The phone-name-with-the-killer collection that opens each “Scream” movie is usually a delectable appetizer, one that as the characters in any “Scream” film may want to inform you establishes the tone for the movie in query. In “Scream VI,” that ritual scene kicks off on the bar of a ultra-modern restaurant in downtown Manhattan. The female seated on the bar is a professor of cinema research (Samara Weaving), blonde and British. As she explains at the smartphone to her Tinder date, who can’t appear to discover the eating place, she’s teaching a direction in slasher films (which, the manner she describes it, isn’t any stab in the darkish of plausibility). Her date, an disturbing dork, is ready to talk her out onto the road to assist him discover the region, and by the time she’s on foot right into a dark alley we understand what’s coming. (His voice lowers into that acquainted mocking AM-radio-DJ growl.) In this example, although, the killer is immediately unmasked as…a university bro. He returns to his condominium, and moments later he’s the frightening-movie sufferer, speaking on the telephone with the real killer.This complex double collection, with its creepier-than-standard overtones (that bro describes how he relished committing a copycat homicide), does a nice task of placing the desk for “Scream VI,” the first access in the series that unfolds in a place like New York City. The four survivors from “Scream,” final year’s “requel,” are all again, having dubbed themselves “the Core Four”: Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera), who triumphantly ended that movie by means of executing the film’s version of Ghostface; Sam’s half of-sister, Tara (Jenna Ortega), who’s attending Blackmore College in New York (a fictional college that appears like NYU), and whom Sam hovers round like an overprotective discern; and Tara’s fellow scholar transplants, the whip-clever horror geek Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and her sexy brother Chad (Mason Gooding).The administrators, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, and screenwriters, James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, are also returned. In their hands, it’s Mindy the brainiac horror superfan who over again elucidates the regulations for a way a “Scream” film works, incorporating, as earlier than, a new audience-pushed corporate cynicism approximately what films can and will do for an encore. Once Ghostface kicks off his rampage, Mindy efficaciously notes that what the characters are actually in the middle of isn’t simply a sequel however a franchise, and she or he lays down the regulations for what that suggests. It approach that the brand new film has got to be bigger and showier. That it’s were given to swing in a brand new course and subvert expectancies. And that the legacy characters are strictly expendable. “Scream VI” extra or less lives as much as the ones dictates.

But here are some regulations of my very own approximately wherein the “Scream” franchise is now at. Rule #1: The entire meta playfulness about the horror genre, with the characters sounding like schlock-culture scholars of their personal dread-ridden fates, has come to be mere window dressing. Rule #2: The truth that we don’t understand the identity of the killer has genuinely allowed this collection to age greater suspensefully than, say, the “Halloween” movies, in which it’s always the identical evil drone underneath the mask. Rule #3: This manner that the “Scream” series, while it retains simply sufficient of the spirit of postmodern snark, now lives or dies on whether or not the film in query really succeeds as a mystery. And “Scream VI,” whilst it goes on for too lengthy, is a pretty good thriller. It’s a gory homicidal shell game that’s smart in all the right approaches, staged and shot extra forcefully than the preceding film, keen to take gain of its greater sprawling but enclosed cosmopolitan setting.