[Warning: this review contains spoilers, as all reviews should]

 

“It’s happening again.”

 

This could be the tagline for ninety percent of films released over the past two decades. The Dark Knight, The Batman, The Lego Batman, The Spider-Man. The Avengers, The Matrix, The Fast and the Furious. It’s happening again. It’s happening again. Good God, it’s happening again! 

 

In this instance, the phrase is uttered by Dewey Riley, the erstwhile sheriff (and even more erstwhile deputy) of Woodsboro, California. There’s not an Avenger in sight, thank God, though Dewey comes close. Having survived four previous installments of this franchise, the character, played by David Arquette, is the closest thing to a superhero the teens of Woodsboro are going to get. “I’ve been stabbed nine times,” Dewey whimpers through gritted teeth, once the teens have tracked him down. When he says this, you believe him. Dewey lives in a trailer park now, sipping stale coffee and pining for his ex-wife. He is grizzled and sad-eyed and walks with a limp. The ex is TV news anchor Gale Weathers. She is portrayed by Courteney Cox, Arquette’s former real-life spouse. Meta enough for you? Just wait. 

 

The franchise, of course, is Scream. The title of this film, the fifth in the series, is also Scream. The filmmakers are aware of how uninventive this sounds. They are aware of everything, you see. They are aware of anything that I, or anyone else, could possibly have to say about this film, and have chosen to address our concerns head on. They do so by inserting meta-commentary into the diegesis, a method perfected in the first Scream and beaten within an inch of its life in three subsequent sequels. “There are certain rules to surviving,” says one of the teens, echoing the words of other teens from Scream installments long since past. Yeah, yeah. We get it. Can we skip to the fun part now?  

 

The film opens on a young woman in a house. The girl is alone. It is night. The phone rings. “Let’s play a game,” says the voice on the other line. Sound familiar? The girl must answer questions about Stab, the franchise-within-a-franchise launched when Gale Weathers, then a beat reporter, sold the film rights to her book, a nonfiction account of the events depicted in the first Scream. If the girl answers incorrectly, her friend Amber will die. “I prefer elevated horror,” says the girl. “Ask me about Hereditary!” She doesn’t know the answers, but it’s no matter: she can simply Google them on her smartphone. Still, she mucks up the final question. The killer billows forth, in full Ghostface regalia. The girl puts up a decent fight, but she is no match for Ghostface’s well-established prowess with a Buck 120. 

 

The girl is Tara Carpenter (wink wink), played by Jenna Ortega. Following Ghostface’s attack, Tara finds herself, in a startling break from Scream tradition, not dead but in the hospital. Her teen friends rush to her side. So does her sister, Sam (Melissa Barrera), and Sam’s boyfriend Richie (Jack Quaid). Sam has been persona non grata the past five years. She left Woodsboro when she was eighteen, abandoning Tara and their mother. Now she finally explains why: Sam’s biological father was Billy Loomis (wink wink), one of the killers from the original film. When Sam discovered this, she ran away, leaving thirteen-year-old Tara with no explanation. With a copycat Ghostface on the loose, Sam has reason to believe someone has learned the secret of her accursed parentage. The new Ghostface is targeting those related to Sam and her notorious dad. Having been forced to sit through this veritable telenova of exposition, Tara is understandably furious.

 

“Get Out!” she screams from the hospital bed. Wink wink?

 

The film’s various teens meet to discuss their predicament. One teen explains that they are all trapped within a “requel.” This is not a sequel, a reboot, or a remake, but something between all three. A requel introduces new characters, while bringing back popular “legacy characters” from previous films. Retconning may or may not ensue. Think Creed, Jurassic World, David Gordon Green’s recent Halloween films. Once the teens uttered the word “requel” I knew we were in trouble. The term squeaks out the sides of the mouth. It is impossible to say without smirking. A film that fancies itself a requel can not aspire to much. Besides, there’s nothing that screams “requel” about Scream. It’s really more of a straight-up sequel. It copies certain elements from the original, but lots of sequels do that. It brings back characters from previous films, but most sequels do that. 

