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.



‘Saturday Night Live’ Celebrates 50 Years with Comedy, Music and Show’s Many, Many Famous Friends 

Martin Short arrives for the "Saturday Night Live 50: The Anniversary Special" at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, US, February 16, 2025. (Reuters)
Martin Short arrives for the "Saturday Night Live 50: The Anniversary Special" at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, US, February 16, 2025. (Reuters)
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‘Saturday Night Live’ Celebrates 50 Years with Comedy, Music and Show’s Many, Many Famous Friends 

Martin Short arrives for the "Saturday Night Live 50: The Anniversary Special" at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, US, February 16, 2025. (Reuters)
Martin Short arrives for the "Saturday Night Live 50: The Anniversary Special" at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, US, February 16, 2025. (Reuters)

Paul Simon and Sabrina Carpenter duetted on Simon's "Homeward Bound" to open the show, five-decade "Saturday Night Live" luminary Steve Martin delivered the monologue, and Paul McCartney gave an epic closing to a 50th anniversary special celebrating the sketch institution that was overflowing with famous former cast members, superstar hosts and legendary guests.

The 83-year-old Simon has been essential to "SNL" since its earliest episodes in 1975, and told the 25-year-old pop sensation of the moment Carpenter that he first performed "Homeward Bound" on "SNL" in 1976.

"I was not born then," Carpenter said, getting a laugh. "And neither were my parents," she added, getting a bigger laugh.

McCartney closed with the rarely performed song cycle from the Beatles' "Abbey Road,Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End," with its wistful ending, "the love you take, is equal to the love you make."

Lil Wayne and Miley Cyrus were among the night's other musical guests, though the show's musical legacy also had its own night with a Radio City Music Hall concert on Friday.

"SNL50: The Anniversary Celebration" aired live from New York, of course, on NBC and Peacock. The pop culture juggernaut has launched the careers of generations of comedians including Eddie Murphy, Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell, who all appeared in early sketches.

And the evening included epic cameos that included Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson and Keith Richards.

Steve Martin's opening sets tone

Martin, one of the shows most prolific hosts and guests since the first season in 1975, tried to keep it current in the monologue even on a backward-looking night.

Martin said when the show's creator Lorne Michaels only told him he'd be doing the monologue, "I was actually vacationing on a friend’s boat down on the Gulf of Steve Martin."

He was joined by former "SNL" luminaries and frequent hosts Martin Short and John Mulaney, who looked at the star-studded crowd full of former hosts in the same Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza that has been the show's longtime home.

"I see some of the most difficult people I have ever met in my entire life," Mulaney said. "Over the course of 50 years, 894 people have hosted ‘Saturday Night Live,’ and it amazes me that only two of them have committed murder."

Later, on the night's "Weekend Update," anchor Colin Jost said there are so many former hosts and musical guests that wanted to see the show that many had to be seated in a neighboring studio and some had to watch "from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn" as a photo of Sean "Diddy" Combs appeared.

Martin took a jab at the always-difficult-to-wrangle Bill Murray in his monologue.

"We wanted to make sure that Bill would be here tonight," Martin said, "so we didn’t invite him."

Murray appeared on "Weekend Update" to rank the show's anchors since they began with Chevy Chase. He poked at the whiteness of the group by first ranking its Black anchors, a list of just one, current co-anchor Michael Che.

The extravaganza came after months of celebrations of "Saturday Night Live," which premiered Oct. 11, 1975, with an original cast that included John Belushi, Chase and Gilda Radner.

It’s become appointment television over the years as the show has skewered presidents, politics and pop culture.

"It is a honor and a thrill to be hosting weekend update for the 50th and if it was up to our president final season of SNL," Jost said.

The show had its typical ending, with all involved looking exhilarated and exhausted on the studio stage. This night it was so crowded with luminaries it looked like it might break. Led by Short, they all applauded in tribute to Michaels, who created the show and has run it for 45 of its 50 years.

Cameos and memorials

Alec Baldwin, the show's most frequent host with 17 stints, appeared to introduce an evening of commercial parodies, seven months after his trial was halted and an involuntary manslaughter charge was dropped in the shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

Aubrey Plaza made one of her first public appearances since the January death of her husband when she introduced Cyrus and Howard's performance.

The 87-year-old Nicholson was once a constant in the front rows of the Oscars and Los Angeles Laker games, but is rarely seen out anymore. He introduced his "Anger Management" co-star Adam Sandler, who sang in his signature style about the show’s history. He gave a roll-call of cast members, giving special attention to several who have died, including his friends Chris Farley and MacDonald along with Radner, Jan Hooks and Phil Hartman.

It ended with, "six years of our boy Farley, five of our buddy Norm."

The show didn't have a formal "in memoriam" section, though it pretended to when 10-time host Tom Hanks came out somberly to mourn "SNL characters and sketches that have aged horribly."

A montage began with the late Belushi's "Samurai" character. The word "Yikes" appeared on screen in a sketch that included Mike Myers and a young Macaulay Culkin in a bathtub. A "body shaming" label appeared over the beloved sketch of Farley and the late Patrick Swayze as Chippendale's dancers.

The oldest former cast member, 88-year-old Garrett Morris, appeared to introduce a film that showed the whole original cast.

"I had no idea y'all that I would be required to do so many reunion shows," he said.

Sketches and bits jam-packed with former cast and hosts

The first sketch featured a mash-up of former cast members and hosts. Fred Armisen hosted a "Lawrence Welk Show" that featured Ferrell as Robert Goulet.

Former hosts Kim Kardashian and Scarlett Johansson — Jost's wife — gave an updated version of the elegant singing Maharelle Sisters with former cast members Ana Gasteyer and Wiig, who provided the traditional punchline "And I’m Dooneese" with a balding head and creepy, tiny doll arms.

It was followed by "Black Jeopardy," hosted by the show’s longest running (and still current) cast member, Kenan Thompson, who called the game show the only one "where every single viewer fully understood Kendrick’s halftime performance."

It showcased many of the show’s most prominent Black cast members through the years including Tracy Morgan and Murphy, doing a Morgan impression.

Streep walked on as the mother of McKinnon's constant alien abductee Miss Rafferty, with the same spread legs and vulgar manner.

Streep's fellow all-time-great actor Robert De Niro paired with Rachel Dratch in a "Debbie Downer" sketch with its traditional trombone accompaniment.

Former cast member Amy Poehler and former lead writer Tina Fey, who partnered as "Weekend Update" anchors, led a Q-and-A with audience questions.

Ryan Reynolds stood, and they asked him how it's going.

"Great, why?" he said defensively. "What have you heard?"

Reynolds and wife Blake Lively, sitting next to him, have been locked in a heated legal and media battle with her "It Ends With Us" director and co-star Justin Baldoni.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Adam Driver, Cher, Bad Bunny, Peyton Manning and Richards were also featured in the bit.

Poehler also paired with Rudolph for a revival of their mock talk show "Bronx Beat," that featured Mike Myers as his mother-in-law-inspired, Streisand-loving character "Linda Richman."

"Look at you, both of you, you look like buttah," Myers said.