Review: ‘Scream VI’ Goes to the Big City and Strikes Out

This image released by Paramount Pictures shows Jenna Ortega in a scene from "Scream VI." (Paramount Pictures via AP)
This image released by Paramount Pictures shows Jenna Ortega in a scene from "Scream VI." (Paramount Pictures via AP)
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Review: ‘Scream VI’ Goes to the Big City and Strikes Out

This image released by Paramount Pictures shows Jenna Ortega in a scene from "Scream VI." (Paramount Pictures via AP)
This image released by Paramount Pictures shows Jenna Ortega in a scene from "Scream VI." (Paramount Pictures via AP)

In “Scream VI,” the psychotic, knife-wielding serial killer known as Ghostface is set loose on the streets of New York City. Yawn.

The former terror of the fictional California town of Woodsboro has made the cross-country trip to the City That Never Sleeps, bringing his creepy mask, black cloak and impressive supply of daggers. But he's lost in the big city, a slasher made small in his new playground.

No disrespect to Mr. Stabby-Stabby, but New York is where you get screamed at by a deranged hot dog vendor, have fistfights over midtown parking, pay $8 for a pack of gum and find approximately six public bathrooms for 8 million people. Ghostface, dude, up your scare game in the Big Apple. This is the city where Pizza Rat lives. This is a city where middle schoolers have nunchucks.

Despite the change of scenery, “Scream VI” is less a sequel and more a stutter-step, a half-movie with some very satisfying stabbings but no real progress or even movement. It's like treading water in gore. And to fully enjoy this “sequel to the requel,” you need to have watched most of the others.

The four main survivors from the fifth “Scream” are all here a year later — the Carpenter sisters, Sam and Tara (Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega) and the smug brother-and-sister duo played by Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown. They dub themselves the Core Four. “Survivors got to stick together,” says the brother.

The same directing team of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett return, as well as the writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, who this time layer in some critiques of social media and fame. Courteney Cox is back, too, the last original cast member — or “a legacy,” as she's called — to appear in the franchise. That may not be such a boastable thing.

Sam Carpenter is firmly in the crosshairs of Ghostface — or more than one Ghostface if the pattern persists — and trying to escape her heritage (and notoriety) as the child of an earlier serial killer. Bodies start falling quick. “This isn’t your fault, Sam,” says her sister. “But it is,” replies Sam. And there are some disturbing signs that a latent killer lurks in her heart, too.

The filmmakers have picked quite a canvas — and wasted it. Unlike the “John Wick” franchise, the folks at “Scream VI” seem overawed by the city they've landed in. We expected Ghostface to slice Elmos in Times Square. We wanted finance bros in puffy vests and Brooklyn hipsters with weird facial hair to bleed. We wanted smugly rich Upper East Siders with tiny dogs to get splattered. Instead, the city seems to humble Ghostface, making him just another easy-to-ignore tourist overpaying for knock-off purses on the street.

There are fight scenes in a bodega and in a luxury apartment on the Upper West Side, but perhaps the best New York sequence is on a crowded subway train, where Ghostface is stalking in plain sight. The film is set around Halloween and so the train is packed with creepy dudes, tweaked-out college kids and masked marauders — in other words, a regular Tuesday. Anyone who has ridden the New York City subway in the past three years wouldn't even flinch at Ghostface. They might even cough up a dollar for him to go away.

The sequel sticks with the formula of folding in on itself, mocking in a meta way the horror conventions it itself helped build. “We're in a franchise!” one of the Core Four explains and, indeed, “Scream VI” opens with a film professor yammering on about cliched movie tropes and ends with fight-for-your-lives slash-a-thon at a disused movie theater. And so at the conclusion, we must limp on to the next sequel, with no end in sight, and hearing the city loudly mocking anyone foolish enough to try to come and scare it.



Pulp Is Back for ‘More,’ Their First Album in 24 Years. Even the Britpop Band Is Surprised 

Jarvis Cocker of the band Pulp performs at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles on Sept. 18, 2024, (AP) 
Jarvis Cocker of the band Pulp performs at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles on Sept. 18, 2024, (AP) 
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Pulp Is Back for ‘More,’ Their First Album in 24 Years. Even the Britpop Band Is Surprised 

Jarvis Cocker of the band Pulp performs at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles on Sept. 18, 2024, (AP) 
Jarvis Cocker of the band Pulp performs at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles on Sept. 18, 2024, (AP) 

Pulp has returned with a new album, their first in 24 years. Who could’ve predicted that?

