Main cast: Melissa Barrera (Sam Carpenter), Jack Quaid (Richie Kirsch), Mikey Madison (Amber Freeman), Jenna Ortega (Tara Carpenter), Dylan Minnette (Wes Hicks), Jasmin Savoy Brown (Mindy Meeks-Martin), Mason Gooding (Chad Meeks-Martin), Sonia Ammar (Liv McKenzie), Marley Shelton (Sheriff Judy Hicks), Skeet Ulrich (Billy Loomis), Kyle Gallner (Vince Schneider), Heather Matarazzo (Martha Meeks), Neve Campbell (Sidney Prescott), Courteney Cox (Gale Weathers), and David Arquette (Dewey Riley)
Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett

I’ve stopped asking who asked for reboots or sequels to all these old IPs, because I know the answer, and I’m sure everyone does too: the suits in Hollywood that have zero creativity and zero inclination to gamble on new IPs, so they only know how to keep current marketable IPs on life support.

So Scream, which is the fifth installment of this franchise that finally drags its way out of the grave. It’s said to be both a sequel and the start of a new phase in the franchise, in a passing of the torch kind of way, but in this case, it’s just the franchise introducing a POC version of Sydney Prescott in one Sam Carpenter while still keeping that window open for most of the old cast members to make future appearances. Hey, Courteney Cox’s and Neve Campbell’s obvious work done on their faces isn’t cheap, you know.

So, Sam and her boyfriend Richie return to Woodsboro to check up on her sister Tara after the latter was subjected to the Drew Barrymore treatment. This is where I know right away I will have issues with this movie, as the whole Ghostface forcing their victims to answer trivia questions or have someone else killed feel so, so played out and tired by this point that I actually cringe and feel glad that I didn’t go out of my way to watch this in the cinema when it first came out.

Tara survives, and whoa, the whole Ghostface thing is back. This eventually leads Sam to connect with Dewey, who is now a cynical guy that looks bewilderingly hotter when he’s all disheveled and what not, and Dewey then warns Sydney and his now ex-wife Gale to be careful and avoid coming back to Woodsboro. I’m sure the ladies will take his advice and stay away indeed, snort.

Some of the younger characters are linked to the characters in the first two movies in this franchise—the twins Chad and Mindy are Randy Meeks’s nephew and niece, for example—and the movie also revisits the locations of those movies, such as how so and so are living in the house previously belonging to so and so in the original movie.

Now, I’m not a Scream fan so all this fanservice stuff isn’t getting me to squeal in joy. It’s eye rolling, though, how this movie inserts such things and then beat me in the head with it. The only iconic things about this franchise is Ghostface the killer, Drew Barrymore in the opening scene of the first movie, and arguably Randy Meeks, but even then, these aspects of the franchise are noteworthy because their novelty and the newness when the first film came out. Hence, people new to the franchise likely won’t care about these things, while those that have watched the earlier movies may wonder why the nods made are to the more forgettable aspects of the franchise.

The movie doesn’t give up, though. Exposition about characters from the first two films constantly come up, and the movie even mirrors scenes and plot developments from the first movie. Of course, it tries very hard to pass all this self-plagiarizing as some kind of deliberate self-aware, ironic, nudge-wink thing, but I find the whole thing just reeks of laziness instead. Instead of passing the torch, so to speak, in a fun and intriguing way (which is what Ghostbusters: Afterlife did so well), this film just sloppily rehashes the first movie and insists that everyone consider this act a homage.

Another problem here is that the new characters are so, so bland. They are the usual assortment of teen archetypes that have zero depth. Sydney and Gale don’t have much to do here, and it is up to David Arquette to keep things interesting, as his character is the only one that had any character development throughout the movies. Sadly, like Sydney and Gale, Dewey is mostly wasted here as he doesn’t really do anything much aside from… well, finally getting some kind of closure that may make some people roll up their eyes extra hard, to put it nicely.

Then there’s also this bizarre ability of the many characters that can survive a series of brutal stabbing. The actual body count in this movie is actually pretty low, as most of the people that get the knife seem to be able to shrug the multiple wounds on their body like they are secretly members of the MCU. Some do die, of course, but the ones that die and the ones that live seem to be determined based on how disposable the script finds them to be. Boy, and some of these main characters have very obvious plot armors.

Also, Ghostface seems to be invincible and unstoppable, or inept and bungling depending on whom they are squared off against. Again, this makes some characters’ plot armor seem even more obvious.

As a result, Scream feels very contrived. Ghostface feels more like a plot device than a menacing villain, to be trotted out to fulfill the slash-slash-slash quota in the most by the numbers way.

Then there is the way the whole plot becomes an eye-rolling middle finger of a rant about how toxic fans think they know better than the show creators. This one induces cringe because this thing isn’t written or directed by the original creator Kevin Williamson, so I’m not sure why it thinks it has the right to make such a statement. That’s not even taking into account how Hollywood and the media that are in their pockets had been waging this war on fans for years now, calling anyone that dares to criticize a movie racists, sexists, transphobes, homophones, and whatever because these people dare to find fault with their badly written, badly made crap. Hence, this movie is just adding its bleating to an already played out and boring chorus.

Oh, and they have a tribute to the late Wes Craven… by having boring dumb teens toasting a bland and forgettable character called Wes, and having some actors from previous movies provide the lines. Why even bother?

That’s this movie in a nutshell, though. It’s a lazy rehash that breaks little grounds, with whatever thrills it may have being negated by the fact that most of the characters that get stabbed to a ridiculous degree end up okay anyway because of plot armor. If anything, this movie may be a representation of the franchise as a whole: you can stab it multiple times, but it will never die, because Hollywood really has no new ideas anymore.