Scream VI Parent Guide

After the grisly murders which nearly claimed their lives in Woodsboro, Sam (Melissa Barrera) and her sister Tara (Jenna Ortega) have moved to New York City where Tara attends university. With them are Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and her brother Chad (Mason Gooding), who also escaped Woodsboro. Sam has been trying to stay on the down low, as a recent internet campaign to paint her as the mastermind behind the killings has put her in the spotlight, but she still feels the need to look out for her sister. That sense of duty intensifies when two fellow students are found murdered in their dorm room with a bloody Ghostface mask on the floor…along with Sam’s driver’s license, listing her current New York address.

Now that Sam and her friends are in danger, they’re going to have to think fast to find a way to stop a faceless killer (or killers) in a city with millions of people, any one of whom could be the culprit. Hopefully, they’ll be able to figure it out before the body count stacks up…but that doesn’t seem likely, does it?

I have never liked the Scream franchise, and this movie doesn’t change my opinion. Thankfully, I’d managed to forget nearly everything that happened in the last film, but that was no inhibitor to understanding what happens in this one. The same irritating batch of morons has relocated to the Big Apple, but apart from that, it’s another unappetizing plate of pointless gore re-heated and served up for another theater full of unfortunates who have just been parted from their hard earned cash. There are movies I’ve liked less, but this doesn’t get any prizes for narrowly avoiding being the bottom of the barrel.

While Scream VI manages to avoid the teen drinking cliches, that’s helped by the fact that the characters are now legally adults. Even then, there isn’t much partying going on, perhaps because the movie is spending so much time talking about…other Scream movies. Ok, sure, the movie-within-a-movie is called “Stab”, but come on. We’ve reached a level of navel-gazing that might pose an actual medical risk of poking clean past the navel and straight through the spine. Speaking of which, this flick is still a blood-soaked mess of gruesome violence, but if you’re a franchise fan, that won’t come as any surprise.

Honestly, I just wish that one of these movies would come up with a halfway convincing reason that their masked murderer is largely invulnerable and hell-bent on killing. Halloween’s Michael Myers is a silent, unkillable monster, but that’s kind of the whole point. He’s one maniac with a weird backstory and a seeming immunity to bullets, knives, fire, blunt objects, and explosions. It’s frequently implied that he’s some sort of supernatural demon, or whatever. (No point in being overly specific, I suppose.) But he’s not a succession of self-obsessed teenagers who can somehow survive just about anything in their quest to commit pointless murders.

Clearly, there’s some secret charm to these films that I’m missing since they continue to score well with audiences. I guess I’ve turned into just another cranky elitist critic with an axe to grind. But seriously, if Paramount could stop making these deeply boring and unoriginal slasher movies, I’d take it as a professional courtesy, because then I wouldn’t have to keep watching them. Or at least take a longer break between movies. I just sat through one of these last year, couldn’t we wait a minute? I need a longer window to forget everything before I have to sit through it again.