Plus points immediately for persuading Samara Weaving to be involved, and with such poetic irony...
"What's your favourite scary movie?" "Well, not that one.," says the Film Studies professor.
I've said it before and will say it again. Welcome to the horror franchise that doesn't really understand horror. It's an enigma for a couple of generations that I have never understood. I have almost always felt I have a contemporary approach to most creativity, but then there is this as an example to disprove that theory. The splinter under a cuticle, buried so deep as to make getting rid of it horribly painful. Honestly, I don't know why the universe keeps making me do this.
I know of, though do not yet understand, the internet's fascination with Jenna Ortega. Seems the requisite American teenagers and twenty-somethings are woke enough these days to not accept ethnic whitewashing or diversity as an obstacle to stardom. Talent also, is not seemingly a requirement.
Imagine owning a Lamborghini, but leaving it untouched in your garage to play Gran Turismo on your PlayStation instead. Scream in general is the glossy, v-synced and ray-traced version of horror. Generating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, this touches nerves that I either don't have or are so warped by proper horror that this fails to really make much of a dent. If Hollywood didn't care about money, this would never have been made, or any of its predecessors. This is merely the blood-spattered phlegm coughed into a napkin at the first sign of aggressive lung cancer, worth paying attention to, but not really the problem.
"Whatever happened last time, expect the opposite."
I would go into this more fully, but just read the previous reviews of all of the other ones. They're the same thing with just a different number on the end is all, and I have better things to do.
One point for the Letterboxd shout. One removed for calling us nerds with no personality. Ooh, that burns!