Seven years later, after two middling Scream outings and the underwhelming vampire mystery Abigail, Radio Silence has turned back to their breakout cult hit with a completely unnecessary sequel. The film picks up right where the first one left off, literally recreating and extending the final shot of the first film. Thus it will be impossible to discuss Ready or Not 2: Here I Come without spoiling the fun finale of Ready or Not 1; proceed accordingly.

A blood-spattered Grace (Weaving) has survived the ordeal of her husband’s family trying to murder her in a game of hide and seek and then exploding like popped blood balloons when an ancient curse came true. She’s rushed to the hospital where her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) meets her. Moments later, they’re both whisked into another single-night game of murderous hide-and-seek, this time with a new lineup of idiotic billionaires hunting them down.

Ready or Not 2 stumbles quite a bit during its opening half, which takes a long time to set up some remarkably convoluted backstory about a cabal of wealthy families vying for a designated “High Seat” that turns you into Capitalism God, or something. The affair is operated by The Lawyer (Elijah Wood). For reasons that never made sense to me, and frankly I don’t much care, this involves hunting Weaving down with Newton in tow.

It doesn’t help that the movie looks rather ugly and dim. Perhaps the original was this visually bleak and I’m misremembering, but Ready or Not 2 feels a step down visually. It is begging for a bright, clear, distinctive color palette. Instead, cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz (returning from Part 1) serves up run-of-the-mill flatness and underlighting.

By the second half, though, the film finds a rhythm. The murderous set pieces pick up and the heart of the film, the strain between two estranged sisters, takes center frame. And while the general scenario is a blatant (and lampshaded) rehash of Part 1, the destinations the story goes to are surprising and fun.

It helps that Weaving, in her almost annual tradition of undercutting her tremendous beauty to get battered around and/or covered in gallons fake viscera, is every bit as ferocious as she was seven years ago. Newton, a scream queen extraordinaire in her own right (see: Freaky), is a well-matched sidekick, her lighter energy beautifully off Weaving’s dry, hardened wit.

The supporting bench buoys the affair, though I missed Adam Brody from Part 1. Sarah Michelle Gellar’s return to an action register, here as a conniving heiress, is a pleasure, though I wish she had gone full Cruel Intentions in her villainy. Wood brings exactly the unctuous bureaucrat energy the part needs, and David Cronenberg turns up for a single scene as a wealthy patriarch named Chester Danforth. Another bright point comes in the production: The film features an early contender for costume of the year in an all-black wedding dress and veil Weaving wears near the film’s ending.

The best scene in the movie, though, is an anti-balletic brawl around the midpoint between two women blinded by pepper spray as “Total Eclipse of the Heart” plays. It’s funny and inventive and exactly the kind of thing I would have asked for in a sequel that has no reason to exist. Let’s at least get silly with it. Ready or Not 2 is not the leap beyond Radio Silence‘s ceiling I’d hoped they might one day take. But it is, surprisingly, about as much fun as the original, though no smarter or sharper.

The flip side of this has been a pretty high floor for entertainment value. Other than their shabby found footage debut, Devil’s Due, I have more-or-less enjoyed their movies. Smiled a bunch of times. Admired a few scenes and touches. Then moved on with my life.

What’s especially frustrating to me this time is that there’s a cool story idea in Abigail that I want to see done right. The elevator pitch hinges on a twist that comes about halfway into the film. The marketing and all press references to the film have done their damnedest to fully spoil this twist, which is a shame. I did my best to avoid any reviews, trailers, etc. devoted to the film on the mere suspicion it had a “big twist,” and still got spoiled at the last moment… by the one-line summary of the film in the damn Wikipedia search bar of all things.

Anyways, here’s the spoiler-free setup: A group of career crooks have been hired to pull a heist on a billionaire. The loot is the billionaire’s daughter, Abigail (Alisha Weir). The mysterious string-puller of the operation is demanding ransom for the return of the daughter. For whatever reason, the agreement he makes with the thieves is that all they need to do is steal Abigail and keep her safe for 24 hours and they’ll get paid their millions. So we have a one day countdown timer.

