THE ONE WITH THE SPOILER WARNING
Here we go again... Following the slasher about slashers, the sequel about sequels, the third act of a trilogy about third acts of trilogies, the fourth one about fourth ones and the requel about requels, here's the continuation about continuations. And the thing about continuations is that they just continue: it's more of the same only moreso. Let's do it again. And again, and again. Repeat to fade. Scream VI really has nothing new in its knife drawer except more killing, more slashing, more preposterous motivations and more tiresome nerdery about horror movie franchises and Rules Of The Genre which frankly are wearing very thin.
Because there's nowhere else for it to go narratively, it can only move geographically and this time it's got the whole of New York to play with as a whole new bunch of hip young things, including the four core survivors of the last one, fall prey to one or more Ghostfaces. Other characters from previous entries also appear (including Courteney Cox, though crucially not Neve Campbell), references to the earlier films' killers abound, and the local cops and FBI each have their own secrets and any of them might be the new killer(s) as suspicion and red herrings flow as freely as blood. Is it him? Is he really dead? Is she who she says she is? Are we still supposed to care?
Scream VI is an episode of Friends: The One Where They All Get Stabbed. It may be bloody and callous and nasty but it's also flip and sarcastic and you know deep down that nothing terminal is going to happen to Rachel, Chandler and Ross (which is why killing off Dewey in the last movie did have an impact). This does toy briefly with the idea that maybe one of the surviving characters from Scream 5 was so traumatised that they've now picked up the blade themselves, but you know they're not taking that path. The motivations thus far might have been demented but they were generally rooted in (their) reality: jealousy, revenge, lust for fame, rather than mere indiscriminate slaughter of whoever's around. There's the traditional whodunnit aspect and the villain's big "it was me all along and here's why" speech at the end, but the trouble is that the reveal is less wow! and more oh... because any interest in who's actually doing it has long dissipated. And that's because it's clear that this is just another episode, just another spate of killings in the same mask around the same people and there'll be another one next year.
Despite the body count and the frequent bloody violence, this is easily the weakest Scream film so far and a strong indicator that they really should just stop it now before they start to embarrass themselves. After 27 years they've had a good run and the average quality has been higher than most horror series that made it to six entries (even the most devoted Michael Myers fan must surely admit there are way more bad Halloween movies than good ones), but the well is now bone dry. Oddly, the Jason equivalent Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, of which we see a brief clip, is a neat comparison: it was the worst, lamest and stupidest of a series that had run out of ideas and had nothing else to do but repeat its limited routine, just in New York (and substantially shot in Canada). It's not without its pleasures, and there are a few surprises, but that's not enough for a film that feels like they're only doing it because it's bankable and not because it's a good story worth telling.
**
