In short: Scream VI (2023)

Warning: there will be mild spoilers, but honestly, what’s to spoil?

The survivors of the last movie all have moved to New York. Yet another Ghostface Killer does their thing. There’s a subplot that plays on the non-existent problem of inheritable serial killer-ism.

There’s really no need to get into any details of the plot when its only reason to exist is keeping the franchise going anyway. Don’t get me wrong, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s and Tyler Gillett’s direction is still as traditionally slick as is typical of the Scream movies but this slickness is in the service of no substance whatsoever. The little character work involved is based on the mediaeval, and pretty offensive, idea of a daughter potentially inheriting being a serial killer/”evil”, whereas the meta level of the old Screams has turned into pointless monologues that have no impact on anything in the film. Worse, these meta parts are about as insightful as that soap bubble floating around my head right now.

James Vanderbilt’s and Guy Busick’s script is not at all improved by a finale that’s even worse than the killer reveal in the previous five movies, while it still shares their love for bug-eyed mad acting which annoys the crap out of me. This time, they’re going for quantity instead of quality.

Also going for quantity is the ridiculous number of characters in Scream VI that work under the Hero’s Death Exemption/Plot Armour rule. One or two characters, one can happily live with, but six? Even the film itself has problems juggling so many protected characters, so we learn about the survival of two of them only in a couple of lines of dialogue. Which leaves us with a slasher where the only characters who are actually dying are the introductory deaths, some nameless side characters and the killers. Seen positively at least here Scream VI innovates, though innovating away tension seems to me a peculiar direction to go into.