This Call's For You, Sidney

I'm not going to get too thick into the weeds of the extra-filmic horrors that plagued this latest Scream movie except to say right up-front fuck the producers at Spyglass Entertainment to hell for firing Melissa Barrera for speaking the truth about Israel's ongoing genocide. Anybody who wants to boycott this movie because of that is right on -- in fact here's a good site where you can donate to aid for Palestinians; feel free to spend your money there instead of on tickets for this movie. That big bag of bullshit and Barrera's right to the freedom of speech to express such correct and necessary thoughts are far far more important than any slasher franchise.

Now... spinning around to give the movie a good review feels a bit turncoat, I'll own that. But what can I say -- I enjoyed the damn thing. You can feel the return of Kevin Williamson's voice -- this movie is simple, straightforward, and a shit ton of fun. Scream 7 feels like a return to the first two movies in that it's got that old-school buzzing energy to it -- genuine tension in the stalking scenes, a heap of nerdy callbacks to the past movies (Williamson apes several shots in the original, a movie I've seen so many times now it's fully burned into my brain, so I probably am well past being able to be fair and balanced here). 

It's also got some extreme gore, which I've seen some people pin onto the writers from the last two movies being on-board here but I dunno -- does no one remember Drew Barrymore's intestines hanging out as she hung from a tire-swing for her parents? The first movie has its gnarly-ass moments. Indeed one of the kills here feels like a mash-up of that with a scene from part 2 -- okay I could geek out about this sort of thing for awhile because there are a million references mixed up in here, but that's either 1) not fun for you or 2) it would be fun for you so I should leave you to experience it in the movie theater. So I'll refrain from going down that road. That said there's also a sequence that feels positively The-Burning-esque in its quick and bloody kill-count, which had me giddy. 

But I'm glad I'm not tasked with writing this up anywhere except here on my own little site so I can be as vague as I want to be on all of this -- no need to force myself to explain the plot or ruin any surprises. There's Sidney (Never Campbell), there's a Ghostface (or two), there's a bunch of teenagers getting knives plunged into their bellies while Sidney goes ape-shit with her gun-love (I remain uneasy with how much this franchise sees guns as intrsuments of heroes). I will say that the motive, when it's revealed, delighted me -- it's a perfect fit for the francise and very very funny. 

And that's the whole of it. I had fun. I left the theater with the same high I had from the first couple of films, which -- I didn't deeply hate the last two movies, not entirely (okay five was pretty bad but the last one was okay) but the magical Williamson touch was very much missing. You feel it, watching this. I've only glanced at the other reviews but I saw the opening Rotten Tomatoes score which is Not Good so I guess I'm going to be an outlier on this. Whatever. I'm right, of course.