**/****
starring Melissa Barrera, Courteney Cox, Jenna Ortega, Hayden Panettiere
written by James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett
by Walter Chaw There’s a fine line between satire and simulacrum, between an ironic commentary on a thing and the thing itself. It’s a tone more than anything, and context, of course. Timing most of all. Fall too far on the one side and the sarcasm is so strident it becomes sour. Overcorrect to the other and it becomes precisely the thing you wish to lampoon. I liked last year’s Scream, Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s “requel,” for taking on toxic fandom and the expectations it imposes on franchise filmmaking–almost certainly the lingering topic of fascination for future cultural archaeologists excavating this period in our popular history. I thought it was a smart way to continue the series’ penchant for metatextual self-evaluation while upping the visceral stakes with stalking and kills that levelled up the intimacy and brutality. The movie was self-conscious without being mired in self-admiration, a neat trick–and one, it turns out, difficult to replicate.
Taking place a year after the events of the previous installment, Scream VI sees the surviving, self-described “Core 4” attending an inner-city college in the Big Apple. The quartet includes sisters Sam and Tara Carpenter (Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega)–Sam being the illegitimate daughter of the first film’s killer, Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), and granddaughter, also illegitimate, of the second film’s killer, Nancy Loomis (Laurie Metcalf)–plus their lesbian cinephile pal Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and her brother, hunky Chad (Mason Gooding). Chad and Mindy are the nephew and niece of the first film’s movie buff, Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy). (The “Carpenter” name probably refers to horror director John Carpenter and “Loomis” to the psychiatrist antihero of Carpenter’s Halloween saga.) Hard to keep track? It is. Verging on needing a flowchart and a photographic memory. Maybe the lesson is that when any franchise persists long enough, it starts to feel like homework for all but the most fanatically devoted. Scream VI, marking the return of Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin along with the screenwriting team of James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, sets its sights on this phenomenon of “franchise fatigue”–that thing where, after years, film series born from empowerment fantasies indulged by outcasts once more end up as solely of interest to those unwilling to call time of death on their cultural moment.
But what happens when a satire of fatigue is fatiguing? Start with a prologue–this is a series as known for its prologues as the James Bond movies–that unforgivably wastes Samara Weaving (star of Gillett/Bettinelli-Olpin’s exceptional Ready or Not) as an associate film professor specializing in slasher movies. She’s embarrassed about her job and her interests, which feels like an indictment of Scream diehards, and she’s disdained and patronized by her students. Her stalking and murder don’t even have much going for them, with the film cheating its promise to use the dense New York City population to its benefit. Instead, she’s isolated and picked off–more of the same old song. A brutal, trailer-spoiled scene in a bodega provides some hope that Scream VI will correct the course of its limp cold open, but alas, it proves the outlier in a picture that is, of all things, mainly boring. Blame the fact that there aren’t any footholds with which to find purchase, nor any subtext not dragged immediately into the text. The work is starting to show in a series dependent on its cleverness. Ten hours in, it’s hard for any lecture to stay fresh. I think Scream VI senses this and tries to insulate itself from criticism by arguing how things like its interminable villain monologue are a satire of such tropes rather than a dire example of them.
The extent you like the film will be the extent to which you buy that it’s about bad as opposed to actually bad. Is it shit writing or a satire of shit writing? And if you’re calling the writing in movies its audience loves stilted and convoluted, at what point does the disdain for conventions slop over into disdain for the audience? There’s a scene in the middle where Mindy tests the bona fides of returning legacy character Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere) by asking, “Candyman: original or requel?” and then judges her answer of “both” as the “right” one; that should be warning enough. Take a stand. Have some backbone. Scream VI teases a reckoning with Internet conspiracy theories and maybe a universe in which a real serial killer becomes a favourite Halloween costume, but even with a swollen 123-minute running time, it doesn’t find an opportunity to unpack them. Fatally, Scream VI is not only without new ideas–it’s the first of these films since Scream 3 that feels contemptuous of its characters.
Scream VI is a case study of what happens when the bubble bursts on a concept. I believe these strip-mined intellectual properties reboot so often because they inevitably slide into self-satire once the well runs dry. It’s why long-running sitcoms leave their settings for haunted tikis and shark-jumps. Friday the 13th visited Manhattan its eighth turn at bat, two films later than Scream, and just because this movie shows a clip from Jason Takes Manhattan (the death of Tamara Mason on the good ship Lazarus) doesn’t mean it’s not exhausted. I know I’m old and fat; it doesn’t make me young and fit. Ghostface stalks and kills a bunch of people, one of the heroes lays out the rules for this stage of a franchise’s endless death spiral, and there are survivors and a door left open for the next sequel. “I hate franchises,” moans Mindy towards the end, and it’s funny because it’s exactly what everyone who’s made it that far (5.9 movies) is thinking, too. That’s a problem. The second and best entry in this series suggests that hero Sydney (Neve Campbell, not back this time) is trapped in a Cassandra cycle of worthless awareness, of terrible wisdom, and pushes her close to breaking through to full awareness of herself as a character in a fiction. That’s the logical endpoint for the Scream movies: Pirandello. Yet because Scream VI is trapped in the rinse of profit and tentpole, all it can do is narrate how stale and joyless it’s getting with an air of resignation and a shit-eating grin.
