Sometimes beloved slasher franchise reboot-sequels can be kind of awesome and then other times they’re this, I guess? I probably was the wrong person to see this because I have never seen the original or the sequel(s)? I kind of thought that wouldn’t matter too much because Scream VI did such a fabulous job of onboarding me for the first five movies that I had not ever bothered to see otherwise. In Scream VI, I saw Jenna Ortega (link to the Beetlejuice x2 article I’ve been meaning to get to), Mikey Madison (link to the Anora article I’ve been meaning to get to), Melissa Barrera, and Samara Weaving and thought, I can ignore all of the nerve endings in my body telling me to not jump onto a speeding train of a franchise twenty plus years after it’s begun.
But, not to make this into a second review of that movie or anything, but Scream VI is so deeply interested in the lore of its own movie, in the consciousness that it is a genre, that there is a whodunit aspect, that the victims are nerds of their own circumstance who want to studiously avoid all of the pitfalls of their predecessors, whereas in this reboot, the knowledge of the previous film is literally scraped off the internet by the daddy of one of the friends for reasons. So, we have truly entered into a pit of amnesia in this movie where everyone can repeat the problems of the first movie all over again but wearing clothes from 2025 and shouting into cell phones for someone to save them, while listening to podcasts and fun pop music and whatever, but inside of the flashy upgraded, updated town is really just the same rotten trash panda and cameos from all the original actors INCLUDING SOME OF THE DEAD ONES FOR SOME REASON??? The cameos are not super useful for advancing the plot and seem to pay homage to the fans (?) of the original who are now flocking back to watch Zillennials (like the wonderful Sui Wonder from Bodies Bodies Bodies and the equally weird Madelyn Cline from Knives Out stuff, but also kind of miraculously Mason Gooding connects the two franchises by having been in Scream Five AND IV AND forthcoming Seven AND Heart Eyes!!!) pantomime the same plot?
Probably the best thing about this movie was the awkward clip from a local morning news show with Freddie Prinze Jr hocking his cook book on a time delay with some old anchors who are too out of date to appreciate they’re talking to a former C-list celebrity from almost thirty years ago.