 

Scream (1996) was a cultural landmark, a deliriously hip deconstruction of the slasher genre that worked both as a satire and as an example of the thing being satirized. The new Scream doesn’t work particularly well as either one. There’s something almost timid about the film, as if its directors, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, were afraid they would offend someone if they went too far. They’re afraid to get down and dirty, but getting down and dirty would have served them well. Each Ghostface sequence is more modest than the last. The body count is low; the stakes are even lower. The copycat killer is singularly uninventive, even bumbling. The victims in these films have always been scrappy. Part of the series’ pleasure has been watching the likes of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Drew Barrymore, and Anna Paquin bash Ghostface over the head with chairs, vases, lamps, and pieces of furniture. This time, though, half the victims escape with their lives. The kills, when they do come, are repetitive, even boring. There are more survivors and fewer victims, particularly female ones. The filmmakers seem almost embarrassed to be part of the franchise that once squashed Rose McGowan to death in a doggie door. 

 

The satire, too, is less blistering than it might be. The current cinematic market is like James Caan’s character in Misery, strapped to a bed and forced to churn out uninspired continuations of creatively bereft corporate properties. Who is to blame? For the makers of Scream, the culpability lies squarely with the fans. After the killer’s identity has been revealed, he explains his justification: the Stab movies have gotten bad. Like, really bad. As a die-hard Stab super-fan, the killer must rewrite the whole script. He must create events that inspire a whole new Stab movie, a movie that will single handedly resuscitate the franchise. It’s a clever enough conceit, but it’s a throwaway. It lacks bite. It doesn’t cohere in any meaningful way with the film we’ve just watched. Also, Jack Quaid is no Kathy Bates, just saying. With all due respect, he’s not even a Dennis Quaid. 

 

Why Scream? Why now? The franchise seemed to have died following the fourth film, 2011’s Scream 4, which earned only thirty-eight million dollars during its entire theatrical run.¹ This new Scream earned almost as much in its first weekend of release. What has changed in the intervening decade? The market is strong for watered-down rehashes of once-vital cultural landmarks – particularly in the horror genre, whose films are notoriously cheap to produce. Last year’s Candyman “requel” tripled its budget. This past October, Halloween Kills brought in a hundred and thirty-one million on a twenty million dollar budget. 

 

Like that film, the new Scream confines its most interesting character to a hospital bed for most of its running time. Jenna Ortega is the film’s greatest asset, and its one true find. Ortega is the only young actor in the film who exudes anything like star power. She’s also given the script’s best lines, most of them delivered in the opening sequence. Compare this rather anonymous cast to that of the original film, which included the likes of Rose McGowan, Jamie Kennedy, Skeet Ulrich (who appears here in cameo), Matthew Lillard, Drew Barrymore, and Liev Schreiber. None of the teen actors in the new film, besides Ortega, even approach the charisma of anyone on that list. Neve Campbell resurfaces as Sidney Prescott, the original Scream’s final girl. But one final girl is not enough for Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett. There must now be a whole bevy of them. There are five final girls in this film. It’s as if the filmmakers lacked confidence that any one of their leads could carry the film through to its inevitable conclusion. A deus ex machina of Botox and girl power descends on the killer in the film’s final act. It is a climax devoid of tension, the outcome so predictable that it hardly matters if you stay to the credits or not. Poor Ghostface never stood a chance.

 

Still, the film held my attention, if only just. It’s fun to see Cox, Campbell and Arquette on screen together, just as it was fun to see Jamie Lee Curtis face off against Michael Myers once again in Halloween. I am not immune to the pleasure of simple repetition, even if such pleasure is ultimately rather hollow. The film’s success (eighty seven million and counting) practically ensures we will be subject to more Screams in the very near future. Yes, I will see them, though I’m much more excited about X, the new Ti West film starring Ortega. Surely a filmmaker as talented as West will give the actress more to do. She has all the makings of a worthy final girl. She only needs a film that will adequately support her talent.

 

Some films are less than the sum of their parts. Some films are more. This film is precisely the sum of its parts. It is a modest film of modest pleasures, modestly assembled by moderately talented creatives. It is anonymous in a fun way, like a truck stop bathroom, though the truck stop is probably ten times more frightening. You can zone in and out of attention, and never be the wiser. You can skip the exposition at the end, and just pretend someone else was the killer. It doesn’t matter. You can choose your own ending, like in Clue. I was alone in the theater when I saw it. Sitting there in the dark by myself, it was easy to pretend I was home in bed, dumbly watching Netflix. I chuckled a few times. I smiled. I gasped. Half-heartedly. Once.

 

Pauline Kael said that when you review a film, you are documenting how the experience of watching it has changed you. After sitting through Scream, I can say with confidence that I am exactly the same as I was before. I am no wiser, no stronger. Not better in any way. But I am also not any stupider. In the current cinematic climate, I’ll take that as a win. 

 

Endorphins: Mild

1. All box office data taken from The Numbers.