Scream VI is Unintentionally Hilarious
I haven't laughed this hard in a while
It takes a special brew for a film to turn out unintentionally funny. Most bad films are just boring or annoying. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Scream VI has a unique boldness and a rushed throw-everything-at-the-screen sensibility that makes it pure comedy gold. It’s like they wrote the script on coke and directed it while drunk. Definitely one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, but also one of the funniest.
Stop reading now if you’re avoiding spoilers for this awful monstrosity.
I broke down the whole movie on last night’s episode of Movie Internet Radio, a livestream I do every Sunday night on YouTube with my friend Channing. It’s been a while since I’ve laughed as much as I did on last night’s show. It was hard for me to sleep afterward because I was just lying in bed laughing.
Scream VI opens in Montreal. It’s supposed to be New York City but it was shot entirely in Montreal and looks it. Not sure what the point of moving the franchise to NYC was if they weren’t even going to shoot any of it there.
Back in 1989, Paramount billed Friday the 13th Part VIII as “Jason Takes Manhattan,” but then when it came down to it, shooting in New York was too expensive so the studio could only afford to show Jason walking around Times Square for a few minutes at the end of the film. That was Mean Streets compared to Scream VI. The only time we see New York City in Scream VI is in a few shots of stock footage at the beginning.
Samara Weaving waits anxiously at a trendy restaurant for her date to show up. She receives a phone call from the guy she thinks she’s waiting for. At first he sounds normal. Immediately I guess that this is Ghostface and that he’s going to lure her out into an alley to kill her, and of course that is exactly what happens. But! Are you ready for this? After Ghostface stabs her, he takes his mask off (while he’s still in the alley) to reveal that he’s Tony Revolori. Here’s the twist! We’re going to know who Ghostface is this time around! Woah!
Not so fast. He dies in the next scene. Yeah, he gets a call from another Ghostface! I know what you’re thinking, we’re only three scenes into the movie, how many Ghostfaces are there already? Well Tony thinks he’s talking to his friend, Ghostface #2, but in fact it turns out his friend has been chopped up and stuffed into a refrigerator by Ghostface #3! By the end of the film we’ll have been introduced to five different Ghostfaces. The way they tried to keep this one unpredictable was by just making every new character a Ghostface.
Cut to Sam, Melissa Barrera from the previous movie, at a nighttime therapy session with her psychiatrist, who seems to have no idea who his patient is. After asking her about her “new meds,” he says, “You’ve been coming here for six months now and all we’ve spoken about is your sister.” He mentions not knowing “whatever happened” to the both of them. “If I’m going to help you, I’m going to need you to give me the details,” he says.
I thought the Woodsboro murders from the previous film was the biggest story in the country. This would be like a psychiatrist treating Casey Anthony for six months and not realizing who he’s talking to.
“I stabbed my boyfriend 22 times and then I slit his throat. And then I shot him in the head,” she says. The therapist stops writing and looks up, terrified. He’s making connections in his mind, you see. Even though he’s apparently just hearing about this story for the first time, he’s realizing Sam could be a serial killer herself (this is a thematic thread through both the fifth and sixth installments that just never works and falls totally flat).
The scene is hilarious. Every facial expression from the therapist is comedy gold. This is a laugh out loud comedy bonanza.
Barrera is actually quite good in the film, as she seems determined not to let Jenna Ortega, who plays her sister Tara, upstage her. Her performance is really the only positive thing I can identify about the entire production.
I can’t get into it all here. I could seriously write a whole book on what a steaming pile of crap this is. I go into depth in the link below. It’s the first hour of the show.