Film reviews: Scream 7 a rather basic slash-and-scream with a preposterous finale
Courteney Cox stars in Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group's 'Scream 7'.
★★★☆☆
Thirty years on from (1996) and its paradigm-shifting self-awareness, (16s) arrives longing for more innocent times, when a horror movie could break all the rules by inventively bumping off characters who are steeped in classic slasher flicks.
“This time it’s all about the nostalgia,” declares one of the characters, just in case we hadn’t already noticed that Kevin Williamson, who wrote the original and its 1997 sequel, is directing this one, or that a plethora of Scream alumni (Courteney Cox to the fore) are popping up to chivvy the plot along.
The most notable reappearance, of course, is that of Neve Campbell, a glaring absence in (2023) but who returns here as the “real-life scream queen” Sidney Prescott, now living in the quiet burg of Pine Grove, married to Mark (Joel McHale) and trying to shield her teenage daughter Tatum (Isabel May) from the traumas that Sidney refuses to allow to define her.
Alas for Sidney (no spoilers, etc), the idyllic peace and quiet of Pine Grove is shattered by the arrival of a knife-wielding Ghostface, who has tracked Sidney to Pine Grove and has plans to (A) finally put an end to Sidney’s legendary status as a kick-ass survivor and (B) murder Tatum too. Why the latter? Hard to say. This Ghostface is a very thorough sociopath, as always, but not entirely logical when it comes to motive.
The first hour is good fun as Williamson and his co-writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick set up Sidney’s life in Pine Grove, establish her role as an “over-protective mom” to Tatum, and introduce some AI-created deep fakes that allow them to reacquaint the audience with classic villains from the past.
Despite its relentlessly self-referential tone, however, the latter stages lack the knowing humour of the best films, and the story abruptly descends into a rather basic slash-and-scream yarn before jumping the shark completely with a wholly preposterous finale.
- theatrical release
★★★★☆
(15A) stars Sergi López as Luis, a Spanish man wandering through the Moroccan underground rave scene in search of his teenage daughter Mar, who has been missing for five months.
Accompanied by his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), Luis teams up with a motley band of dropouts and neo-hippies who are heading south across the desert to find the next big rave, only to discover that they are ill-prepared for their epic trek.
Written by Santiago Fillol and Oliver Laxe, with Laxe directing, is a blend of Dionysiac excess and bleak existentialism that pounds along to Kangding Ray’s trippy, bass-heavy score, all set against the unforgivingly barren backdrop of the Sahara.
López delivers a superb performance here, playing Luis as a kind of Beckettian anti-hero, helpless and hopeless but relentlessly dogged in his pursuit of his quixotic quest.
- theatrical release
★★★★☆
“When I hear someone damning Paul McCartney,” says Paul McCartney in (15A), “I tend to agree with them.”
Morgan Neville’s documentary opens in 1969 with The Beatles splitting up and McCartney — rumoured to be dead, but holing up with Linda McCartney and their children in a remote corner of Scotland — contemplating the awful possibility of never again writing a single note: ‘Am I any good on my own?’
The audience, of course, knows that Wings is the next step, as McCartney embarks on a programme of songwriting as “the ultimate therapy”.
Charmingly self-effacing as it charts Wings’ progress (“In a way, we invented Spinal Tap”), the film features input from Mick Jagger, Chrissie Hynde, and Denny Laine, along with plenty of previously unseen footage, much of it depicting McCartney, Wings, and his family larking about and revelling in the freedom to simply be themselves.
It also includes Mull of Kintyre, of course, but you can’t have everything.
- Prime Video
