The old horror movie franchise Scream is still going strong, with Scream 7 playing in theaters and making so much money that Scream 8 is reportedly in the early planning stages. Neve Campbell, who became a movie star playing the lead character, “final girl” Sidney Prescott — the always-targeted victim of the stabby Ghostface since the first Scream back in 1996 — has returned in the new sequel after having dropped out of Scream 6 when the producers wouldn’t meet her price. But obviously, they paid up this time around.

So is Scream 7 a good movie? Oh God, no. It’s pretty bad — rote and tired. But it’s the most profitable film yet in the franchise. I saw it in a theater where some die-hard fans gave it an enthusiastic reception, including one guy who had an off-putting slasher movie tic, exclaiming “Nice!” every time Ghostface killed someone with extreme gruesomeness. And in this movie, he had lots of opportunities to say, “Nice!”

For Scream 7, the unenterprising screenwriters Kevin Williamson and Guy Busick lifted the premise from the rebooted Halloween (2018), which involved the killer Michael Myers setting his sights on the next generation and attempting to slaughter a mother-daughter combo of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her estranged daughter, Karen (Judy Greer). Translated to the much more pedestrian Scream 7, this means Sidney Prescott has to reconcile with her peeved and overprotected teenage daughter Tatum (Isabel May) in order to teach her how to be scrappy and fight off Ghostface time after time.

Neve Campbell has the stolid quality of a settled upper-middle-class woman, but that doesn’t mean she can’t fight convincingly — she could easily be one of those wine moms who turned out in Minneapolis prepared to face off against ICE goons with commendable tenacity. Still, as final girls go, Campbell has none of the fascination of Jamie Lee Curtis in one of her go-for-broke performances as aging Laurie Strode, who’s become a reclusive, somewhat deranged alcoholic doomsday prepper in her decades-long campaign to survive the murderous assaults of unkillable Michael Myers.

I’ve never been a big fan of the Scream franchise. Always preferred Halloween. All that Scream po-mo stuff, the meta chitchat with characters referring with supposed cleverness to their own likely fates as recognizable types operating within the slasher genre — meh. It was amusing the first time director Wes Craven did it thirty years ago, but it wears thin fast, and by now it’s just a strain, dragging in another obsessed fan character who can quote chapter and verse from every slasher film and lay odds on who’s going to die next and what unlikely character will turn out to be behind the Ghostface mask. In Scream 7, it takes forever to get to the main killer — various other secondary killers and artificial intelligence fake-outs have to be dispensed with before the main killer is unmasked, and that character turns out to be so extremely unlikely, they have to talk for twenty minutes in order to justify their own homicidal motivation. It’s the most boring part of the whole movie.

And that’s saying something, because in order to make the fans happy, Scream 7 relies on same-old-same-old plotting, characters, and dialogue. Everybody’s dragged back who can be dragged back from the older films in the franchise. Courteney Cox returns as Gale Weathers, the ruthless tabloid reporter, now fired from her high-profile show and freelancing aggressively as a true crime reporter to get back in the game. The most fascinating thing about Cox’s performance is that she’s gone to such extreme lengths to look exactly the same as she did back in the late 1990s, with long raven-black hair and an unlined model-thin face and physique, that she’s apparently lost the use of her facial muscles. Nothing moves except her mouth dropping open when she speaks, as if she were a living South Park character.

Matthew Lillard brings some welcome energy to his typically loopy performance as Stu Macher, who was definitely killed several Screams ago, all the way back in the original. Or was he? You can never be sure if people really died in the Scream films — many come staggering back to life after being gutted like fish, muttering the equivalent of “just a flesh wound.” Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding, playing young twins who are new media wannabes named Mindy and Chad Meeks-Martin, niece and nephew of the long-dead film geek Randy Meeks, are on board again after having been featured in the past two Scream sequels. And David Arquette is resurrected briefly via AI as the late Dewey Riley, the hapless town cop who was married to Gale Weathers but killed by Ghostface a while back.

You may have heard about the big switcheroo in plotting and casting that occurred before Scream 7 got off the ground. Scream 5 and 6 had starred Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega as sisters taking the franchise in a fresh direction. But Barrera got fired after sharing a 2023 social media post sympathetic to the Palestinian people, accusing Israel of “genocide and ethnic cleansing” in Gaza. Not long afterward, Ortega dropped out too, though the reason given was scheduling conflicts related to her hit Netflix series Wednesday. Director Christopher Landon, about to take over from directing team Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, quit too after receiving death threats for firing Barrera, though he was not involved in the decision by those in charge of production company Spyglass Media Group. Kevin Williamson, the original screenwriter of the Scream series, took over as writer-director of Scream 7.

Makes you wonder how many people in the United States have lost their jobs in underreported incidents for publicly expressing support for the Palestinian people. Barrera has refused to back down or apologize for her statements. Protesters assembled at the Paramount Theater in Los Angeles for the premiere of Scream 7 on February 25, waving the Palestinian flag, apparently in solidarity with Barrera and condemnation of Spyglass Media Group.

It’s one more reason to skip Scream 7.