The SCU strikes again!
Scream 7 is, in all ways that it is important to be, a Scream movie. It has a villain or villains who want to right a perceived wrong by killing Sidney Prescott. It has a news reporter hoping to make a big break and/or comeback. It has a character who is desperate to explain the rules of Scream movies. It has absolute buckets of blood spilled by various stab wounds, most of which should be far more debilitating than they turn out to be. Are you really looking for something else here?
I was, it turns out. I shouldn’t have been, it was a mistake. But two important things happened to lead me in the wrong direction.
- There was a really catastrophically dumb mislead just for the purpose of being a mislead, and the worst part is I could have fixed it in the script with maybe ten or twenty seconds of different dialogue and slightly different actions, with no long term damage to the end product.
- Well, okay, two is a massive spoiler, so behind the cut it goes.
Seriously, stop reading now, last chance.
The thing is… the unexpected survival and revenge of Stu Macher would have simply made a better movie than the one we got. My reasons are as follows:
a) Her (the killer’s) actual motive was, okay, whatever, crazy people gonna crazy, but it was so shallow. I think the shallowest motive in the history of the franchise?
b) We wouldn’t have had to deal with the “haha killed my son, who cares, he was too much like his dad” scene I alluded to above. Although, perversely, my solution to have the other guy kill him via having had no idea it was her son, then she gets mad, kills the other guy, and blames Sidney for the whole thing would have been a more appropriate way for a crazy person to be crazy, and also it would have fixed my complaint about the motive, even though yes she did not have a real motive until way after the start of the revenge. Emotionally satisfying can fix a lot of order of operations errors, you see
c) The AI thing worked as a visual, of course they can find old pictures of Stu and age him up and scar him up. But as an audio track… I’m sorry, but no. 1996 is way too soon to have a way to find and age up a large enough sample set of his voice. And that was Stu’s voice, full stop. So it falls apart at the “could this even be done?” level.
d) Most importantly, though, I actually cared about Stu’s revenge. It was a good hook! Don’t make your real answer worse than your fake out!
Anyway, Kevin Williamson, if you decide to make any more of these? It’s nice that you still care about the characters and the franchise and clearly remember the past well enough to make an engaging flick. Just… write it better next time, okay?