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The sequel to the requel is set in the city, where the series finds new ways to amplify old horrors.
The phone-call-to-the-killer sequence that opens every Scream movie is always a tasty appetizer that, as the characters in every Scream movie might say, sets the tone for the movie in question. In Scream VI, this scene begins at the bar of a trendy downtown Manhattan restaurant. The woman at the bar is a professor of film studies, blonde and British. As she tells her online date over the phone, who the restaurant can’t seem to find, she’s teaching a class in slasher movies (which, she explains, isn’t a stab in the dark of plausibility). Her date, a cute annoying jerk, is able to persuade her to hit the streets to help him find the location, and when she walks down a dark alley, we know what’s coming. (His voice lowers to that familiar AM radio DJ mocking snarl.) In this case, however, the killer is immediately revealed to be… a college brother. He returns to his apartment and moments later he’s the victim of the scary movie and on the phone with the real killer.
This elaborate double sequence, with its creepier than usual undertones (this brother describes how he enjoyed committing copycat murder), does a good job of setting the table for “Scream VI,” the first entry in the series that evolved unfolded in a place like New York City. The four main characters from last year’s requel, Scream, are all back: Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera), who triumphantly ended the film by performing the film version of Ghostface; Sam’s little sister Tara (Jenna Ortega), who attends Blackmore College in New York (a fictional university that feels like NYU) and whom Sam hovers over like an overprotective parent; and Tara’s fellow transplant students, whip-smart horror freak Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and her sexy brother Chad (Mason Gooding).
Also returning are directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, and screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick. In her hands, it’s Mindy, the deranged horror superfan, who once again lays out the rules of how a “Scream” movie works and, as before, infuses a new audience-centric corporate cynicism about what bonus movies can and will do. Once Ghostface begins his killing spree, Mindy correctly states that what the characters are now in the middle of is not just a sequel but a franchise, and sets the rules for what this proposes. That means the new film needs to be bigger and flashier. That it needs to swing in a new direction and subvert expectations. And that the legacy characters are strictly expendable. “Scream VI” more or less lives up to this dictate.
But here are a few rules of their own about where the Scream franchise is now. Rule #1: All of the horror genre’s meta-playfulness, making the characters sound like schlock cultural scientists of their own terrifying destiny, has become mere window dressing. Rule #2: The fact that we don’t know the killer’s identity actually aged this show more exciting than, say, the “Halloween” movies, where there’s always the same evil drone under the mask. Rule #3: This means that while the “Scream” series retains just enough of the spirit of postmodern snark, it now lives or dies on whether the film in question actually succeeds as a thriller. And Scream VI, although it’s too long, is a pretty good thriller. It’s a murderous shell game that’s clever in all the right ways, more powerfully directed and shot than the previous film, eager to take advantage of the more expansive, but closed, cosmopolitan setting.
In the ’90s, the “Scream” movies exuded a genuine affection for cinema in their self-reflective slasher-on-rewind manner. In Scream VI, one of Ghostface’s victims says, “We need to finish the movie,” to which Ghostface, just before stabbing him, replies, “Who cares about movies?” Scream VI captivates audiences, but it also tweaks a genre , which it knows all too well no longer matters. The Ghostface mask, like an old leather couch, is a little shabby and worn this time around, and that’s fitting for a 27-year streak that has since had nine different Ghostface killers.
In Scream VI, Ghostface is anything but shy. He charges right into the center of the scenes and attacks Sam and Tara in a bodega (the teller has a shotgun, but that’s not enough to stop him). And the movie knocks our masks off our feet right at the start with a sequence where Ghostface breaks into an apartment that almost all of the main characters are in, so we’re like, ‘This can’t be any of them.’ We have too good reason to believe it can’t be one of the roommates, the voluptuous Quinn (Liana Liberato), whose father (Dermot Mulroney) is the cop on the case. So stays… who? Ethan (Jack Champion) the stammering virginal nerd? Too simple.
Melissa Barrera has the fire and ability to play Sam as a woman so obsessed with taking down the killer that she is…obsessed. Sam emerged as the heroine of “Scream,” but an online conspiracy theory has since smeared her with the insinuation that she was in fact the killer. And since she destroyed Ghostface with a vengeance like his own, she – or at least her therapist (Henry Czerny) – thinks, “Maybe I’m a killer.” Between all of that and protecting Tara, Sam has a lot on his plate. Jenna Ortega’s newfound fame as the titular character of Wednesday will only help Scream VI at the box office, and she gives Tara a sullen courage that counts. Courteney Cox makes Gale Weathers’ return feel more than a symbolic legacy gesture, and so does Hayden Panettiere, whose Kirby Reed (from ‘Scream 4’!) has returned as an FBI agent, although her best scene is that Matching horror matches -Movie reviews with Mindy.
The “Scream” series was always the slasher series in its first two parts (before creatively faltering in “Scream III”), too self-conscious to be just a slasher series. Now it’s the slasher series that’s just confident enough not to be a mindless retread. This really is part two of the rerun, which is perhaps why it doesn’t wear off its welcome (although it could easily have been only 100 minutes long). There’s a great sequence that takes place on Halloween night in a subway car with costumed freaks. And there are several scenes that take place in a kind of underground shrine built in an abandoned cinema where the killer has collected and displayed all the important evidence from all cases. It’s a knowing nod to the fact that the series itself now faces the prospect of turning into something of a “Scream” museum. But this team of filmmakers might be smart enough to avoid that, as long as they keep finding ways to turn the cynical entropy that usually drags horror shows down into exactly what makes Scream scream.