Not even the band, it turns out. “It took us by surprise as well,” dynamic frontman Jarvis Cocker told The Associated Press. “Why not?”

If there are casual Pulp fans, they don’t make themselves known. The ambitious Britpop-and-then-some band emerged in the late-'70s in Sheffield, England, artistic outsiders with a penchant for the glam, grim, and in the case of Cocker, the gawky. Fame alluded them until the mid-'90s, and then it rushed in with the trend of Cool Britannia.

Their songs varied wildly from their contemporaries, like the recently reunited Blur and soon-to-be back together Oasis. Instead, Pulp’s David Bowie-informed synth-pop arrived with humor, ambiguity and intellect — songs about class consciousness that manage to be groovy, glib, awkward and amorous all at once.

Then, and in the decades since, Pulp has inspired devotion from loyal fans across generations. They’ve charmed those lucky enough to catch band members in their heyday before a kind of careerism led to a hiatus in 2002 — and those who saw them for the first time during reunion tours in 2011 and 2022. With all that reputation on the line, it’s reassuring that the band has decided to give its audience “More,” their first new album in over two decades.

Give them ‘More’

There were a few catalysts for “More.” The first: “We could get along with each other still,” jokes drummer Nick Banks. “It wasn’t too painful.” The second: The band worked a new song into their recent reunion show run — “The Hymn of the North,” originally written for Simon Stephens’ 2019 play “Light Falls” — and people seemed to like it.

The third and most significant: The band’s bassist and core member Steve Mackey died in 2023.

“It made me realize that you don’t have endless amounts of time,” Cocker says. “You’ve still got an opportunity to create things, if you want to. Are you going to give it a go?”

And so, they did. Cocker assured his bandmates Banks, guitarist Mark Webber and keyboardist Candida Doyle that the recording process could be done quickly — in three weeks, lightspeed for a band that has infamously agonized over its latter records, like 1998’s “This Is Hardcore.”

Webber describes a “reticence to get involved in a yearslong process” that was alleviated when they started to work on new songs which came “quite easily.” That’s at least partially due to the fact that, for the first time in the history of the band, Cocker elected to “write the words in advance. ... It’s taken me until the age of 61 to realize it: If you write the words before you go into the studio, it makes it a much more pleasant experience.”

The 11 tracks that make up “More” are a combination of new and old songs written across Pulp’s career. The late Mackey has a writing credit on both the sultry, existential “Grown Ups” originally demoed around “This Is Hardcore,” and the edgy disco “Got to Have Love,” written around “the turn of the millennium,” as Cocker explains. “I did have words, but I found myself emotionally unable to sing them.”

“Without love you’re just making a fool of yourself,” he sings in the second verse. “I got nothing else to say about it.”

It makes sense, then, that the romantic song was held until “More,” when Cocker believed them — coincidentally, after he was married in June of last year.

A pop band reflects

Maturation — the literality of growing up on “Grown Ups” — is a prevalent theme on “More,” delivered with age-appropriate insight. “I was always told at school that I had an immature attitude. I just didn’t see any point in growing up, really. It seemed like all the fun was had by people when they were younger,” said Cocker.

“But, as I said on the back of the ‘This Is Hardcore’ album, it’s OK to grow up, as long as you don’t grow old. And I still agree with that, I think. Growing old is losing interest in the world and deciding that you’re not gonna change. You’ve done your bit and that’s it. That doesn’t interest me.”

“You have to retain an interest in the world and that keeps you alive,” he adds. “So, you grow up. And hopefully you live better, and you treat other people better. But you don’t grow old.”

In addition to “More,” 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of the song that defines their career, “Common People.”

“That one, we’ve never really fallen out of love with,” says Webber.

“Because of the way it affects people, really, you can’t fall out of love with it,” adds Cocker.

“More,” produced by James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Fontaines D.C.), arrives Friday. The band will immediately embark on a UK and North American tour. Then, who knows? Is this the beginning of a new, active era for the band?

“The next one is going to be called ‘Even More,’” Cocker jokes. “Nah, I don’t know. The album wasn’t conceived of as a tombstone. ... The jury is out.”

“It wouldn’t be good for it to end up feeling like you’re stuck on a treadmill,” Banks adds. “And at the moment, it’s still pretty exciting.”