Review - Scream 7
Starring Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy Brown. Screenplay by Kevin Williamson and Guy Busick. Directed by Kevin Williamson. Rated R. 114 minutes. In theaters.
One of the most delightful interviews I’ve ever conducted was when Neve Campbell came to town for a Boston Film Festival screening of “The Company” in the fall of 2003, back when the Boston Film Festival was still a thing. The movie was her baby and Campbell was beaming. Not only had she starred in and produced the picture, she’d also come up with the story and hired Barbara Turner to write the screenplay. Campbell then spent something like a year hounding and harassing her favorite filmmaker Robert Altman until he finally agreed to direct it.
If you haven’t seen “The Company,” it’s a lovely movie that spends a season backstage at the Joffrey Ballet. Inspired by Campbell’s days as a student at the National Ballet School of Canada, it’s an almost Wiseman-esque study of a dance troupe’s inner workings, with a blithe impresario played by Malcolm McDowell nurturing his performers and shining on the money men, dancing between art and commerce in what might be the closest thing to an autobiographical figure in any Altman picture. It wound up being the director’s penultimate film.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to lie and pretend you liked the movie,” a regional publicist said to me in the elevator on our way up to the interview, “I hated it, too.” I tried to explain to her that I didn’t just like “The Company,” I loved it. She thought I was doing a bit.
I forget which hotel it was, but Campbell was holding court in a cozy, faux-rustic room with a fireplace. Seeing her in person, I couldn’t help thinking about the opening paragraph of a Roger Ebert review from a few years earlier: “Neve Campbell is amazingly cute. I have admired her in other movies, but now, in ‘Three to Tango,’ which gave me nothing else to think about, I was free to observe her intently. She has wide, intelligent eyes, kissable lips, and a face both sweet and carnal, like Doris Day’s. I support her decision to never wear any garment that comes within a foot of her neck.” (The posthumous sainthood bestowed upon Ebert does a disservice to what a happy horndog he could be at his best.)
It wasn’t just that Campbell was gorgeous. That day she was glowing. It’s pretty easy for an interviewer to clock when someone’s trying to sell you a bill of goods, which is most of the time. But she was here to talk about her dream project, and clearly couldn’t have been happier with how it had come out. Campbell was at something of a crossroads in her career. She’d just finished shooting a semi-improvised, low-budget indie with James Toback in New York (2004’s underrated “When Will I Be Loved”) and after years of “Party of Five” and being a literal Scream Queen, Campbell was finally generating her own projects and working with edgy auteurs. She told me some great Altman stories, and a few rare, non-nauseating Toback tales, too.
Like so many dancers, she smoked a lot. (American Spirits, I recall. The healthy cigarettes.) She was excited about the work she was doing and the new opportunities she was creating for herself, making the kinds of movies she wanted to see. Her enthusiasm was infectious. She told me how unhappy she’d been on a recent studio comedy that she declined to name, but it was obviously “Three to Tango.” (I didn’t bring up Roger’s review.) We laughed about the absurd possibility of a “Scream 4,” with Campbell conceding that the whole thing had gotten a bit out of hand, wondering how she was supposed to keep playing this character after every person in her life had either been brutally murdered or tried to kill her. (“C’mon, Sidney would be catatonic,” she quipped.) To this day, the number of beautiful Canadian ballerinas with whom I have discussed James Toback’s debut film “Fingers” remains one.
Eventually the publicist came in to tell us my time was up and Campbell was wrapped for the afternoon, so we all wound up riding the same elevator down to the lobby. I forget what we were chatting about, but I remember a little voice in the back of my head saying I should ask her if she wanted to grab a drink or something to eat before the screening. Look, I understand she was promoting a movie and I’m not one of those guys at the club who thinks the stripper really likes him, but I did get a distinct vibe that she wouldn’t be averse to continuing the conversation somewhere else, even if the publicist probably would have walloped me with a clipboard for having the effrontery to ask.
I know this is silly. There’s no way Neve Campbell would have actually gone out with me. But you try spending 40 minutes or so talking about old Robert Altman movies with one of the prettiest girls you’ve ever seen and tell me if you don’t get a little delusional, too. I still can’t help thinking about that elevator ride and wanting to kick myself every time I see her in something, which unfortunately isn’t very often. That whole career pivot she was so excited for didn’t pan out.
