Luke McWilliams gives his review of the 2023 slasher film, Scream VI, starring Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera.
One year after the last Woodsboro killing spree, another murder is committed by a killer in a Ghostface mask in New York. Soon, word of the murder gets to the survivors of the last outing, who had moved to the Big Apple to start anew.
The Scream series is best known for its balance of horror and meta-comedy that pokes fun at the very genre that it is set in. After Scream 4 failed to kick off a new trilogy, the team behind Ready or Not kicked off a new attempt at a trilogy. This one poked fun at the nature of ‘requels’: movies that, like the Creed series, serve as sequels but also remakes of the legacy entries that came before. As this is the second entry in the new trilogy, cue the call-backs to 1997’s Scream 2.
Like Scream 2, our survivors have acknowledged the trauma caused by the previous entry’s horror and have attempted to move on with their lives by fleeing the environment of their pain. Our new Final Girl Sam (Melissa Barrera), the illegitimate daughter of Scream’s original killer, plays an extremely over-protective step-sister to young Tara (Jenna Ortega) whilst continuing to battle her own genetic predisposition to being a bit too stab-happy. Our Ghostface is more brutal, with bigger and gorier kills, shaking up the formula by not caring about the horror genre.
Verdict: A fun, intense and cinematic slasher, which, like all Scream entries, loses credibility upon the killer’s reveal and flimsy motivation. 3 stars.
- Luke McWilliams, themovieclub.net, viewed at Dendy cinemas.
