Review: Scream VI (2023)

Scream VI (2023)

Rated R for strong bloody violence and language throughout, and brief drug use

Score: 3 out of 5

We've got a moderate Democrat in the White House, Y2K aesthetics are coming back into fashion, and everybody's hyped up for a new Scream sequel. Buckle up, folks, it's 1997 again. Scream VI (the number returning, this time as a Roman numeral) is a film that takes heavily after the second film in this franchise, the protagonists now in college and dealing with the legacy of the events of the fifth movie that preceded it. As far as Scream sequels go, it's pretty middle-of-the-road in a franchise that's always had a high bar for quality, ranking below the second and fifth films but ahead of the fourth. Outside its heavily advertised New York setting, it doesn't really do much new with the franchise, instead existing as a vehicle for fanservice in the form of both returning characters and references to the older movies, and there were a lot of moments when I thought it could've afforded to be a lot more daring, in terms of both killing off established characters and making full use of the fact that it's set in the Big Apple. That said, the Carpenter sisters have grown on me as the series' new protagonists, the kills and the buildup to them were highlights, and the moments where it did step outside its comfort zone, especially the opening sequence, sent me for a loop. Overall, it was a film that had a lot of missed opportunities and felt like the series was coasting in franchise mode, such that I'm not really comfortable giving it more than a 3 out of 5, but it was an entertaining, crowd-pleasing slasher that showed that the last movie wasn't a fluke -- Ghostface is back as a horror icon.

This film takes place a year after the events of the last one, with Tara Carpenter and the Meeks-Martin siblings Mindy and Chad having moved to New York City to attend Blackmore University, and Tara's older sister Sam following them and sharing an apartment with her sister. Tara is eager to move on from what happened to her in Woodsboro, but for Sam, it's not so easy, not only because she seemed to have enjoyed killing the last movie's killer but also because, since then, conspiracy theories have proliferated online accusing her of being the real Ghostface murderer and framing the people who were actually responsible. What's more, a new string of brutal murders by a killer wearing a Ghostface costume has struck New York, and the killer seems intent on connecting Sam to them, leaving her old driver's license at the scene of the first murder. Together, the "Core Four", as the four Woodsboro survivors call themselves, team up with a group of friends both new and returning -- Sam and Tara's roommate Quinn, Quinn's NYPD detective father Wayne Bailey, Sam's boyfriend Danny, Mindy's girlfriend Anika, Chad's roommate Ethan, the older Woodsboro survivor Kirby Reed from the fourth movie (now an FBI agent drawn in by her investigation of the opening victim), and Gale Weathers, who went back on her decision at the end of the last movie to not write another true crime book about what happened, much to Sam and Tara's fury -- to hunt down the new Ghostface, who, as it so often is in this series, may very well be somebody in their midst.

The opening scene, which starts with the requisite big-name star (in this case, Samara Weaving) getting brutally murdered, threw me for a loop and started the film on the right foot by immediately revealing Ghostface's identity (Jason, working with an accomplice named Greg) and motive (he thinks Sam is a murderer and that he's avenging "her" victims). This is an idea that I've always thought it would be neat for a Scream movie to explore, telling the story in a Hitchcockian fashion by following both the heroes and the villains with full knowledge of what both sides were up to, the tension coming not in trying to figure out the killer but in wondering if the heroes would figure out what's really going on before it's too late. It almost felt like a cheat to then have the real Ghostface step in and kill this impostor, especially since Tony Revolori's brief performance was a highlight in crafting an utterly cold-blooded sociopath who doesn't think his victims are human. This was, unfortunately, about as inventive as the movie got, and the fact that they backed off from that idea of making a Scream movie where we knew who Ghostface was right off the bat kind of foreshadowed that the rest of the movie would be quite derivative of the ones that came before it, the second film most of all. It's got Roger L. Jackson's Ghostface voice being creepy as ever, the requisite self-referential humor about horror movies courtesy of Mindy (in this case long-running franchises), and more, but in a lot of ways, the New York setting was really the only thing new about this movie.

Fortunately, when you're working with "a very simple formula!" like the Scream movies, themselves loving homages to '80s slasher tradition, it's the production values that really count, and this movie looked and felt amazing. There were a ton of great slasher moments and sequences, from a battle between Gale and Ghostface in her penthouse apartment to the scene in the bodega (heavily featured in the trailers) where Ghostface decides to finally grab a gun to a scene involving a ladder that is easily one of the most intense moments I've seen in not only the series but the slasher genre in general. Not only were there some killer chase sequences, the kills themselves were properly bloody, with stabbings, eviscerations, eye gougings, and knives getting shoved down victims' throats all depicted in graphic detail that earns this movie its R rating. If I had one real complaint about this movie on a technical level, it's that they could've made better use of the New York setting. Yes, seeing Ghostface kill people in alleyways, brownstones, bodegas, penthouses, and (of course) the New York City Subway was great fun, but if I were to really go all-in on sending up the gimmicky setting of Jason Takes Manhattan that was clearly on the filmmakers' mind, this time with an actual budget so that they don't have to spend two-thirds of the movie on a cruise ship, I would've gotten a bit more inventive. In the penthouse scene, use the location hundreds of feet up as a hazard for the protagonists to work around and Ghostface to exploit -- which would've made a great homage to a standout kill from the second film, while you're at it. I get the reference to the second film's climax of having the finale take place in an abandoned theater, but instead of a fairly generic location like that, have it at a Broadway theater during a show or a TV network (perhaps even the one Gale works for) during their nightly newscast, which would've had the added bonus of having the killer's plot blow up in their face by way of an inadvertent public confession.

The cast, both returning and new, was solid, especially the "Core Four" of the new generation of Woodsboro survivors. The MVPs were probably Mason Gooding and Melissa Barrera, the former getting a lot more to do as Chad than simply hang around in the background (especially with his romantic subplot with Jenna Ortega's Tara) and the latter having improved considerably since the last movie, growing into her role as Sam and finding a lot to work with in regards to her troubled relationship with her past and those around her. The film seemed to be setting up an arc for Sam not unlike what the fifth Friday the 13th movie set up for Tommy Jarvis, or the fourth Halloween movie set up for Jamie Lloyd, and unlike those series, I can see the next Scream movie actually following through on the darker directions they take her character rather than chickening out. Seeing Hayden Panettiere back as Kirby was also a treat, especially once the movie started throwing some curveballs with regards to her character. The killers, however, were a weak spot. While the film did do one new thing from a technical perspective, and I liked how the lead killer's identity was foreshadowed over the course of the movie, their motive was recycled from the second film, and only the lead killer really left much of an impression, their accomplice feeling like an afterthought who was there just because Ghostface in these movies always has somebody to do their dirty work. There were also plot holes as to how the investigative reporter Gale and the FBI agent Kirby would not have figured out who they were, and their connection to previous Ghostfaces, from act one. While the acting for the killers saved them, overall I felt that they were the second-worst Ghostface team in the entire film series, ahead of only the killer from the third movie and the hot garbage that the TV show served up. The character of Sam's boyfriend Danny also felt completely pointless, existing only to provide some hunky sex appeal and accompany the rest of the cast on their adventure without really having much of a character of his own. He felt like a waste, there only to pad the suspect list.

The Bottom Line

This was a flawed movie that felt like it was cranked out to cash in on the success of the last one, but the Radio Silence team knows how to get the job done, and overall, it's a solid, perfectly fine installment in a series that is, at this point, five-for-six in terms of quality. If you're a Scream fan, you don't need me to tell you to check it out, but even if you're not, it's still a worthwhile watch.