So last year’s Scream “requel” was surprisingly solid, managing to capture more of the meta-aware horror magic of the original than you’d think would be possible five movies in. This year’s Scream VI… enh, not so much.

I mean, it’s a competent-enough slasher. There’s a lot of slashing, some tense action scenes, and good characters. But whereas the first Scream really shaped how people thought about horror movies thereafter, and last year’s really sharply nailed the “requel” phenomenon, this one doesn’t seem to have much to say. Its big meta monologue is mostly about how they’re now in a franchise, and that means there are no rules, because anything at all could happen.

Which is true, that’s the obnoxious thing about franchises, that they just iterate through any and all plot permutations until the thing stops making money, with no thought to artistic coherence. And that’s actually not a bad description of what this movie is doing. But… I don’t know that it’s a good idea to lampshade it, or indeed to do it at all.

If you want to watch a slasher, hey, here you go. But if you want a smart slasher, don’t bother.

(As a side note, one of the weirdest things in this movie is its massive over-correction on abdominal stab wounds. There was a trope in the past where movies would weirdly treat a stab to the belly as if it was instantly fatal, and then it would always be “shocking” when characters who got stabbed once somehow managed to stand back up and shoot a gun or whatever. But here, they’re basically acting as if an abdominal stab wound isn’t even a real wound, like it’s just a thing you can put a Band-Aid on and maybe eventually you’ll need to go to the hospital, but no big. It’s a little cheap, and feels like an undeserved way to have way more brutal stabbings than you have characters available for killing.)