Scream 7 review: "Never as sharp or as smart as the series' best, but still has a few neat tricks up its billowing sleeve"

Scream 7 hasn't had the smoothest journey to the screen. Following the very messy, very public firing of Scream 5 and 6 lead Melissa Barrera, and the subsequent departure of Barrera's on-screen sis Jenna Ortega, this requel-sequel was retooled as a starring vehicle for Scream's ultimate final girl, Neve Campbell, with another Scream OG, screenwriter Kevin Williamson, parachuted in to direct. It's the kind of behind-the-scenes turmoil that typically spells disaster, but against the odds, Scream 7 is a serviceably entertaining victory lap.

You might not realize given how coy distributor Paramount has been playing it in pre-release marketing materials, but Scream 7 is supposedly the final entry in the 30-year-old slasher franchise. The final stab, if you will. While the story relocates the action from Woodsboro (via New York) to the similarly suburban Indiana town of Pine Grove, Scream 7 largely ignores recent events – Sam and Tara Carpenter aren't even mentioned – in favor of callbacks to the Wes Craven-directed quartet, with Matthew Lillard's original Ghostface Stu Macher seemingly back from the dead to torment Sidney all over again.

Sidney, too, has more going on this time around. Her teenage daughter, Tatum (Isabel May), is about the same age she was when Macher and Billy Loomis went stab-happy on her friends back in the day. But overprotective Sid has kept Tatum in a bubble, and at a distance from her (admittedly traumatic) past. So when Ghostface comes calling, Tatum has to learn how to fight back fast.

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Slash fiction

In the grand tradition of Scream, the seventh entry starts on a high with a devilishly fun, standalone opening sequence set in the old Macher house, where Billy and Stu were unmasked. Now a true-crime, Airbnb 'Macher Experience', complete with an animatronic Ghostface haunting the halls, it's exactly the kind of playful, tense, and ultimately very bloody setpiece the series has gleefully delivered over the decades.

You get a lot of Ghostface for the price of admission in Scream 7, in fact. After a relatively economical reintroduction to Sid and her new life in Pine Grove, where we discover she's married to Chief of police Mark Evans (Community's Joel McHale) and runs a coffee shop, the slayings soon start in earnest. In spite of Campbell's recent claim that this new movie wouldn't be "as gory" as Screams 5 and 6, the seventh instalment has its fair share of gnarly murders – including one outrageous kill involving a beer tap that strikes the perfect balance between silly and scary.

Williamson isn't as cutting a horror filmmaker as Wes Craven, of course. The stalking scenes here lack Craven's killer edge, his eye for building tension. But it's a good enough facsimile, and in some ways feels more classically composed than the (excellent) Radio Silence movies, which were also drawing on a number of post-Craven influences. Williamson finds time for a handful of disturbingly beautiful death tableaus as well, while Ghostface's sparkly cloak has never looked quite so fabulous as it does here during a nasty theater murder.

Generation kill

The script – co-written by Williamson and Scream 5 & 6 scribe Gary Busick – is admirably full-throttle, with a very cool rug-pull around the mid-way mark. It's almost completely lacking in any meaningful, postmodern commentary on the horror genre; perhaps coming so soon after the frightfully clever requel, there was nothing new left to say. We're in pretty straight legacy sequel territory here, with Courtney Cox's Gale Weathers turning up for a stretch to finally secure that long-sought-after interview with Sidney.

Instead, the self-aware humor is largely directed at the series' own recent history. There are multiple allusions to Sidney not featuring in Scream 6 ("You're lucky you sat that one out, it was brutal," quips Gale), and there's a cute gag about retcons that almost makes Mindy's (Jasmin Savoy-Brown) and Chad's (Mason Gooding) otherwise tonally discordant returns worthwhile. Sidney scarcely cracks a smile throughout – like Laurie Strode in David Gordon Green's Halloween trilogy, Sidney is a conduit for past trauma here – but there's enough camp humor on the fringes that things never get overly sombre, not least in the risible Ghostface reveal, which works best if you believe it's knowingly played for laughs.

Similarly naff is the film's integration of legacy characters beyond Sid, Gale and Stu. It's been revealed that Dewey (David Arquette) and Scream 3's Roman Bridger (Scott Foley) both appear despite both being very dead. We won't spoil the context, but die-hard fans would be wise not to get their hopes up. Lillard at least makes the most of his screentime by dialling his performance up to 11, even if there are story-based limitations to how much he can do.

The new cast doesn't really pick up the slack either. May's Tatum is a perfectly fine final girl stand-in when the script feels the need to keep Sidney at a distance, and McKenna Grace is good value, but disappears too soon. The rest of the prime-suspect friend group – including Asa Germann, who seems to just be playing his Gen V character without super-strength – fail to make any impression, and there's a bit too much red herring tomfoolery going on with them simply to throw audiences off the scent.

It won't be anyone's favorite scary movie, then, but given understandably low expectations after years of behind-the-scenes chaos, Scream 7 does more than enough to justify its existence. It continues to be a shame that Sam and Tara will seemingly never see their stories resolved, but if this truly is the final Scream – though don't be surprised if the sky-high box office tracking leads to an imminent change of heart on that – it's an effective killing blow.

Scream 7 releases in theaters on February 27. While you wait, check out our ranking of the best Scream movies, and keep up with upcoming horror movies heading your way.