Aside from a surprisingly effective opening segment, Scream VI feels like a series of set pieces in search of a coherent narrative (most explicit as it moves to its climax). Ferocity of stabbing aside, the series of set pieces and meta commentaries feels simultaneously belaboured and weightless.
“Ghostface in Manhattan.” Got it, but what else beyond this elevator pitch?
On the one hand, it’s almost comfy to return to past glories, past characters, past stories, but it feels so robotic - so pre-programmed, so without soul - that it’s instead kinda depressing, constantly reminding of what it isn’t, desperately trying, and desperately failing, to fit into the older sibling’s hand-me-downs.
And is it just me, or is uncanny-valley-Skeet-Ulrich more distracting than the jump scares that pop off every other minute?
Alicia (Frances Raines) is having a bad day: she suspects her twin sister (also Raines) of sleeping with her boyfriend, while she’s also begun receiving rather odd phone calls - not quite obscene, but mysterious, anonymous, and upsetting. While much of this could be all in her head, the rash of sex killings in town certainly are not. And while local cops stumble along trying to find the killer, Alicia’s personal frustration and despair grows. And then she meets Franklin…
The use of Brittany Spears’s “Toxic” feels a little too on the nose here.
