Hey there, you digital degenerates. It has been a long, long time since I've sat down and reviewed a movie on here. I'm not really fully sure why that is exactly. I guess I've just been feeling pretty unmotivated to do so over the past almost year, which you've probably noticed. But, I decided that's some bitch shit. So, I figured it would be time to knock the dust off and get my rusty ass writing again. And, I'm going to start back up with the most recent film I caught at the theater, Scream 6 (It would have been John Wick 4, but life decided to make me have to wait. Fuck you, mother nature).
Scream 6 is the latest entry into the Scream franchise, a film franchise that I'm sure literally every single person reading this is at least aware of even if they've never watched any of the movies, just from the sheer amount of pop culture that's developed around the series. The films have had heavy influence in many ways within the horror genre, and have definitely helped shape how some films in the genre have been written/made. References to Scream have been made in tons of TV series and other movies of all kinds of genres. There's been a shit ton of parodies, some god awful TV show based on it. Hell, you can even be Ghost Face in the game Dead by Daylight. This series has invaded every form of media imaginable. If you haven't heard of this series at all, then I imagine you either have to be 5 years old, or you've been lobotomized and sitting in a chair staring out a window all of your life. If it's the latter, I'd have to say I'm impressed you found this post somehow, so kudos to you.
Anyways, Scream 6 was released last month and is the second part of a new film trilogy being released (The second trilogy of this franchise, so kind of like the Star Wars format, but not shit). These movies are a mix of a reboot and a sequel, bringing in past characters from the older, previous films while also introducing a new cast to take over the reins. I had only ever watched the first two scream movies while growing up, and they didn't really click with me at the time of watching them. Probably because I think I was like 9 or 10 years old, and all I cared about back then was my Pokemon collection, Godzilla destroying tokyo and watching Goku fuck shit up on Dragonball Z (Damn, on a side note I picked good shit to love as a kid, since I'm still a whore for Pokemon and Godzilla as an adult). You know, so basically a pseudo weeb. So, I decided to catch up on the series before checking out scream 6, so I could be caught up on all the lore/meta commentary shit. I should have probably reviewed scream 5 before this one, but fuck it. Scream 5 was good and a nice re-entry into the series. But, what did I think of scream 6?
If you just want to know what I thought without knowing anything about the movie, I'll just say that it was a very fun experience and I enjoyed it quite a bit, I'd recommend any fan of horror to check it out. I'm going to try and not spoil everything, but there will be some spoilers from this point on. So, read at your own discretion. You've been warned, fucko. Scream 6 is very much continuing on with the tradition of being a self aware meta movie. I think for some people that can be a turn off, but I really don't mind it and I think it makes for some goofy/fun dialogue as long as it's not breaking the 4th wall constantly like a Deadpool movie or something. I don't mind it a bit here and there, but that shit grinds my nipples straight into some gears. Regardless of all that, the main elements that make up a scream movie boil down to a few things that I should mention.
First, finding out who the killers are. Scream has always played with the classic tropes of the slasher film genre, specifically where almost all slasher movies have just one have killer at large. But, Scream almost always uses 2 killers (Again, very much like the rule of 2 from Star Wars. That's right, I'm really tying Scream to Star wars. What are you doing to do about it, pussy?) It's always a guessing game on who it is, and they try their best to subvert your expectations on figuring out the murderer. I actually guessed correctly on who one of the killers was in scream 6, but they did get me a bit on it where I was surprised. The next thing is obviously the kills, these movies are made to be fun slasher flicks, and the thing people watch slasher movies for are entertaining/goofy kills with gore. I would say this movie does pretty good overall with having some entertaining kills, though sometimes it does feel overplayed when most of the kills of this franchise are stabbings. The final part is subverting your expectations of what a Scream movie will be, as well as subverting typical slasher and horror movie tropes. I think that's pretty self explanatory.
Since I just mentioned the kills, lets get into that a bit. I have some issues with that in this movie, but I'll go over what I liked first. The set ups for the kills in this movie are done very well, and there are chunks of the movie where there's actually good tension build up before hitting a climax. In scream, the killer usually makes a phone call and does monologues and mind games with the characters before attacking. That can be really hit or miss depending on the writing, and I think in this movie it was very well done. Ghost Face comes off very, very menacing in this movie as well and actually feels like an efficient killing machine. It was honestly fun to see and a breath of fresh air, as typically Ghost Face acts like one of the three stooges with getting random shit thrown at him and trips all over himself and just acts like a goofball. This iteration of Ghost Face always puts up a solid fight and actually seems like a huge threat.
One of my favorite scenes in the movie was the convenience store scene, where Ghost Face gets his hands on a shotgun after obliterating a store full of people. Definitely a more unique sequence in the scream franchise, and had some really cool shots that definitely will give cinematography nerds a big old boner probably. The intro kill sequence was also very fun, especially when it reveals the first set of killers just to set them up into victims shortly after. There's just a lot of good stuff in here, and I was entertained. However, some of the kills end up being a bit goofy and don't make a lot of sense because the deaths are inconsistent in this series, which is a problem for me. This movie is one of the worst contenders for it, in my opinion as well. Some people will die from 2 or 3 stab wounds in the shoulder somehow, while others will be stabbed 37 times and somehow live. Towards the end there is an excessive attack on a character and I had a small chuckle out of disbelief that the character survived somehow. I just wish they didn't get so out there with this, because it's hard to suspend disbelief when other people die from paper cuts basically.
