A phone ringing against a black screen. Then, an image of a suburban house at night.
Inside, a teenage girl — Jenna Ortega’s Tara — has little interest in picking up her mother’s landline as she texts a friend on her smartphone.
The ringing persists, though, and she acquiesces.
The male voice on the other end of the line, initially claiming to be a friend of Mom’s, wants to play a game. A horror movie-trivia game. One that — he soon makes clear — in which incorrect answers will lead to deadly consequences.
It should not come as a surprise that Tara soon will encounter a knife-wielding attacker wearing a Ghostface mask.
This is, after all, the beginning of the latest “Scream” movie.
Titled simply “Scream” — just like the self-aware horror flick that landed in theaters in late 1996, launching a series that, to date, has grossed north of $600 million worldwide — this fifth big-screen entry has about as much bloody fun as you could have hoped.
Coming more than a decade after “Scream 4” and the television series that ran for a few years on MTV and VH1, this “Scream” is, well, what you’d expect from the franchise at the dawn of this decade. (The movie originally was slated to come 25 years after the original but saw a delay due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.)
It’s largely for an audience familiar with both the trendsetting franchise and the evolution of pop culture and movies, with characters discussing topics ranging from “elevated horror” — Tara tells her soon-to-be-attacker she prefers movies such as “The Babadook,” “Hereditary” and “The Witch” to his beloved “Stab” series, the fictional franchise based on the killings from the “Scream” flicks — and toxic fandom.
It’s also largely concerned with the idea of a “requel” — a movie that sits somewhere between a straight sequel and a hard reboot, blending a new cast of faces with “legacy characters” still important to the longtime fans. (As one of the characters points out, “Star Wars” and other big franchises have gone this route, leading to great success at the box office.)
That’s exactly what this “Scream” is, the entry introducing new characters including Tara and those played by Melissa Barrera, Mason Gooding, Mikey Madison, Dylan Minnette, Jack Quaid, Jasmin Savoy Brown and Sonia Ammar with franchise staples Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette.
That it does this rather well while not losing sight of a key ingredient — the guessing game of who is behind the series’ synonymous Ghostface mask — is a tribute to co-writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick and co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, all of whom were involved with the highly enjoyable 2019 horror-comedy “Ready or Not.”
They inherit the controls originally operated, respectively, by then-newcomer screenwriting Kevin Williamson — who’s credited as an executive producer here — and veteran horror director Wes Craven (“A Nightmare on Elm Street”), who died in 2015.
In their story, word of the attack on Tara reaches her older sister, Sam (Barerra), who five years ago left the once-sleepy town of Woodboro, which saw its first Ghostface murder 25 years ago. Wanting to be there for the hospitalized Tara, her devoted boyfriend, Richie (Quaid, “The Boys”), insists on going with her back to her infamous hometown.
There, we are familiarized with the other key young characters: Tara’s high school friends Amber (Madison, “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood”); Wes (Minnette, “13 Reasons Why”); twins Mindy (Brown, “The Leftovers”) and Chad (Gooding, “Booksmart”); and Liv (Ammar), Chad’s girlfriend. Each of them could be the killer. As you’ll learn, some of them have ties to characters from previous “Scream’s, adding to this one’s requel requisites.
That idea is reinforced when Sam and Richie, out to solve the mystery themselves, seek the help of the town’s now-former sheriff, Dewey Riley (Arquette). Although he’d prefer to remain in the company of his bottles of booze, watching his ex, Gale Weathers (Cox, “Friends”), as she anchors a morning show from New York. While he does eventually agree to get involved — and presents the young sleuths some rules of the game they should be keeping in mind — he calls longtime Ghostface target Sidney Prescott (Campbell, “Skyscraper”) to tell her to stay away from Woodsboro, doing the same with Gale via text.
Phew. Good to know they won’t show up (cough) and put themselves back in danger.
This fifth entry — and yes, the fact that it’s not called “Scream 5” will be addressed in an appropriately meta manner by the characters — more adjusts the “Scream” wheel for the times than reinvents it. And for a viewer not in love with this sort of thing, the climactic, stab-filled stretch does drag on a bit.
That said, you can’t escape how simply competently made this movie is. The writers and directors set so many small things up — including naming a character Wes and dedicating the movie to Craven, however obvious those choices may be — that you can’t help but be impressed.
A couple of standouts in the cast who are worth mentioning: Barrera (“In the Heights”) proves to be a worthy Sidney 2.0, and, of the legacy characters, Arquette (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) stands out as the grizzled vet.
Among the ideas of which this movie is aware: that it may not please some longtime fans. Maybe some would hope for another movie built more around Sidney, Dewey and Gale. Perhaps others would hope for more of a blood-soaked break from the past.
Well, you can’t stab, er, please everybody.
‘Scream’
Where: Theaters.
When: Jan. 14.
Rated: R for strong bloody violence, language throughout and some sexual references.
Runtime: 1 hour, 54 minutes.
Stars (of four): 3.
