Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Scream 7 (2026)

This is it. I can't believe we're staying at the cycle killer b and b oh. Oh that's so cool. It's a motion detector. Hello, Hello, Sydney, did you miss me?

Nice little toel you found you and your pretty daughter reminds me of where we grew up. Well, you sure know a lot about me for another asshole hiding behind a voice changer. Oh, I'm not hiding, Sydney, not this time. I want to be a fighter like you. If you heard her, I'm not going to hurt her until you're here to my unmast this fucker.

Oh, your friends died for just being near you. Where is my daughter? So you didn't listen to me? He's trying to find another way answer. We're gonna do this together.

You're gonna have to shoot him through the wall to the right of the door. Shoot him, do it? He did? You need to make sure you shoot him in the head. I'm gonna burn it all down, mother, That's gonna be fun.

Welcome back, midnight viewers. I'm Father Blone and I'm welcoming you to a special bonus episode of the Weekly Round Up. It's Scream seven. The world is ending, so we don't have a lot of time. Let's get into it.

The banner headline here is I retract my complaints about Scream six. Scream seven brings back Sidney Campbell now Mason as our lead. Gone, just unexplainably gone are the Carpenter sisters. So now Sydney and her husband Joel McHale, who seems to be auditioning for his own John Wick every Man Who Can Kick Ass film series, live quietly far from Woodsboro with their three children, two of which are conveniently away at Grandma's for the length of the film, leaving us with high school senior Tatum played by Isabelle May after an opening at the original Stu Mocker House from Scream one, which has been turned into an immersive Airbnb stab experience, complete with voice changer calls from the owner of the house.

The sequence is serviceable at best, although I like that one guy, Jimmy Tatra. He was really funny in the lead of that true crime mockumentary American Vandal. There is a lot of murder and fire, which alerts Sydney that a new killer is on the way. So we get Tatum and her circle of friends, including Ghostbuster McKenna grace and we get to know them and it's Scream everybody. There's a hungry cub report order like Scream two and shout out to always effortlessly charming Mark Consuelos in that role.

The movie needed more of that guy. And then there's eviscerations and throat slicing a plenty. As a quick aside, if you're an old school go around like myself, you will have a fucking delightful time. For portions of the film, it is easily the most brutal of the bunch. They get away with stuff here that back in the golden age of slasher films nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighty four, the filmmaker would have been locked up forever.

We get the usual taunting of Sydney via electronics. Sometimes it's Roger Jackson's oh so familiar voice, and sometimes it's face time, face time with ste That's right, I'm not spoiling anything here. Matthew Lillard makes his return to the franchise. Matthew Lillard couldn't save this film, that's how tire it is. So Now, Sidney, with the aid of her new best friend next door neighbor Jennifer played by the always fucking solid Anna Camp has to protect her family by doing what she does best, hunting ghost faces.

Watch Out ghost Face. Personally, I'd like to see a scream with ghost based on the back foot for the entire film, just relentlessly hunted by Sidney Prescott and her growing army of survivors. I mentioned Gail can't have a scream without her. I suppose. Actually I mentioned Mark Consuelo says the contender for the throne, but he's just one in what I consider the only real portion of the film that works.

Gail's assistant and her cameraman are the Meeks twins, niece and nephew of original dead Boy Randy. They were the brightest lights in the two previous flicks, and they are more than welcome here in a development that felt natural. Of course, they join up with Gail Weathers with an eye toward taking her crown, and the rest plays basically as you'd expect. No real surprises, no great sequences you'll be turning over in your head for weeks to come, and no scares, no scares. It's not the cast's fault.

They are across the board, on point and hitting it hard. Nev Campbell, in particular, delivers a fucking career topping performance as a woman who actually has been through all of this drama and is soldiering on and making a family and trying to shield them from everything that's happened to her. She is easily the best part of this film. She's always had an expressive face, but something about the passage of time has made it even more so. You can see everything she's thinking.

And in a film overstuffed with dialogue, it is so welcome to have someone get us to the same places emotionally without a word. Now, then all difference to Isabelle May, who plays Sydney's daughter Tatum. I'm sure she's fucking sick of hearing it, but facially and in manner she bears a deeper resemblance to Jennifer Lawrence, and not catnus high school looking Lawrence. Jennifer Lawrence. Now, anytime she's next to Nev Campbell, I just assume they're contemporaries.