I've been going on about a lot, but I should probably talk about the bones of this movie. Normally, a scream movie takes place in a small town. This one has a very different setting of being in the large city of New York. You know, the town where people totally don't shit all over each other and give no fucks about anyones lives but their own. (There was criticism about some of the scenes in the movie and how it's not realistic that people wouldn't do anything. To that, I say go watch some fucking videos of the crazy shit that goes on in NY, where 99.9 percent of the people there just ignore and act like nothing is happening because they're so used to it and don't give a flying fuck. That place is fucking awful.) Because it's in a large city, there's a lot more space and locations to play around with, so there's a lot of different settings going on outside of just this persons house and this persons house and then this one business over here. And, like I mentioned, I think setting it in NYC was a great move because it really helps it make more sense why people in the background just seem like walking corpses when reacting to crazy shit.
This film continues on with the characters from Scream 5, focusing on the sisters from the previous movie who are played by Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega, who most people know from the Netflix show Wednesday since she's been blowing up over that. I'm going to be honest, I'm kind of shocked she has become so popular lately. I watched a bit of Wednesday but it wasn't really my vibe, but I thought she was fine in that, I guess because she didn't emote much. Because in this movie, she's really not very good. Her performances feel like someone acting in a B-movie, which just kind of shocked me. The other characters are the core cast from 5, as well as a few legacy characters being brought back like Courtney Cox. The rest of the performances from the cast are pretty good, with the exception of the cop character played by Dermot Mulroney. My lord, he gives the most cartoonish, goofy performance by far. It is comically bad, and I don't know if he was trying to lean into that really hard on purpose, or if he just didn't give a fuck and was wanting to collect a paycheck. From what I see, he does a fine job on other projects. So, it was just weird and out of place.
Scream 6's narrative is very much similar to the previous scream movies, Ghost Face wants to kill the main character, as well as ruin her life for a specific reason which you guess at and uncover as this movie goes on. I'm not going to run through the narrative too much because I feel like that spoils everything, so I'll just mention some of the things that I didn't like about it. One of my main gripes with the story was I thought the scene was a bit strange when the motivation and killers are revealed. The killers end up being the cop and his children, which inserted themselves into the main casts life for months beforehand. Their motivation is that the cops son and their brother was the killer in Scream 5 who was dating the main character, and she killed him so now they want to kill her. I just think this is kind of odd, because realistically, she would have been aware of them or known of them after being in a relationship with the previous killer for like a year or so. So, just seemed a bit strange and clunky, but it's whatever.
Another issue I had with the narrative is that the cops are heavily involved in the situations going on, they always show up very quickly after an attack happens and someone dies. But, they're the most incompetent cops ever apparently. Because, instead of doing anything like putting a detail on the characters or at least keeping a response unit nearby they just don't fucking do anything besides clean up the bodies. I mean, you'd figure that they would piece together "Hey, people keep dying like all the time around this specific group of people. Maybe we should put some units on them and keep an eye out for the next attack since it just keeps happening again and again." I guess you could just say suspend disbelief here, but I just thought it didn't make a lot of sense. My final thing is very small, but I just want to say the therapist that was shown early in the movie made me laugh because that was quite literally the worst therapist known to man and was probably the most unrealistic thing besides someone surviving being shanked 29 times.
As far as the narrative goes though, I thought this movie had one of the better ones. There are several little side stories going on in this one, and most of them were enjoyable and build some more character. Scream movies have been hit or miss for me for the actual narrative and motivation of the killers, I would say this one is somewhere around a B+ to an A- tier in terms of Scream stories if I had to rank it. It wasn't the best one but it was definitely better. I'm not sure where else I'll mention this since the review is almost over. But, I definitely think seeing this in the theater made the experience a lot more fun. The reactions from people reminded me of the early marvel movie days where people would clap or cheer over something happening in the film. Which was just nice to see with a horror movie, since people don't seem super engaged with anything these days that isn't a giant block bluster film. So, that was nice and I just had fun at my showing.
Overall, I really enjoyed Scream 6. It has very fun kill sequences, some cool cinematography and it does a mostly good job at throwing you for a loop on figuring out who the killer is up until the very end. Besides two characters, I really thought the performances were good, even from just some side characters that are only in the movie for a few minutes. I'm actually looking forward to the 7th movie in a film franchise, which is fucking wild to me because those kind of franchises are almost always absolute dogshit. It's definitely not a perfect movie by any means, but I would give it a nice 7 out of 10 for sure. I'd definitely recommend checking it out if you want a fun horror flick to watch.
But, yeah. Sorry if this review seems a bit scattered or all over the place or anything. Definitely need to knock the rust off a bit and get back into the groove of writing out large posts like this. Hope you enjoyed the review though. If you've seen the movie let me know in the comments so I can read them after I'm done fucking your mothers and see what you thought.
Until next time! Later!