Heart Eyes (2025)

Director: Josh Ruben

Cast: Olivia Holt, Mason Gooding, Gigi Zumbado, Michaela Watkins

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I’ll admit that it somehow missed my radar altogether, but a last-minute re-working of the Beyond the Cabin in the Woods schedule brought me here.

Did I Like It: I can’t readily recall the last time I’ve been on such a roller coaster with a movie. For the first stretch it feels like it is going to be a fun gore-fest, somewhere in the vein of the Evil Dead series (and likely competing with The Monkey (2025) for screens and audiences). It also wants to weave romantic comedy tropes into the trappings of a horror movie. It worked for Shaun of the Dead (2004), why can’t it work here*?

Then it settles into the comfortable slasher rhythm that has become ubiquitous in the wave of Scream (1996) and its more recent sequels. I’m sitting there not being terribly frightened (I might be past the time where a slasher elicits any kind of real fear) and I’m more concerned with trying to figure out who did it.

I’m kind of tired watching a horror movie and slowly realizing I’m watching less of a horror movie and actually watching what amounts to a cozy mystery**.

But then something happens in the third act that gave me a strange sense of hope. The mystery suddenly becomes incidental to the murder and mayhem. For a moment, I almost dared hope that the pure simplicity of John Carpenter might be heading for its renaissance.

Then the film goes on for another twenty minutes and veers right into being just another Scream clone. Disappointment abounds.

*Spoiler alert for the end of the review: The reason it won’t work is because few people are Edgar Wright. Shaun works because the horror works, and the romantic comedy works. This movie ends up being a mashup of the later Scream-quels and something like Crazy Stupid Love (2011), when I’d really love to see a mashup of You’ve Got Mail (1998) and Halloween (1978). But I get why film studios hesitate to make films they can only market to me.

**There are few terms in the world that set my teeth on edge more than “cozy mystery.” I have my reasons.

Scream VI (2023)*

Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett

Cast: Melissa Barrera, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Jenna Ortega, Mason Gooding

Have I Seen it Before: Nope, brand new. Well, sort of brand new.

Did I Like It: No review of this film will probably be complete without reckoning with the elephant steadfastly refusing to enter the room, Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott**. Campbell’s  decision to not participate in the film did nothing to remove her from the suspect list. That the filmmakers were still able without skipping a beat to get this film into theaters inside of a year after the release of Scream (2022) tells me pretty clearly that Sidney was not a vital part of this story. Watching it unfold makes it pretty clear that the film probably wouldn’t have room for her. Campbell claims that she was being undervalued by the franchise she has brought so much to in the past, and in a series where it is important to not believe much of what we are told, I believe her completely.

That aside, I find this new film to be an exercise in half measures. The opening sequence—with Ghostfaces upon Ghostfaces being hunted by other Ghostfaces—is promising to the point that I think the series may have found a new lease on life that I was never completely convinced had been earned in last year’s entry. What’s more, spending time with the new “core four” characters this time was so engaging that I doubled down on my desire for six more Screams to come. This doesn’t even cover the fact that Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox, the only original cast member to return, even though I have sneaking suspicion that Matthew Lillard is in a cell somewhere, waiting for Scream 7–Sceaivii?—to come find him) gave Ghostface the fake out we all didn’t know we had been waiting for for nearly thirty years.

And then the ending happens, and most (but not all) of that promise goes up in smoke. Difficult to talk about the ending of a Scream without playing all of the available spoiler cards, but it’s a little disappointing that the new character played by the most famous actor in the cast winds up being behind it all. That’s a rule that will get you to solution of most crime procedural episodes before the second commercial break. That the whole affair ends up being a barely warmed-over rehash of the series-best Scream 2 (1997) doesn’t help anything. And the fact that both the protagonists and the villains of the piece could all come together and agree that Sidney Prescott should not be bothered right now strains the credulity of even the most naive of moviegoers. Namely, me.

Maybe we did need Sidney and Neve Campbell after all.

*Or is the title really SCREAIVI? I’m honestly not sure.

**Which I absolutely typed as Sidney Bristow originally. Thank Wes Craven that I was able to catch that one before sending the review to the press.

Scream (2022)

Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett

Cast: Melissa Barrera, Mason Gooding, Jenna Ortega, Jack Quaid

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: Where Scream 4 (2011) seemed like it didn’t have enough targets and not enough time had passed since the original films to have much of anything to say about how horror and movies have changed in the ensuing years, there are an army of legacy sequels to fuel this film’s runtime, to say nothing of an ongoing, tense meditation between the more confectionary pleasures of slasher films and the rise of so-called elevated horror. 

At the beginning of this, the fifth film in the Scream series, the idea of continuing the series felt like a bit of a chore for this viewer. Indeed, had I not been on the upswing of my Beyond the Cabin in the Woods renaissance, I probably would have been content to miss this one. I’m glad I didn’t. The mystery of just who is the killer is played exceedingly well, to the point where I dismissed my initial, correct instincts. “It can’t be the boyfriend! They already did that,” I told myself, stupidly. Every ounce of the movie is designed to subvert expectations, right from the moment that the first idiot who decides to pick up a landline call in the 2020s actually makes it to the end of the picture.

Additionally, I have ultimately given up the ghost(face) on seeing Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell, winning this year’s “Mark Hamill in Star Wars - Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015) award for barely showing up in the a legacy sequel, despite being integral to the film’s advertising) be the killer in one of these movies. It’s never going to happen, and now I can make my peace with the fact that it will never happen. I’m glad that there can be a horror movie legacy character who has mastered the ability of not letting their trauma dominate them. It’s just another subversion of expectation from a franchise built, at its best, on the idea.