It should be a calling card to wrap things up when a movie is becoming the exact movie your series has parodied for decades. For the Scream series, this is exactly what has occurred, with the hasty new release of “Scream 7.”
With the series beginning in 1996, Scream has quickly become one of the most popular and longest standing horror movie series’. However, following a disappointing third movie, it took 11 years to produce a fourth, and the hope for the continuation of the series seemed to be gone.
But now, in the last four years, lead director Kevin Williamson has pumped out three movies in a row, garnering new stars in an attempt to bring the franchise back to relevance such as Jenna Ortega.
Each movie continues to be as repetitive as the last, with the lead protagonist of the series Sydney Prescott, portrayed by Neve Campbell, continuing to fall right into the crosshair of a new “Ghostface” killer every time.
It gets to a point where every movie is almost a carbon copy with a revolving door as the cast. With “Scream 7”, like each one of the past, it begins with Sydney receiving a call from the new Ghostface.
Living in a small town in Indiana and married to the police chief, the last thing Prescott needs to be doing is engaging with her potential murderer for the seventh straight time.
But in a twist, the call switches to video and the killer is revealed to her as Stu Macher, the killer from the original film in 1996. Unlike Scream movies in the past, the potential killer is revealed almost immediately.
Thought to be long dead, Sydney finds herself in the epicenter of chaos with a new wave of killings as she brings her friends such as Gale Weathers, played byCourtney Cox, and Mindy Meeks-Martin, played by Jasmin Savoy Brown, to investigate the possibility of Macher being alive.
The film features a personal record in gore, which for a modern twist on the classic series could be considered one of the few positives. But it is hard to be distracted from the glaring issue that this franchise is turning into everything it hates.Throughout the series, the killings are parodied in a within the movie film called “Stab” where the running joke is the comedic irony of Sydney continuously falling into the same situations and the will for the production company to keep churning out the same product again and again.
And for “Scream 7”, this is exactly what it is. Overall the product that has been seen time and time again in years past gets a below average two stars.