Movie Review: I scream, you scream, we all scream, but ‘Scream 7’ is an uninspired bore
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(AP) -- Early in "Scream 7," in one of those blasts of the franchise's signature, self-mocking irony, Neve Campbell is taunted for sitting out "Scream VI."
"It's not the same without you," she is told.
It's true: Campbell's Sidney Prescott is the plucky heart of this series, the original Scream Queen, the so-called Final Girl, who bites her lip and yet leaps into action when needed. "Scream VI" tried to put defibrillator paddles on the Ghostface killer franchise without Campbell, and it felt like a stutter-step.
So it's a welcome back for Sidney Prescott in this seventh edition, which is a messy mix of horror and humor that's clearly only for "Scream" completists, those hardy folk who refuse logic or vivid filmmaking in their quest to see a dude in a cape and mask stab people.
Sidney is now a mom to a rebellious 17-year-old daughter, a wife to the town's police chief and a cafe owner in the very artificial suburban community of Pine Grove. She has pushed her traumatic past into a memory hole and thus has created a tension with her daughter, played by a very bratty Isabel May. Her calm life is upended when her past comes to find her.
Franchise creator Kevin Williamson returns to direct and co-write the screenplay with series veteran Guy Busick, but it's all very slack, a ton of B-acting joined by a plot, dialogue and editing that produces less dread than inadvertent humor, slipping over and over in its own puddle of gore.
"Scream 7" mixes old and new franchise characters, adds new horrific ways to die -- like being slit open while suspended over a high school theater stage or having your skull impaled on a beer tap -- with a desperate search for whoever is doing the killings. It's never who you think it is and you'll never figure this one out, either. "It's always someone you know" is one helpful tip.
Campbell is joined by Courteney Cox, who reprises her role as Gale Weathers, an annoying TV journalist who is the only character to appear in all seven "Scream" films. (Is that really something to boast about?)