Nostalgia and naivety, a well-known potent cocktail, has dulled our assessment of the original Scream’s actual cleverness. It was fresh for the time to be certain, and remains quite good. But it wasn’t quite the transcendent satirical meta-aware horror reinvention that it has been made out to be. That said, if compared to the latest installment, the original is a holy scripture.

The considerable behind-the-scenes chaos and incivility surrounding Scream 7 prompted Tatiana Maslany to call for a boycott. Let the record show that we should all always do whatever Tatiana Maslany says to do. I’d like to think this review will only help her achieve her desired objective. What is on the screen may not be morally worse than what was behind it, but it is certainly cinematically reprehensible.

Writer/director Kevin Williamson returns to the series he helped launch with a sequel that has killed it, if not in practice at least in purpose. Gone is every unique or creative element, replaced by formulaic and simplistic gibberish that is now fully unintentionally hilarious. The villainous “twist” reveal is discernable within the first 15 minutes. The obligatory cameos are profoundly lazy. Even the music is next-level laughable. It’s not that they dust off “Red Right Hand” for an umpteenth time, it’s that they somehow found an even-more-slowed-down cover of “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” At this rate, the next version will consist of a singer slowly pronouncing just the word “don’t” for five full minutes.

Anyway, here’s the “plot.” Sidney Prescott-Evans (Neve Campbell) now runs a coffee shop called The Little Latte Coffee Co. The corporate “cleverness” of that name will be as close to comedy as the film is willing to go. Sid has a daughter, Tatum (Isabel May), who is now the same age as Sid was when Ghostface first started getting stabby.

Sid also has two other children. They are whisked away offscreen to preserve narrative consistency with the size of her family mentioned in a previous installment while not having to film scenes with young children in them. You would be wholly justified in assuming that Sid loves her teenaged daughter and only her teenaged daughter.

She’s also married to Joel McHale and Joel McHale’s new hair, who are two fully sentient and separate creatures here.

Anyway, murders start happening again! And they are eventually revealed to be happening for inarguably the thinnest, dumbest, most useless reason in the entire Scream oeuvre. Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) shows up to do…nothing of consequence. She also brings the only members of the last two films with social media profiles clean enough for the studio to allow their involvement.

There are a lot of red herrings, an attempt at social relevance involving AI, and plenty of mean-spirited gore. Victims in the series have always died grisly, graphic deaths. But something about the laziness on display here makes the gore feel the wrong kind of gross and bad.Everything here is gross and bad, except Campbell. She is so sincerely good here that it is upsetting she’s not a bigger movie star.

Like everything touched by capitalism, the film industry has devolved to the lowest common denominator. Regurgitated riffs on intellectual property increasingly dominate, and expecting more from a franchise like this is silly. And yet, this is so wholly and completely devoid of joy and meaning, such a naked box office heist that rooting for its downfall seems not only the noble thing to do but the necessary thing.

It will continue. Scream 7 will not be the end. The revenue stream must persist. If I could float a humble suggestion: Make the Scream equivalent of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare next. Embrace the exponentially explicit meta. Have Campbell play herself. Make it into a literal condemnation of the cheeky self-aware sequels we’ve been forced to endure in this era of rebootquels. Get Ari Aster to direct. But, first, as David Lynch says, “fix your heart” and get Tatiana Maslany’s permission first.

Grade = F

Other Critical Voices to Consider

Anthony Whyte at The Movie Blog says “Is it the sharpest blade in the series? No.  But when Sidney Prescott stands at the center, even a flawed Scream still feels like home.”

David Chen at Decoding Everything says “I would describe the resolution of Scream 7 as catastrophic. Whenever we get to the reveal of a Scream film, it’s always a bit of a stretch who the real killer is but at least there’s some kind of internal logic to it. Typically, the reveals build upon the lore in interesting (or at least fun) ways. Here, the resolution is so ridiculous and nonsensical that I actually felt embarrassed. I was stunned that people came up with this and expected the audience to be okay with it. It felt insulting, especially for a franchise that used to be considered hip and subversive.”

Alison Foreman at Indiewire says “Nostalgia, in the end, isn’t this sequel’s theme but its shield. It doesn’t erase the franchise’s highs, but nevertheless stains the canon with a fraught production nightmare that will be remembered as unnecessary. Horror can’t work without bravery, on and off screen. But Scream 7 mistook safety for survival, and in doing so, coughed up the least dangerous Ghostface yet.”