By Geno McGahee
In 1996, the original SCREAM was released and it was a huge hit. Made on 15 million, the slasher would bring in 175 million and a guaranteed franchise and here we are with SCREAM VI, 27 years later. Now even though we have made it this far, the SCREAM franchise isn’t exactly the strongest one there is.
SCREAM VI immediately gets credit for the setting. A horror film based in New York City sets the tone immediately and draws immediate comparison to FRIDAY THE 13TH, PART VIII: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN. Much like the other SCREAM entries, the film starts with a brutal kill and two killers, but they change it up a bit with a third killer coming along and eliminating them both.
This film is an immediate follow up to the 2022 film “SCREAM”, which I saw, but I don’t remember a lot of it. Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera), the survivor is back with her sister, Tara (Jenna Ortega), and their two close friends, Mindy (Jasmin Savoy-Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding). Sam is trying to get her life back together after killing the last Ghostface and is dealing with some backlash from the online community that believes she is a killer.
It doesn’t take long for the new Ghostface to target Sam and her friends begin to get killed. She, and her remaining friends, tries to figure out who the killer is and what is going on. This is where the film started annoying me. I guess every SCREAM movie has to have one character that sucks and is annoying and Mindy, who is related to Randy from the original somehow and tries to act just like him, is it. Mindy is terrible throughout and her behavior just isn’t believable.
In one of the coolest scenes of the film, Sam and Tara run and seek help in a corner store. Ghostface storms in and kills everyone in the store and it was a super intense and cool scene. The fact that Ghostface decided to use a shotgun at one point was great and brutal.
Teaming up with Detective Bailey (Dermot Mulroney), Sam and the group try to turn the tables on the killer in a final showdown. Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) is back too as a detective as well, which was a role that she didn’t pull off too well. Panettiere is a good actress, but she was not believable at all as a bad ass detective. I know she had ties to the other films, but it just didn’t work.
(Some spoilers coming)
SCREAM VI has some major issues. The biggest being Mindy and every time that she was on the screen, she was obnoxious and took away from the flow of the film in a huge way. Other things that bothered me was how the killer could not close the show. At one point, Mindy’s girlfriend gets stabbed in the stomach and the knife is pulled up to her chest and she somehow survived, temporarily at least, and it made no sense.
Chad was stabbed five hundred times and he made it out alive, even though he was getting stabbed over and over and over again. Mindy was stabbed in the stomach and she not only survived, she left the ER within hours to go to the scene where the finale took place.
Another annoyance in this film is that there are several times where the good guys have Ghostface by the balls and they run off instead of finishing him. Chad hits him with a huge camera and he’s basically out and he could have kept on bashing him and killed him, but he ran away instead. Nobody takes advantage when Ghostface is down.
SCREAM VI is a decent entry in the series, but they seemed so afraid to kill off any main character. There’s a lot of cool visuals in this and they definitely wanted to make a good movie, but there is a lot wrong with it and the writing is less than stellar.
I do recommend SCREAM VI, but it’s going to be another forgettable entry in the series.
