To say the very least, I'm a bit of a horror fan. Jason, Michael and Fred are my main guys like most horror fans, but Ghostface was never far behind them. I still remember when Scream was released back in the '90s and it was such a fiasco. Yeah, we'd all seen slasher films in the past, but none of them had been as creative as Scream yet. Scream was really the first non-comedy/horror to push the Meta of horror movies right into the viewers' faces. A "Whodunnit" plot mixed with a new iconic killing machine and the saga was born. The original trilogy followed all the steps you would expect from a trilogy. Ironically, these steps were even told directly to the audience during the 3rd film.
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Enter Scream 5. Another 11 years since Scream 4 allowed for technology to catch up to the films, forcing a smarter "Whodunnit" as the audience is more adept to the horror "formula" by now and will pick apart every little detail you get wrong. And, unfortunately, this is no exception.
Now, let's get this out of the way, I liked the film; I didn't love the film. The very first thing I should say about Scream 5 is it felt like a Scream movie. Why am I saying this at all? This is the first of the Scream movies to not be directed by the late great Wes Craven. The father of horror himself. The creator of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Last House on the Left, The Hills have Eyes and many more. So there's a bar to live up to regardless of what you think of the original 4 films. And this does that with style. Although it took two to fill Wes' giant shoes, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett took special care in making sure that the legacy of Scream stayed intact while making sure to appease the new generation of audience goers, however few they may be in the theatres right now.
There are easter eggs all over the place for die-hard fans to find, which is a great addition to the Scream movies. Scream has always fallen back within the movies on the events that took place but never really sprinkled anything extra until this chapter. An example that I noticed was when Richie was watching YouTube videos to learn more about the Stab movies. It's so quick that I wasn't sure if I saw it so I had to look it up to be sure, but in the recommended tab, there was a video that had the title "Interview with Woodsboro Survivor Kirby Reed!". For those of you that are not geeks for this stuff, Kirby was one of the beloved characters from Scream 4 whom I thought had died in the movie as we are never given confirmation. Well, looks like she's alive and well. These examples of attention to detail are amazing in a slasher film and really shows there was love put into it.
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The film deals with the new Meta of movies as a whole, which was not unexpected but still a pleasant surprise. The kills are much gorier and "In Your Face" than the rest of the franchise, which again, was not unexpected but welcome all the same.
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However, the movie is not all rainbows and sunshine. The plot is both Meta great and super terrible all the same time. My fiancee and I knew who dawned the Ghostface mask this time within the first 20 minutes of the film, which was kind of a bummer. I like a good "Whodunnit", and no, I'm not saying that the previous films were better at this at all. Just that it was something I had hoped they would have learned from their predecessors. And they did not.
Yes, the film has legacy characters returning like Gail Weathers, Dwight "Dewey" Riley and of course, Sidney Prescott, but Scream 5 falls into the issue that most of these "requals" have; they aim to pass the torch to the new generation of stars to continue the franchise. But instead of passing it, they toss it away Yes, that was a stab at Luke from The Last Jedi literally throwing his lightsaber away. See what I did there. Anyways, the same thing is present here as in many other franchises now. The movie has the original characters, but the original characters do virtually nothing. They are there to say they were included. To make the die-hard fans "happy". Well, it doesn't make us happy to just have them there. Let them do something to show the new characters why they are legendary. Although I didn't care for Terminator: Dark Fate, I did feel like the handling of their legacy characters was some of the best I've seen yet. Matrix Resurrections went the complete other way and basically made the legacy characters the main characters again, which is fine, but nothing new there either. I digress.
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The new characters were not very memorable to me. Although I personally liked the background of the main protagonist, I can totally understand someone out there being like, "Wait, what?". And it just reeks of a previous movie in the franchise where I rolled my eyes then too to why the character was there. Acting talent like Dylan Minnette was, IMO, completely wasted. He's too great an actor to have nothing to really do. The whole cast was kinda' like that. Their performances were decent enough for what they had to work with but there just wasn't much for them to do. Scream (no pun intended) and run away was the extent of their needed performances. And I can see it now, "Well Tim, did you expect Oscar-worthy acting in a slasher film?" Hell no, no of course I didn't, but I did expect them to do more. More planning, more fighting back, more, well, more!
Overall, this is far from the worst in the series, but nowhere near the best either. For me, the list of Scream movies now goes from best to worst: 1,2,5,4,3.
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