Scream 7

Hastily retooled and rewritten after production company Spyglass accused actress Melissa Barrera of being antisemitic for her pro-Palestinian social media posts, writer-director Kevin Williamson's Scream 7 (Williamson co-writing with Guy Busick) is, at least in terms of its structural identity, exactly as rushed and misbegotten as you might expect. The firing, not to mention slandering, of Barrera resulted in a collapse of this modern Scream phase: Jenna Ortega, citing commitments to Netflix's Wednesday, exited this sequel during the development phase and Happy Death Day director Christopher Landon (who was drafted to replace Scream and Scream VI directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) walked, stating that the project he signed on to steward was no longer possible. Presumably, this speculative seventh Scream would have dealt with the increasingly frayed psyche of Barrera's schizoaffective Sam Carpenter. 

Williamson's Scream 7 then largely dispenses with the accrued baggage of latter-day Scream sequels to focus on Neve Campbell's Sidney Prescott, a character that had become something of an afterthought in these newer films. Sidney was reduced to little more than a cameo in the fifth Scream, chatting away with Courteney Cox's Gale Weathers at a safe remove, and completely absent from Scream VI, reportedly because Paramount Pictures were not interested in paying Campbell an amount that she felt comfortable with. All of which is to say that the mercenary, behind-the-scenes throat-cutting that underwrites this particular sequel is a lot more exciting than the film Williamson has served up. Despite writing the reasonably well received Peacock Original, and John Hyams directed, Sick - basically a pandemic-themed Scream spin-off - Williamson utterly fails to construct a satisfying or even diverting whodunnit here. 

When the killers are finally revealed, unfortunately the centrepiece moment in every episode of this franchise, there's no sense that several disparate details or dangling insinuations are, finally, locking into place. Instead we're faced with two underwritten nobodies suddenly promoted into positions that their previously minor screentimes cannot hope to support. So farcical, or even contemptuous, are these reveals that all interest in proceedings immediately evaporates. Although hardly a series highlight even before this grinding gear shift, Scream 7 does betray a certain conceptual continuity with earlier sequels, specifically a pair of kills that, like Scream 2, indicate some trace knowledge of violent, Italian thrillers. A fake-out involving Joel McHale, as Sydney's unconvincing beat cop husband, and wreaths of tarpaulin doesn't quite dispense with the geography of a suburban garage enough to truly sing but the murder of Mckenna Grace's Hannah, dressed as Tinkerbell and suspended in a harness she cannot unclip herself from, cannily combines the cruelty and inevitability of giallo in an era where such dismemberment frequently takes on absurdist or even darkly comedic notes.