Scream (2022): A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A dull blade, short on scares, devoid of the winking wit, wisdom, vibrancy and vivacity of the original.

The original Scream, directed by horror master Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson, hit movie theatres in 1996 and revolutionized the form with its giddy self-awareness of its genre after a cavalcade of inane ‘Halloween’ and ‘Friday the 13th’ sequels had drained slasher movies of all signs of life.

Now, twenty-five years and three sequels later, and for the first time without the brilliance of late director Wes Craven and sans writer Kevin Williamson, Scream is back to take another stab at the box office with the new, aptly yet oddly titled movie, Scream.

You see, even though Scream is the fifth movie in the franchise and is a direct sequel to 2011’s Scream 4, it is not titled Scream 5, which to quote Spinal Tap, is a mystery “best left unsolved, really.”

The original Scream was a breath of fresh, blood-soaked air and a box office bonanza back in ’96, as it brought in $173 million on a measly $14 million budget. Not surprisingly, over time the budgets for the sequels grew and the box office haul shrunk, with the most recent film, Scream 4, bringing in $97 million on a $40 million budget.

This new Scream, which is written by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick and directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, has a manageable budget at $24 million, and in spite of potential audience hesitancy born by the Omicron surge, it hopes to be the first blockbuster of 2022. There’s a very strong possibility it earns enough in its opening weekend to be the first film to knock the juggernaut  Spider-Man: No Way Home out of the top spot of the weekend box office for the first time in a month.

Scream defines itself, through the franchise’s formula of slasher movie self-awareness, as a “requel”. It’s not a reboot and it’s not a sequel, but instead it’s a “requel” that features fresh new characters but also connects back to the original movie in order to revitalize the franchise.

Back in supporting roles for the fifth installment of the franchise are original cast members Neve Campbell, David Arquette and Courtney Cox reprising their roles as Sidney Prescott, Dewey Riley and Gale Weathers respectively.

They join the main cast of Scream newcomers, including star Melissa Barrera as Samantha Carpenter, Jack Quaid as Samantha’s boyfriend Richie, Jenna Ortega as Samantha’s sister Tara, Mikey Madison as Amber and Dylan Minnette as Wes, among others.

The storyline for the new Scream is like all the other Scream movies. In the unfortunate town of Westboro, there’s a killer on the loose targeting a group of friends, who dons a ghost face mask and calls to torment his victims before brutally stabbing them to death.

The original Scream was vibrant, vivacious, incredibly clever and as sharp as a serial killer’s blade. But after beating, stabbing and shooting this dead horse to near dust, the franchise on its fifth outing is as dull as a baby’s plastic spoon by which they feed their audience this thin gruel of watered-down nostalgia.  

The movie tries desperately to re-ignite the fire from the original, but it just cannot, for the life of it, find a spark anywhere. The new cast are a bunch of unappealing dullards and even the return of David Arquette, Neve Campbell and Courtney Cox falls flat and feels like a sign of the franchise floundering rather than flexing.

In an attempt at being coolly self-aware, Scream admits its creative bankruptcy when it has characters discuss how “Hollywood is out of ideas”, but admitting you’re out of ideas isn’t actually an idea.  

And when the film has characters muse “how can fandom be toxic?” and declare that “this time the fans are gonna win!”, it feels pathetically patronizing because the fans aren’t winning when they shell out their hard-earned money to see this tired, unoriginal old retread.

While I found some of the more subtle, inside jokes regarding the Halloween franchise and particularly Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to be mildly amusing, the truth is they aren’t exactly insightful and they’re certainly not worth the price of admission.

Scream labels itself as a slasher-whodunnit, so I won’t give away any twists and turns, but let me assure you, after sitting through this dull and derivative, two-hour mess of a movie that in its final third descends into an orgy of utter incoherence, I’d say it’s less a slasher-whodunnit than a blood-stained-who cares?

The greatest sin of Scream is that unlike the original film, it isn’t smart, it isn’t clever, it isn’t fun, and worst of all, it isn’t scary. Scream isn’t a horror movie, it’s just a horror of a movie.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

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