“Everyone seems to have forgotten what was so cool about the original Scream:
When you saw it, up to then, most other big slashers were supernatural in some way. Freddy, Jason, Mikey (we’re pals, I call him Mikey). And when you watched that first movie, the killer seemed supernatural because he was always in two places at once. You hit the ending, it makes sense, it all works.
The second thing was that the killers were main characters we at least sort of cared about, and they were killing people they sort of cared about. As opposed to killing total strangers for convoluted reasons. Which differed a lot from other slashers as well (with the exception of the point where we decided Jamie Lee Curtis is related to Mikey, sure, why not?).
Third, the meta commentary that people focus on is the rules, but that’s not the big thing, the big thing in that first movie is that the people in the movie were acting as though they were in a movie. They would say, What if this was a movie, what would I do? They threw off the genre blindness that plagues horror heroines.
This movie feels like it was written by someone who read the Wikipedia for the first movie, said Got It, and threw something together that just doesn’t bring anything interesting to the potluck.
Oh, and part of the beauty of the other movies is that you usually didn’t know which person killed who, so when it was a big guy, you could say, Well, I guess Raylan did that one, not aunt Jackie. But this one throws that out the window and expects me to believe a 5’3 girl made of spaghetti was capable of ripping David Arquette in two with a knife. C’mon, movie, just don’t tell me that. You did a smart thing casting Jenna Ortega, who is 5’1, and putting her on crutches to fight that girl. That’s semi believable. Or, you can just not have that girl specifically say she stabbed Dewey. There are at least 7 ways to make that work, and none of them were selected.”