“The Company” opened a few months later to bad box office and disappointingly dumb reviews, while the Toback picture barely opened at all. Campbell worked with Altman one more time, in his famously disastrous West End production of Arthur Miller’s “Resurrection Blues” that was supposedly so awful it prompted calls for the resignation of the Old Vic Theatre’s artistic director, Kevin Spacey. (Surely the worst thing that guy ever did.) She took a lengthy hiatus from acting after that, and her next producing credit was a decade later on a Lifetime movie called “An Amish Murder.”
Most of us didn’t see Campbell again until 2011’s joked-about “Scream 4,” which she did not, by the way, play as catatonic. I recall rather enjoying that one, which had a spiky, “get off my lawn” energy missing from the recent, tiresomely reverent revivals. Campbell herself was missing from 2023’s dire “Scream VI,” reportedly due to a salary dispute, though I’d assumed it was because all she’d been given to do in 2022’s confusingly titled franchise re-launch “Scream” was roll her eyes and complain, “I’ve already seen this movie.” (You and me both, sister.)
Campbell’s character, Sidney Prescott, is only back for this seventh installment because of a massive, self-inflicted PR disaster after production company Spyglass Media fired new series lead Melissa Barrera for sharing pro-Palestinan posts on social media. (Obviously, this is a disgusting move on the studio’s part and it goes without saying that in any sane country Barrera would not have been fired for exercising her right to free speech, but rather because she’s a terrible actress. And really, if we’re gonna start shitcanning young people for putting their politics on Instagram then most of my feed just became unemployable.) Co-star Jenna Ortega realized that since “Wednesday” she’s become way too famous for this kind of nonsense and dipped, while director Christopher Landon bowed out after receiving death threats for firing Barrera, which wasn’t even his decision. So everything’s going great.
“Scream 7” isn’t a movie so much as it’s a flailing franchise’s attempt at damage control. Campbell was offered a whopping $7 million to return, with the original film’s screenwriter and “Dawson’s Creek” creator Kevin Williamson back in the director’s chair for the first time since 1999’s “Teaching Mrs. Tingle.” It’s an exhausted excuse for a sequel, lacking a single new idea or any discernable reason for being. Taking place in another drab, suburban wasteland where everyone is tediously obsessed with a few murders that happened 30 years ago, the “Scream” movies have long ago shifted from an arch commentary on slasher movie tropes to an endless recycling of the same.
I’ve been saying this since the series re-launched in 2022, but there really is so much a modern day “Scream” could do to skewer current crazes in “elevated” horror, going after A24 generational trauma stories or Jordan Peele knockoff social issue thrillers. Yet these movies are only interested in other “Scream” movies. The last film ended in a derelict movie theater surrounded by props from the previous pictures, and this one begins with the site of the first film’s climactic killings repurposed as an AirBnb tourist trap.
By now we know the structural beats so well they could be MadLibs, and after the obligatory self-reflexive cold open, our sweet Sidney — now a suburban mom running a coffee shop in Indiana — gets a menacing video call from a middle-aged Matthew Lillard, who we all thought she’d killed by dropping a TV on his head at the end of the 1996 original. Nobody takes seriously the idea that the character could have survived. The call is quickly pegged as AI trickery used by the killer to confuse Sidney and by the filmmakers to cram in a bunch of cameos from dead fan favorites who could cost-effectively Zoom in their performances.
Like most things in the picture, the AI angle is forgotten almost immediately after it’s brought up. “Scream 7” dutifully goes through the motions of assembling a new crop of teenagers to get picked off one-by-one in some sadistic and unimaginative set-pieces. It looks ugly and cheap, using minimal locations, a paucity of extras and barely-dressed sets. (Does anyone who isn’t on the film’s poster live in this town? The movie looks like it was shot during Covid.) Campbell’s franchise-record salary must have also eaten into the budget for lights, with most scenes unfolding in such a dim, soft-focus digital murk that it’s difficult to tell what’s happening. The only aesthetically pleasing parts of the film are the long, screen-filling closeups of its star, where we’re invited to appreciate how gracefully Campbell is aging, especially during her scenes opposite plastic surgery casualty Courtney Cox.
Sidney spends a distracting amount of the movie apologizing to the other characters for not going to New York to help them in the previous picture. She keeps saying it was “wrong” of her not to be there. She does this so many times it starts to feel like the producers are trying to put the performer in her place for sitting the last movie out. Campbell hits her marks and even manages to sell some seriously silly emotional beats, though even she can’t salvage a bit when Sidney’s nondescript leather jacket from the first film is treated like Indiana Jones’ fedora. I understand that $7 million and a blockbuster franchise are nothing to sneeze at, but I’ll always think fondly of that one afternoon two decades ago, when this talented performer appeared poised to offer so much more.
“Scream 7“ is now in theaters.