Guelph, Ontario, Canada, is about an hour northwest of Niagara Falls. For years, it was most famous for being the city where actress Neve Campbell of the “Scream” movies was born, raised, and educated. However, these days, Guelph is more renowned for the Sleeman Centre, which is its 4,600-seat professional indoor arena. Why? The ice hockey scenes for “Heated Rivalry,” the most talked about romantic drama in decades, were filmed there. That’s show business for you.
However, Campbell has gotten back just a little bit of her lost sizzle. After sitting out “Scream VI” because of a dispute over what the studio wanted to pay her — it wasn’t enough, said her people — she has returned for “Scream 7.”
Yes, the maniacal slasher Ghostface has also returned, but let’s go all the way back to the birth of the first “Scream,” a 1996 box office smash hit that had fun with the legacy of horror movies, not only delivering shocks and thrills, but also having its characters comment about the best fright films and coolest killers. “Scream” was “meta” before the word became today’s buzzy catch-all for self-referential.
The publicity photo with this article shows Campbell as the married Sidney Prescott-Evans with a mobile phone in her hand. The first “Scream” opened with Drew Barrymore as a character being creepily called on her cordless phone and swiftly being murdered.
I was in at the birth of the now-36-year-old franchise, the storyline of which was being kept secret. “Scream” was distributed by Dimension Films, which was part of Miramax. At the television junket in Manhattan for “Scream,” I was one of the first so-called “outsiders” to see the completed movie. The screening was a sensation. I attended for WIVB-TV and interviewed Barrymore, Campbell, Courtney Cox, David Arquette and other cast members, as well as screenwriter Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven, a horror movie legend in his own right. All of the interviews were one-on-one. The best sound bite I received came in response to my asking Craven where he got his nightmarish story ideas. His reply was: “from my dreams.”
The comic highlight of my interview with Barrymore was when, while answering one of my questions, she spit on me. Yes, you read that correctly. It hit the right lapel of my sports jacket. She was stunned and said, “Oh no, I just spit on you.” I was laughing and said, “I can’t believe you spit on me.” I could hear everyone in the room where the recording engineers, publicists, and studio people were gathered, also laughing. After Drew and I finished chatting on camera, she was truly quite lovely and very apologetic about the incident. I was the king of the junket for the rest of the day.
I wish “Scream 7” had been that much fun. In the new edition, which is playing in theaters, everything old is trying to be new again. Well, sort of new. Like a well-worn carpet, the tread marks are present, but the trail doesn’t take you anywhere particularly interesting. Throughout the entire 114-minute length of the feature, I kept silently encouraging it to go somewhere unique, somewhere that would invigorate the franchise.
Campbell’s Sidney is married to police officer Mark Evans (Joel McHale). They have a teenage daughter named Tatum (Isabel May), who will be the focus of the return of Ghostface and all of the murderous elements that are part and parcel of the series. The screenplay, by the aforementioned Williamson, who also directs, and Guy Busick, has some specific guidelines to follow, which it does. This is primarily a movie in which a fresh bunch of young people is still going to be severed by gleaming knives because, let’s face facts, you can’t have a slasher movie without some slashing.
The enjoyable commentary about horror movies is ever-present, and because the characters know all about what went down in Woodboro and its surroundings in the previous “Scream” films, it doesn’t take long before they realize they are trapped in a cycle of cinematic violence. Alas, the details of the plot aren’t much different from the details that characters and moviegoers experienced in the other six pictures. There is a bit more humor and less dread, but very little revs up to properly energetic proportions. One cliche that could have been handled better is the conflict between mother Sidney and daughter Tatum. The teen angst material lacks anything new and adds very little to the history of relationships between parents and their children.
Bringing “Scream 7” to the screen was not without its problems, including the firing of actress Melissa Barrera, who was going to be playing a new heroine named Sam. She was let go after tweeting about Gaza. Then co-star Jenna Ortega and the new film’s director, Christopher Landon, left the production, which resulted in some chaos. Back to square one and the return of Williamson (who also wrote editions 2 and 4) and Busick (co-writer of the fifth and sixth entries). It was decided that money be damned, Sidney had to return. For you trivia fans, Landon is the son of actor Michael Landon, who played Little Joe Cartwright on television’s “Bonanza.”
“Scream 7” feels like a film that suffered because of the production issues. How else to explain all of the returning faces – very familiar faces at that – from previous franchise hits? Even the previously mentioned Cox, as journalist Gale Weathers pops in. There are moments when it feels as if you are in a wax museum. I won’t name the other performers, but these returnees are in their late 50s and early 60s, and they haven’t been given much to do. This negates the experience of bringing them back. More thought should have gone into their return. Smarter thinking would have utilized them better because there really are endless possibilities for twists and turns in the story. The first “Scream” was clever, witty, frightening, and superbly made; everything “Scream 7” is not. Williamson, whose work I like and whom I enjoyed interviewing in 1996, has delivered a repetitious ghost of what came before. It is nowhere near being a cut above the norm.