So now Campbell’s oddly vacant Sidney Prescott has been dusted down and plonked at the centre of this, to quote Paquin’s Rachel, “recycled shit” about a ghost-face killer terrorising a tiny Indiana town and murdering the residents with ghoulish aplomb. A girl is disembowelled, a guy is impaled on a beer tap and the ace reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) skids into frame via the kind of “ta-dah!” entry that might have launched a thousand ecstatic “whoop whoops” 20 years ago but now proves only a groaning source of overfamiliarity. Oh great. Sidney and Gale are back together. Again. Whatever happened to that new girl? Shut up — look at Sidney and Gale. They’re back!

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Worst of all, and quite baffling for a film that was directed and cowritten by the franchise creator, Kevin Williamson, this isn’t even about articulate teens deconstructing horror films any more. There are a handful of limp references to AI deepfakes but otherwise all the sharp culture awareness, and certainly all the irony, has been removed. It’s as if nobody realised that a Scream movie without the irony is just a bad horror movie. Roll on Scream 8?
★★☆☆☆
18, 114min
In cinemas

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