And then she calls Sidney mom, and I'm like, oh, that's right, that's her daughter, her nearly thirty year old high school senior now granted skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard were both twenty five when they made Scream, but they looked and acted impossibly young. Not so with young Tatum. It was a nice touch to have her name after Rose McGowan's garage doored character from the first film. Wasn't that a great fight? Incredibly simple with the beer bottles, and just shockingly effective and economical.

Yeah, Wes Craven, he was the hell of a director. The two previous entries in the franchise, the then only Scream films not directed by Wes Craven, were helmed by Matt Benenelli, Opie and Tyler Gillette. Part of the film collective called a Radio Silence, they're responsible for a slew of a recent mostly excellent horror movies VHS Ready or Not, and two segments of a horror anthology that will definitely be covering somewhere down the road apiece That's Southland. Whatever issues I have with Screams five and six, the direction ain one of them. There are solid scares and crackling pacing in each of them, and they seem to be straining at the traditional set up pause scare routine that this franchise has been mired in.

Since day one. The schedule for this film conflicted with theirs when it came time to shoot Abigail the Vampire Ballerina movie, so the directing duties were given to Christopher Landon, who had directed those excellent Happy Death Day flicks. Incidentally, did you know that he's the son of original Teenage Werewolf and Little House on the Prairie patriarch Michael Landon. It's true Landon dropped out during the writer's strike when the film lost its two leads and a page one rewrite of the script was suddenly necessary. So the studio's in trouble.

Yeah, the thing's gotta work. Bring back Nev Campbell, get Matthew Lillard on the horn, have David Arquette film a cameo, and to bring the whole thing home, we need a damn fine director, or at least one with a name. They got a name, and he's legendary with Scream. There isn't a franchise without him, and he can at times be a fantastic writer. But Kevin Williamson, I'm sad to say, shows off all the same chops we got back with teaching missus Tingle Boy.

There's a guy who took a look around at life when he was a teenager and just said, I shall remain here for the rest of my life. There is one Bravora sequence in the film, Sidney and Tatum being chased through their home by a ghost face. I'm calling him a ghost face from now on. Like fake schemps in the Sam Raimi movies. There's a safe room in hidden passages, and it's got genuine intentions, so I'll give him that.

And it's not like it looks cheap or sent bound. But the pace of the film is so fucking wobbly. Not just the mostly inept action scenes, which hilariously are all either overcut or undercut, almost in the opposite manner of which you need them to be at that moment, but it's the pacing overall. It starts as a virtual remake of the first film as far as scenes and situations and even geography, but then it drifts out into new I'm using air quotes territory where it feels haunting and odd. It's an hour forty five and it easily mercifully should have been a tight n ninety five for some character development.

Speaking of things cut, let's dive a little bit into why this is no longer a trilogy about the Carpenter sisters. The film functions without them, or it could have if it were a better movie. But what gives well dig it? During the aforementioned writer's strike, Melissa Brera, the twenty first centuries Sidney, the one who constantly has visions of Psycho Dad Billy Loomis, Sam Carpenter spoke up on her personal social media that this situation in Gaza was fucked up and she was branded anti Semitic and fired. Then Jenn Ortega, younger sister Tarak Carpenter cried scheduling conflict with her series Wednesday, and then her reps cried pay dispute, and then miss Ortega said, nah, fuck that they fired my sister, so fuck them, and I'm inclined to agree.

These are the same producers who, after the one hundred and forty million dollars take on a budget of twenty five for that Scream five flick, decided Niv Campbell wasn't worth paying what she was owed. When they came to her hat in hand after losing their two leads for this film, I hoped she took them to the fucking cleaners because whatever she was paid, it wasn't enough. I think that's as broad as I can be about the film without spoiling. So let me say this. I wouldn't waste your money, not in this economy, baby.

