1 of 5 | Who is Ghostface this time in "Scream VI?" Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures
LOS ANGELES, March 8 (UPI) -- Last year's Scream (the fifth entry) was popular, so its fans will probably also like Scream VI, in theaters Friday. Unfortunately, that popularity empowered the filmmakers to double-down on their worst impulses.
One year after the last Woodsboro murders, Tara (Jenna Ortega), Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding) are in college in New York. Tara's sister, Sam (Melissa Barrera), has moved to New York to be close to her and Sam is overprotective.
Of course, a new pair of Ghostface killers start murdering people connected to Tara and Sam, while referencing the previous Scream films. The latest meta sequel folds in on itself so many times that it loses any level of grounded reality.
Scream VI opens with so many fakeouts and misdirects toward the new Ghostface killers that it already breaks trust with the audience. Scream IV opened with fakeouts too, but those were within fictional Stab movies, not the main characters.
When reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) shows up, Scream VI includes a fan service twist on her previous appearances. Gale's explanation for Sydney's absence feels entirely disingenuous, considering Neve Campbell revealed the studio simply refused to pay her what a franchise star should get for a sixth movie.
By the time Mindy gives the obligatory speech about the rules of a horror franchise, it turns the franchise's clever hook into an insufferable rant.
She's wrong about a lot of aspects of franchises, too. Mindy names characters from other franchises as examples of how expendable legacy characters can be, but many of those she names did survive their latest entries.
Mindy's point that franchises have become too episodic is true, but Scream VI does nothing to subvert that. Scream VI is, in fact, just another episode that gives its characters something to do and leaves enough of them available for Scream VII.
Gale mentions competing against true crime-limited series, but those pose no threat to the Scream VI killers, so why bring them up? Fleeting mentions of fan theories about what really happened in previous Screams are promising, but without reckoning with those theories, it's just lip service.
It also becomes a problem when the franchise Scream characters refer to is the fictional Stab franchise, which includes many entries that only exist off-screen. It becomes hard to correlate Stab with the actual six Scream movies.
The issue the two latest Screams failed to adequately address is that the conversation surrounding movies has changed since the original Scream. In 1996, the rules of horror movies were something only true fans or academics analyzed.
Before the Internet gained widespread use and before social media, a movie was the only way to deliver that meta message to other horror fans who would appreciate it. In 2023, Scream VI is just copying things people said on Twitter, not making its own observations.
Perhaps it is a cinematic reflection of the observer effect in physics that you cannot observe an event without also influencing that event. By part six, it's hard for a series to provide meta commentary on a genre of which this franchise is integral.
It's not impossible, though. Creed and Cobra Kai remain high watermarks of balancing nostalgia with moving the story forward. The comedy series Reboot addressed the self-referential phenomenon more effectively, too, though to be fair, it didn't have five previous sequels.
Scream VI loses any potentially poignant threads in the clutter to include every trending hashtag. There is a conspiracy contingent that accuses Sam of framing the last movie's killer, but that never poses a problem for Sam once the new killers strike.
Sam and Tara's reactions to surviving trauma would be a valid depiction of opposite extremes. That proves to be merely superficial setup in one scene before the characters go through the motions of evading killers for the rest of the movie.
The Kevin Williamson-scripted Scream films had good dialogue outside the film theory analyses. Characters in Scream VI speak entirely in trailer lines.
No one has a conversation that resolves a situation. They just say catchphrases at each other.
The filmmakers use the milieu of New York City to stage some stalking scenes that would be effective had they not burnt all their goodwill leading up to them.
A convenience store, neighboring apartments and the subway leave characters vulnerable to attack. And the kills are as gory as Scream 2022, which is to say far more extreme than the '90s films.
The audience for Scream VI may be looking for something entirely different than audiences in 1996 were. Yet, it can't help but feel like a disregard for the originals, whose quality allowed a sixth entry to exist at all.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001 and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
