Scream Review: 6 Ups & 4 Downs

Ups...

6. The Meta Satire Is Smart & Hilarious

The single defining trait of the Scream franchise above all others has always been its giddy, shameless self-awareness, using the template of a slasher movie to make fun of not only slasher movies but the horror genre as a whole.

And the fifth Scream unsurprisingly doesn't stray from that tradition, with the film's themes and commentary hinged around criticising Hollywood's obsession with nostalgia-baiting legacy sequels.

That's not the only iron in the fire, though: there's also blatant mockery of toxic fandom, gentle ribbing of the aforementioned elevated horror, and also the frequent indication that humanity is just a little too reliant on the conveniences of technology.

For long-time fans of the series who also count themselves as horror fiends, these aspects will land with good humour and sly wit, even if in their specificity to the current era of horror one suspects they won't age quite as well as, say, Scream 4's massively ahead of its time social media critique.

Still, in the moment as viewed today, the satire absolutely works, even if the script sometimes leans a little too hard on satire to hand-wave some of its lazier screenwriting choices.