Scream 7 Review: A Gutting Disappointment.

I am a fan of the Scream franchise.
I enjoyed the first four movies as a teenager and got back on board with the fifth and sixth film.
While in retrospect Scream 6 had some issues, I was still looking forward to the conclusion of the new trilogy to see how the Carpenter sisters’ story would end.
Then Melissa Barrera was unjustly fired for her comments on Palestine.
Then Jenna Ortega also dropped out.
The director bailed and the script for the seventh film was thrown out.
Needless to say, these events had me extremely worried for Scream 7’s quality.
Unfortunately, these concerns were justified because, after seeing the seventh film, I can say that the Scream franchise has finally had a bad film.

Before this, the weakest film in the series was Scream 3, but even that had its fun with campy moments and good characterization.
The seventh film has none of that, with an extremely boring and forgettable cast overall, twists that are somehow both predictable and completely stupid, and an eye-rolling amount of callbacks.
The story once again follows Sidney Prescott, as her daughter Tatum (Isabel May) and husband Mark (Joel McHale) are threatened by the return of Ghostface.
With a cast of boring suspects, she must stop the killer before it is too late, all the while trying to determine if Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) has really returned.
Neve Campbell is back as Sidney and, while it is good to see her return, after a pay dispute caused her to leave Scream 6, her character does no have much meaningful development.

Her character’s husband and daughter also feel bland, and the latter is supposed to be the secondary main character.
Sidney is not the only returning character however because Gale (Courtney Cox), Mindy (Jasmin Savoy-Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding) also return but, for the life of me, I cannot understand why.
I mean, I get why Gale would try to pursue the story of another Ghostface killer, but she does not have enough presence in the film to warrant a return.
Neither do Chad and Mindy, since the two could have been absent and nothing about the story would change. 

So, the characters are a bust, but what about the mystery?
It is always fun to watch a Scream movie and guess who the killers are before the big reveal.
Well, not this time.
The hints towards the killers are so blindingly obvious, I guessed it from their first appearances.
What makes it worse is that in practically every Scream movie, there is a killer with a deep connection to our main cast.
Either that or their motive ties into the themes. 
Not this movie. 
No, instead the characters playing the Ghost Face killers are barely in the movie before the reveal, and their motivations make zero sense. 
In my opinion, these are the worst Ghost Face killers of the entire series.
They have so little screen presence, their plans are dumb and I cannot for the life of me even remember their names.

The only memorable thing about this film’s killers is their frequent nostalgia baiting, but that is not the kind of thing I want to remember.
The callbacks to prior films made my eyes roll so far to the back of my head, I was worried they would get stuck there forever.
The only redeeming qualities to this film are that the performances are admittedly decent, some of the action is well-done, and the gore made me wince.

Other than these few positives, Scream 7 is a disaster.
The new characters are dull, most of the old ones do not have a reason to be here beside nostalgia, said nostalgia is handled in an extremely annoying way, and, to top it all off, the film has the worst killers of the franchise.
Scream 7 is the worst Scream film and it is not even close.
They should have gone with the original plan for this movie and never fired Melissa Barrera.
It would probably have been good and not… whatever this was. 
If I were to rewatch the Scream movies, this is one I will undoubtedly skip.