Film review: Scream VI revels in weaving together the series' bloody, violent strands
Ghostface in Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group's "Scream VI."
- Scream VI
- ★★★☆☆
It makes perfect sense, if you live in a town like Woodsboro that’s being plagued by a knife-wielding maniac, to move elsewhere – although New York might not be the safest possible sanctuary.
(16s) opens with Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Tara (Jenny Ortega) decamping to the Big Apple in the wake of their traumatising encounter with the latest manifestation of the serial killer Ghostface, only to discover – spoiler alert! – that Ghostface can clock up the old air miles too.
If you’re worried about coming late to the Scream party, don’t be: Sam’s friend Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is on hand to bring us all up to speed on what it means to appear in a ‘sequel to the requel’, explaining that, at this point, all bets are off.
In other words, everyone is a potential victim, up to and including ‘legacy characters’ like Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), the veteran reporter with a nose for gore.
Written by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, both of whom wrote the reboot Scream, this latest instalment goes for the jugular from the very beginning, when we meet Film Studies lecturer Laura Crane (Samara Weaving), who specialises in classic slasher flicks and sets the meta tone as she finds herself experiencing the kind of scenario she has previously lauded as a pop-art cultural response to the zeitgeist.
Here the directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are having their cake and wolfing it down, offering tongue-in-cheek justifications for lashings of bloody violence whilst cramming every last nook and cranny of their movie with – yup, you’ve guessed it – lashings of bloody violence.
The fans will love it, of course, and not least because the plot is a cat’s cradle that weaves in the storylines of pretty much all the previous Scream movies, with Melissa Barrera doing a heroic job of anchoring all the lunacy with a performance of real gravitas. (cinema release)
