So after Scream VI was disappointing, they went back to the writer of the first movie for this seventh installment. Which I mention here, because I didn’t even realize it until the end credits; there’s nothing in the movie at all that indicates it’s made by the guy who wrote that successful first movie; it felt like a phoned-in franchise installment made by the cheapest guy they could get.

The biggest problem with Scream 7 is that it’s boring. Sure, it has other problems — a lot of its plot elements don’t make sense, emotional impacts of murders are weirdly downplayed even as trauma is a major theme of the movie, motivations are kinda dodgy all around — but lots of horror movies have those problems. Like, Suspiria is maybe one of my top ten movies of all time, and I still could not actually explain its plot, which absolutely does not make logical sense. But it’s sure as hell not boring, and that’s what really matters.

My first instinct here was to say that, look, we’re on the seventh movie of a franchise, it’s just going through the familiar franchise motions, that’s why it’s boring. But after thinking about it more, the problem is actually the opposite — it’s not going through the franchise motions at all.

Like, what makes a Scream movie different from any other slasher movie? It’s that it’s snarky, self-aware, ultimately kinda meta, right? And this one makes vague gestures in that direction, like it starts out in a B&B themed around the events of the movie Stab and one character later gives a half-hearted “rules” speech. But mostly, it just plays it straight. This feels for all the world not like a meta movie playing with late-series slasher movie conventions (as Scream (2022) did), but like a straight-up late-series slasher movie. It could practically be an installment of Stab rather than of Scream.

And as a generic slasher movie minus the franchise verve, it’s just kinda nothing. The kills are unimaginative, the characters are rote, it’s all just extremely by the numbers. It’s competent enough not to be outright terrible, but somehow that just makes it even more boring — nobody will hate this movie, because hating it would require you to feel anything at all.