I really couldn't afford it, and I really regret it. So if you want your surprises, terrible, disappointing surprises unrevealed, then this is where we part. Dear listener, tune in tomorrow for Hammerhouse of Horrors, and the following week will be the next star trenk Fest. I think we're finally getting Romulans. Oh wait, I don't feel so good.

Spoilers ahead, everybody right, It's not Stew. It's a deep fake Ai Stew. Yeah. So he ends up being a bit like mister House in Fallout, appearing on screens and saying something menacing. And here's the thing.

When I said Matthew Lillard couldn't save the movie. First of all, they don't let him by confining him to a phone. And second, Lillard himself seems to be doing a bad imitation of the original Stu character. As it turns out, that was Lillard killing it because it isn't Stu. It's two fucking dumb dums pretending to be Stu and puppeteering as Avatar.

This is bar Nun, by the way, the stupidest set of killers in the entire franchise. They are people who were inspired by Sidney personally. They read her book and used it as an inspiration for their own lives. So inspired was next door neighbor Jennifer that she murdered her way out of an abusive relationship. And then when Sidney didn't appear and scream six, Jennifer thought that was a huge betrayal because Sidney is supposed to kill bad guys, and then she lost her mind.

It gets better. She then checked herself into a highly secure psychiatric hospital, where she met a former Google employee whose specialty was AI, who had been laid off and is now part of the staff there, and together they formed a plan to punish Sydney for not stepping up, with the ultimate goal in killing her, forcing her daughter to become the new Final Girl. Have I mentioned how much I hate the term final Girl? When I heard it for the first time, I thought, Oh, someone's biting on Nathan Rabbin's style here, him having coined the term manic pixie dream girl that spread like a virus. Now, in that case, the term is perfect.

It is a long standing and boring trope We've been enduring for decades and there are no manic pixie dream boys in popular entertainment. Final Girl like Ash and Evil Dead like Tommy Jarvis in two of the Friday the Thirteenth Flicks. Remember Jesse Walsh in Elm Street two. All Final Girls. Since nomenclatier has given so much weight nowadays, let's not be lazy.

So yeah, yet again, a missed opportunity to make this series into something more than its parts by giving us a real core villain. I mentioned in the previous episode that I have thought for some time that nobody should be behind me that mask. At this point, it ought to be just a malevolent spirit that rises due to circumstance. Barring that just picks someone and to make them the villain. The fucking ultimate shame of Scream seven is that they had the fucking keys to the kingdom with Stu Macher's return.

How about this for an ending? If you want more movies, let him get away. You think the ending of Halloween was so chilling because the loomis filled Michael Myers full of leads, sending him tumbling out a window. No, it's because he gone up and walked away, and there's already precedent here. We believed Stu died at the end of the first film along those lines.

I need every filmmaker interested in who done it's to please listen to me. If you have a character show up and they're not important, but we linger a little too long on their face, we know they're the killer, at least I do. There are actually three ghost faces in this flick, ghost Face Karen, ghost Face Google, and ghost face psychiatric patient who they've been using to carry out the first murders. A man who buys a coffee from Sydney at one point and just stares and stares. Hmm.

I wonder if he's involved. They even square under the whole AI thing. At one point, the killers cycle through various ghost faces from the past, so we get ghost face stew ghost Face Jackie from Roseanne, ghost Face unremarkable white dude from Part three, and then Dewey squandered. I say, why not taunt Sidney throughout with any and all of these people, Putting aside the fact that Deep Fanks right now blow and they're nearly always transparent on how deeply fake they seem. Try live streaming, where it's converting your image into decades dead serial killers from whom you have no footage or vocal reference, sounds good to me.

Okay, I'm getting as scattered as the film here, so I will try and wrap it up. I'm just gonna let you go about your day. I genuinely wanted to like Scream seven. I thought there was nowhere to go but up from part six, and as always I was utterly disappointed. It is definitely worth a watch thanks to Nev Campbell and the Meeks twins.

They should just jump in gales Van and go off and Scooby do it. They could pick up stew along the way. How's that for a world's colliding? They could hunt down ghost faces wherever they're popping up. Hey, gang, I gotta lead in an entire miss the ghost spaces in Aberdeen, Washington.

Say, isn't that where Kurt Cobain is from? You don't suppose