Scream (2022) - Movie Review

Critics Score - 4 of 10

General Audience Score - 7 of 10

For those of us that grew up in the 1990’s, the Scream phenomenon sparked an almost immediate change, it proved that audiences wanted new takes on the age old genre. I Know What You Did Last Summer and Final Destination followed as new audiences began steering away from the genre’s tropes that the Halloween and Friday The 13th franchises had made bank on. But the original Scream had unmasked things about the horror genre that no film had before. It deconstructed a slasher film, certainly in some meta ways but also in an extremely intelligent way through it’s characters and dialogue. The Scream franchise has been trying to a capture the same level of intellectual twists and surprises ever since that first film dropped in 1996, but it’s never quite succeeded. The new Scream (2022), not to be confused with Scream 5, tries to go back down the rabbit hole with Sidney Prescott, Gale Weathers, Dewey Riley and company. There’s plenty of great kills for those in the market, but the film’s ultimate goal of living up to it’s originator is not even in the realm of possibility. The tired franchise is desperate to reinvent itself for generation Z, but it’s so problematic and feels so forced you might just be tempted to . . . yell loudly.

SYNOPSIS - Unsurprisingly, the opening for this stab fest does the same thing the Scream franchise is known for, a teenage girl Tara (Jenna Ortega) is home alone, texting her friend Amber when an unknown caller pops up on the outdated landline. She ignores the call once, but in order for there to be a movie, they call back, she picks up and begins to engage with the suspicious caller. They end up on the “what’s your favorite scary movie?” shtick, but it uses the dialogue in a meta way to try and make it seem like we’re not watching the same thing for the millionth time. Tara likes The Babadook because it’s “elevated horror”, “it’s not just some schlocky, cheeseball nonsense with wall-to-wall jump scares.” I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of films going full meta and talking about themselves in an attempt to do things differently than a previous installment. One of the friends, the “movie expert” goes on a long rambling monologue later with more of the same. “See, you can’t just reboot a franchise from scratch anymore. The fans won’t stand for it. Black Christmas, Child’s Play, Flatliners. That shi* doesn’t work.” What doesn’t work about that dialogue is keeping me in the movie, people just don’t talk like that. It didn’t work for me in the recent fourth film from the Matrix franchise and it didn’t work for me in the fifth installment of Scream. Anyways, back on topic, elevated horror girl Tara gets tricked into playing a game, gets herself stabbed due to an extremely problematic security system app and a tired screenwriter.

After the blood from the first attack subsides, we meet our main protagonist, Tara’s estranged sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) and her overly supportive boyfriend Richie (Jack Quaid) as they take a break outside the bowling alley they work at. These faces are the two most familiar ones we see through our almost two hour runtime, unfortunately they are the performances the film must lean on and they are desperately inadequate. “What’d you just take?” Richie asks as he walks over to Sam. “Your boner pills”, she retorts. He kneels down, his face trying to convey mocking seriousness, “You um . . You are my boner pills.” I began reaching for the knife on my counter. If ghostface doesn’t kill these idiots, I may have to. Aside from the issues I had with the meta dialogue being problematic, there were some cringe worthy lines the screenwriters should’ve deprived us of. And while I really like Barrera, although she maybe wasn’t a standout in last years In The Heights, she was clearly more comfortable singing and dancing than in this film. In between agonizing over being a bad sister and trying to convey terror, she’s always got an annoyed with life attitude painted on her face that makes most of what she’s saying unbelievable. We finally meet five of Sam and Richie’s friends that will be the main target for ghostface filets as they talk after school about how to stay safe with a killer on the loose. The editing was particularly messy during the sequence, the camera switching too quickly away from someone still talking made the conversation difficult to follow.

But once the new crew is all present and accounted for, the veteran actors are slowly brought back into the picture. Campbell, Cox and Arquette is where the film is able to find some firm footing, they were all very good in their limited roles. Part of the problem was that they have so much experience and skill in performing within this franchise, the new cast paled by comparison and it sometimes felt like a new age soap opera when we’re with them. But I’ve gotta give Ortega props for being one of the younger cast members I thought elevated the acting for this new generation. Once the movie gets down to business and we start to see bodies hit the floor, the graphic murders take the realism of the franchise up a notch. There’s always been stabbing and blood in a Scream film, but some of these sequences of violence are startlingly realistic. One scene of ghostface slowly forcing a knife into a guy’s neck is particularly brutal and gruesome. Of course that’s the name of the game when it comes to modern horror, it’s a never ending attempt to up the ante over the last gore fest of a feature film. They did bring back one of the series theme songs Red Right Hand for a sequence which always sets a fun and creepy tone for a few minutes. I give the film credit for trying something new, although I don’t think it succeeded in it’s efforts to change things up. It definitely didn’t succeed in being anything I ever felt afraid of, not one iota of me felt fear through the runtime, let alone an inclination to “scream”.

SUMMARY - Scream (2022) is a below average horror film but with well crafted effects and kills, those thirsting for blood and gore will have their fill. Many horror fans and general audiences will enjoy it’s attempts to reinvent the series, but those that scrutinize cinema and look for excellence in filmmaking may very well find the film’s title to be remarkably apt.