LThe phone rings. An unknown voice on the other end of the line. Soon the massacre … Called for gore and cry by the public, we are told, Scream returns after more than ten years of absence and is still doing Scream. Again. And even. And even. Is it bad? Not really. Is this new? Not yet. Are we bored? Yeah, probably. A new ghostface masked killer is therefore rampant in the town of Woodsboro. He attacks young Tara (Jenna Ortega) and leaves her in a sorry state!
His older sister Samantha (Melissa Barrera) returns immediately to Woodsboro, flanked by her boyfriend Richie (Jack Quaid, the son in the life of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan for fans of Hollywood elite). They find Tara’s classmates on the spot and, very quickly, all these little people will suspect each other, against the backdrop of revelations of family secrets … Like their elders in 1996, the 2.0 high school students dive into their knowledge of cinema clichés of horror and in particular of the series of horror films Stab (inspired by events in Woodboro for 25 years), to identify the culprit (s) among them. Now in retirement, the ex-sheriff Dewey Riley (David Arquette) is requested, before calling in turn to the rescue Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), survivor of all the murderers-Ghostface who have bloodied Woodsboro for a quarter of century.
Direct continuation of the fourth part, this new film comes out yet without figure attached to its title, as if to hide under the carpet the vulgarity of the company and its status of rehash. As if this Scream was self-sufficient and symbolized a virginal new beginning, while he drinks until his thirst at the source of the past, like the others. We escaped the worst: Scream 5 Certainly not the sharpest knife on the stash but still less sticking out of the throat than some dastardly freeze-dried reboots of recent years. Alas, just like the recent ones Halloween kills, Spider-Man: No Way Home Where Ghostbusters: The Legacy, it illustrates despite everything the sinister unprecedented regressive phase that Hollywood entertainment cinema is going through, knife drawn with the slightest notion of innovation.
The process has faded for 25 years
The wink, the nudge, the memories, the good old sauce definitely seem to serve as a toolbox for screenwriters under the orders of lazy investors preferring to capitalize until nausea on the recipes that have made their mark. proof. From the start, the great specialty of Scream – recently pumped by Matrix Resurrections – is to accept this observation and offer spectators to have fun, via an almost non-stop commentary on the action in progress on the screen: in each part, the characters (and through them the screenwriters) let us know that they are not fooled by the tricks and clichés guiding the intrigue. In the jargon, we call it “meta cinema” and the creative resignation is thus miraculously transformed into an intellectual figure of speech. But the process, which seemed fresh and pleasant in the first two parts, has faded inexorably for 25 years.
READ ALSOBut what do they all have with “Scream”?
In Scream 5, the authors cling to a final ledge before falling into the void: this time, the young heroes debate the sad evolution of the franchise Stab (fictional version of Scream, you follow?), whose last shutter would have ruined the vein. Not very nice, by the way, for the late Wes Craven, who died in 2015 and director of Scream 1 to 4. Convinced that the new wave of murder in Woodsboro will inevitably spark a new film, the teens discuss the rules that the possible future iteration should follow and joke about the concept of “requel”, halfway between the reboot and sequel … Precisely the principle at work in Scream 5 and who, in 2018, also guided the Halloween by David Gordon Green (quipped nicely in the film). We necessarily have fun with this setting in abyss, always skilful and we always revel, in good sadistic public of the Scream, a few felt scarlet splashes offered by Matt Betinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, Wes Craven’s successors in directing.
Folded over the navel of his mythology
But the non-reptilian part of our brain will be much less satisfied with the other side of the blade: that of a scenario piling up incredible improbabilities and bewildering negligence like Ghostface multiplies corpses; another one of a psychological characterization close to nothing (including for ghosts Sidney Prescott and journalist Gale Weathers, still camped by Courteney Cox); finally, that of an overall absence of surprise, as the plot follows the course of the 1996 film. The whole company gets there by having avoided the worst: we are relatively entertained. But once again, in the end credits, as with so many other recent sequels / reboots / stammers of cinoche popcorn, we salute the writers of the 70s to 90s for having done the job of innovation without which their current successors. would be hard pressed to work. Even the eternal name dropping – a character is named Wes, the two sisters have the surname Carpenter… – seems drawn in autopilot mode.
Scream 5 Moreover, it came out a little more than ten years after the previous one, but, no doubt because of the will of the authors, it seems to be almost completely ignorant of the extent of the changes that have occurred since 2011 in the environment of American youth. The omnipresence of social networks and virtual worlds, the post- #MeToo era (started with the fall of Harvey Weinstein, historical producer of Scream), the ideological rifts in post-Trump America … This new Scream Doesn’t make much of it, folded up on the navel of its own mythology and not evoking the recent classics of horror (Mr Babadook, It Follows, Hereditary…) Than at the turn of a replica. It’s both refreshing and at the same time, symptomatic of an entire shutter bathed in “nostalgism”, with teenagers a little out of time and of whom we do not perceive the slightest interaction with the outside world. A film-museum which, likeHalloween 2018 before him, juggles frantically with many second knives of the past to find the lost soul of a concept once much sharper.