scream 7 film review
i’ve consumed my fair share of what i would consider to be garbage horror films over the past few years. clown in a cornfield, the monkey, heart eyes, and keeper are a handful of them. none of them were so much a polished turd as scream 7.
i’ll be real with y’all, the scream franchise as a whole is remarkably mid. the self awareness and 4th wall gimmick worked well for the first film, and the second film is already where it begins to grow long in the tooth. like every once great horror franchise, it has been reduced to mere cash grabs and brand recognition. i haven’t even seen the past two scream entries.
i last watched a scream film in 2011 during the dawn of my adolescence. i was in eighth grade, fresh out of a lifetime of private schooling, and sheltered to say the very least. there i sat, somewhere in the first three rows of the theater, gazing upward at scream 4. my girlfriend of one week at the time reached over… among a group of our friends, mind you… and takes a stab (no pun intended) at getting froggy with me in the theatre. being so sheltered, i had no idea what to do, and panicked. she wasn’t so hot on me after that, and this is likely where my real disdain for the scream ip was conceived.
scream 7 felt like a tubi film. the modern equivalent of going to walmart in the 2010s and seeing what fresh compost they rounded up into the $5 bin of dvds. there were times during the viewing experience that i truly could not believe the film was greenlit. it was a slog of ludicrous dialogue and one-liners, silly and uninspired scoring that i couldn’t take serious, mediocre acting and delivery, with plot hole after plot hole being the finishing cherries. police don’t show up in the long third act until our final girl(s) are safely wrapped in blankets and digesting their fresh trauma. the big reveal was NOT big for business. once you find out who these cold blooded killers are, you begin to look back at the kills and wonder how they were even physically capable of pulling some of them off. the film banks on you being a brain-rotted shell of a human, years deep into tapping blown out veins to inject euphoric cocomelon. it crosses it’s fingers that you have the attention span of a sleepy toddler with an iPad in the middle of olive garden. my colleagues that dragged me into this cinematic hell and i looked at each other upon the black screen and wondered how films like this even have a shot at happening.
us moviegoers have long wondered about the future of cinema among streaming networks, sketchy monopoly deals, and artificial intelligence. sometimes, i will watch a good film that has heart and soul, and i’ll understand that the human spirit will prevail. i’ll watch a scrappy indie that got picked up by a major studio and i will see visions of myself in the theatre with loved ones for decades to come. then, i watch something like scream 7. i slowly realize, to my terror, that chatGPT probably could have done better… if it wasn’t fully scripted with it to begin with. scream 7 is poop from a butt. it’s insulting, tacky, and a stinky skid mark on a franchise that many hold near and dear. the $14 you spend on a ticket will be better utilized to wipe your rear end with in a time of great need. sorry for all the poop talk. don’t watch this movie.
