Scream VI: Ghostface goes to New York, but we’re all missing Sidney

Scream VI (R16, 123 mins) Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett **½

A year after they barely escaped with their lives, the Carpenter sisters are dealing with their shared trauma in disparate ways.

While Tara (Jenna Ortega) has thrown herself into her studies and campus life at New York’s Blackmore University, Sam (Melissa Barerra) is working two crappy jobs and struggling to make any therapy headway in working through her demons.

It’s a painful lack-of-progression not helped by a growing web online of those who believe she was actually the one responsible for the most recent Ghostface serial killings in Woodsboro – and not the boyfriend she stabbed 22 times, slit his throat and shot through the head.

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However, Sam’s paranoia and distrust is cramping her little sibling’s style, Tara particularly unimpressed when she tazers a prospective hook-up. “You were out of my life for five years – and now you can’t leave me alone for five minutes,” Tara rants.

But while she ponders whether she’s more messed up than she realised, Sam finds herself implicated in the death of two film students. That’s because not only is their apartment festooned with Ghostface memorabilia, but also her driving licence.

Although initial investigations are conducted by the Carpenter girls’ new room-mate Quinn’s (Liana Liberato) detective father (Dermot Mulroney, doing his best mid-’90s Mel Gibson impersonation), it isn’t long before he finds himself having to cede jurisdiction to an FBI agent with intimate knowledge of Ghostface’s past – Kirby Reed (Scream 4 star Hayden Panettiere).

Protesting her innocence, Sam’s first instinct is to leave town. Tara though is resistant to dumping her education and fleeing the state and – besides – it doesn’t take long for “that voice” to make contact again, vowing to not only kill the Carpenters, but also “show the world” who Sam “really” is.

“Nobody cares for last century’s heroes”, “Who gives a f… about movies.”

Returning writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick’s rather cynical and cavalier attitude towards Scream’s history and legacy might be trying to give this installment an edge, but in trying to go darker (more blood-soaked set-pieces, a greater kill count, a larger canvas), they’ve actually blunted what made the original great – the subversive fun factor.

There are flashes of inspiration: This generation’s resident “explainer” Mindy (Yellowjackets’ Jasmin Savoy Brown) explaining the now “franchise’s” (rather than the expected sequel-to-a-re-quel) rules that means “no one” is safe, Ready or Not’s Samara Weaving (her native Australian accent and all) playing a film studies associate-professor, a nice nod to the obvious inspiration for the location shift (no, not Scream 2, but Friday the 13th VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan) and Courteney Cox’s Gail Weathers admitting she couldn’t sell the movie rights to the last killings because “now it’s all about true-crime limited series”.

But, maddeningly, after essentially telling us all bets are off, it ends up pulling its punches. Likewise, Vanderbilt and Busick also swerve further into the Hollywood obsession with families. Joining Halloween’s Strodes, Friday the 13th’s Voorhees and Elm St’s Kruegers, we now have a “clan” who feel like a cross between Dexter’s Morgans, Star Wars’ Skywalkers (or Palpatines) and Furious’ Torrettos.

Of course, the real spectre that looms large over Scream VI, isn’t really the man or woman (or both) in the distorted Munch mask (or Ortega’s newly acquired Wednesday baggage) – it’s the absence of the original “final girl” Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell).

Although there are a couple of lines that suggests she’s safe and still loved by the movie’s makers, why they didn’t move hell or high water (or some of the film’s finances around) to keep her onboard is beyond me.

Despite narratively atrophying, the recent Halloween trilogy (which this film’s writers and directors were clearly inspired by – or at least that’s what they told us last time out) was held together by the magnificent Jamie Lee Curtis. Campbell was her Scream equivalent – and this story feels muted without her.

Scream VI is now screening in cinemas nationwide.