Scream 5 (2022)

Scream 5 (2022)

 

4/10

Starring

Melissa Barrera

Mason Gooding

Jenna Ortega

Jack Quaid

Marley Shelton

Courteney Cox

David Arquette

 

Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett

 

Contains Spoilers

I am a huge fan of the Scream franchise. I enjoyed the plot of the first two Scream movies, done in 1996 and 1997, by Wes Craven (director) and Kevin Williamson (writer). The two worked together on the first four Scream movies, but neither was involved in this one, with Wes Craven having passed away.

I, for one, felt this movie was a mess, thanks to the plot and the lack of a strong, convincing heroine. The plot failed to do justice to the killings starting again. Then there’s the nonsense where the bad guys holding knives are unkillable. They have superhuman strength and are relentless until the very end. I had no problem with this cliché happening all over again; this is Scream—it’s all about the clichés. But there is always something driving these killings. The first Scream movie had the men doing this because they wanted to wreck the Prescott family. The second was about revenge for the happenings of the first movie. The third (let’s forget about that mistake of a movie). The fourth movie was about revenge for fame, which today we have seen the extent to which people will go for fame, so killing is not off the table. Here, the whole point of the killings happening again is… to assist their favorite movie as muses.

The two idiots are fans of the Stab movies. If you’re a fan of Scream, you will know there’s a running gag where there is a movie within the movie, which almost emulates what happened in the Scream stories. Here, the idiot fans felt the movies had declined in quality, so they decided to embark on this killing spree to give the Stab movie good source material to work with. What the hell?

When you’re watching Scream, you’re being plagued with fun clichés, the movie mocking other horror movies and trying to get a head start on what bad guys do in the horror movies we see. What makes Scream magnificent for me is when the reveal of the killings happens, and you discover somehow that Sydney Prescott’s mother’s affair is forever haunting Sydney, even though she had nothing to do with it.

Here, the bad guys pick their mark, start killing them and their friends to make a good enough story for the next sequel to their favorite movie.

Knowing there are plans to make more Scream movies, I do hope this time they give us a better reason for the killings to come back. Scream has always been my only stab movie that I enjoy. Now, this horrible addition is giving me more reasons to give up watching the franchise.

This movie brings back the golden trio—Sydney, Gale, and Dewey—and then kills off one of them.