Scream VI (18)

High school student Tara Carpenter, her older sister Sam and the twins Chad and Mindy leave behind the most recent killings in Woodsboro and head towards the bright lights of New York, believing the nightmare is now behind them. Instead, a new Ghostface killer hunts them down in the teeming metropolis, hiding in plain sight in a city where no one rallies to a neighbour's blood-curdling cries for help.

LondonNet Film Review

Scream VI (18) Film Review from LondonNet

The f word is used liberally and loudly in directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s sequel to the requel of Wes Craven’s self-referential 1996 slasher. Not the expletive, although swearing is plentiful as Ghostface runs amok in New York City at Halloween with a knife and shotgun. The buzzword is ‘franchise’, that neat summation of a six-film series (thus far) with more than 700 million dollars in global box office takings. Scriptwriters James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick gleefully foreshadow carnage with a trademark monologue that explains the sleek architecture of a franchise: successive entries usually have bigger budgets, higher death counts, and no one is safe, certainly not the legacy characters…

Scream VI delivers on each signposted promise and conceals the identity of Ghostface in plain sight, but familiarity with previous instalments and well-worn genre tropes breed predictability. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s picture doesn’t tee up any jump scares or heart in mouth shocks and two hours of brutal, relentless violence is numbing, especially when Ghostface insists on stabbing some victims several times in a frenzy, the camera lingering on the wound site. A year after terror returned to the Californian town of Woodsboro, high school student Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega), older sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) and twins Chad (Mason Gooding) and Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) have relocated to the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple, foolishly believing the nightmare is behind them.

Tara, Sam and Chad are enrolled at Blackmore University while Sam is reluctantly seeking help from a therapist but refusing to unpack her trauma. A new Ghostface strikes in the teeming metropolis, where online romance can right-swipe bloodshed and no one rallies to a neighbour’s blood-curdling cries for help.

Mindy’s girlfriend Anika (Devyn Nekoda), Chad’s dorky dormmate Ethan (Jack Champion) and Tara’s sex-positive roommate Quinn (Liana Liberato) are drawn into the bedlam as TV reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) angles for an exclusive interview and Quinn’s father, Detective Bailey (Dermot Mulroney), pinpoints his prime suspect. The plot thickens and fellow Woodsboro survivor Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere) returns to face her knife-wielding demon.

Scream VI confidently orchestrates a deadly game of cat and mice in apartment blocks, on city streets and the subway, harking back to earlier chapters to expand and distort the series’ blood-soaked mythology. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett delight in plunging blades into almost every member of the cast while Barrera and Ortega strengthen their sisterly bond with touching scenes in the face of chilling adversity. The script pointedly denies certain characters their constitutional right to bear arms and prematurely end Ghostface’s reign of terror, guaranteeing a risible number of bodies tagged and bagged in New York’s mortuaries.

– Sarah Lee