But things go south quickly. The thieves learn the girl’s father is the mob boss Kristof Lazaar. The crew all squirm at this name, because Lazaar is known for cruel revenge, and they just, you know, kidnapped and drugged his daughter. Each member of the team also has a shadowy past they only reluctantly admit might crossover with Lazaar’s wrath. Lazaar’s hit man is the cruelest executioner in the game, a mystery figure known as Valdez, spoken of in Keyser Soze-like tones. The crew starts to piece together that one of them might be a double-agent feeding info to Lazaar. In fact, one of them might even be Valdez — the latter theory supported by some brutal deaths of members of the crew early in the 24 hour window.

It’s a classic but heightened “we got a mole” heist setup. I particularly love the opening theft itself, a cross-cutting between Abigail’s ballet performance and the careful orchestration of the job scored to Swan Lake. Over-dramatic use of Tchaikovsky will always get my attention.

I like the crew themselves, too. It’s not an all-time bunch, but they’re decently well-defined and well-acted. Each is given a nickname based on a member of the Rat Pack, a reference to the original Ocean’s 11 (and the hunt for a “rat”). Our entry point to the story is Joey (Melissa Barrera), a medic and maternal presence who cares for Abigail. There’s also the corrupt ex-cop leader of the job Frank (an excellent Dan Stevens), stoic Marine sniper Rickles (Will Catlett), hacker grrl Sammy (Kathryn Newton), muscle Peter (Kevin Durand), and getaway driver Dean (Angus Cloud, RIP).

All good so far. Solid set-up, high energy, intriguing hook. And then comes the twist, which is likely to totally alienate you or otherwise be the entire reason you see film in the first place. Abandon hope all ye who avoid spoilers from here on out.

So it turns out the crew’s instincts were right. The entire operation is one big setup, and Valdez the sicko executioner is indeed in the building with them. And if you didn’t guess it right away, here it is: Valdez is Abigail, Lazaar’s twelve-year-old ballerina daughter. What’s more, Abigail is a full-on vampire. As in: a supernatural monster. And now the team is locked in a haunted house with her as she hunts them down one by one.

Parts of this admittedly work. There are some well-staged scenes of vampire attacks with gnarly gore, plus a handful of good jokes as the scenario unfolds. A fun runner is that Sammy is a Twihard and knows some vampire lore, but is too dopey to get it quite right. When she goes to hunt for garlic for protection, she grabs a big bag of onions from the kitchen. Etc.

But overall the execution is a big fat mess. Radio Silence can’t decide if it wants Abigail’s identity to be a secret. It’s largely treated as such, but also foreshadowed so heavily that I can’t imagine an unspoiled savvy viewer not guessing some version of Abigail’s treachery, even if not the vampiric specifics. The timing of events and revelations is all off: Key character details, like connections to Lazaar, only take shape too late in the film when they should have been part of the setup. The twist, on the other hand, comes way too early: at about the 50-minute mark of a bloated 110-minute runtime.

The directors can’t help but turn Abigail into a Ready or Not retread for the entire second half of the film, with Barrera’s Joey body more mutilated and blood-spattered with each passing scene as she scrambles to escape. At least this time we don’t get a subtle-as-a-crowbar “eat the rich” layer of class commentary. In fact, that’s one of my favorite parts of Abigail — other than some introspection on Joey as a mother, it’s immensely light on subtext and happy to just be a story.

Radio Silence has basically the exact opposite thoughts towards this specific story that I do. They want it to devolve into a violent horror-comedy romp ASAP, the crime story setup rushed and haphazard, there simply to get us to that “good stuff.” But it would have so much more unique and impactful if Abigail was a fully-fleshed heist story. Build out that mystery of who in the crew is a traitor, and gut punch us with a brief orgy of vampire violence in the finale. The proxy parent relationship set up between Abigail and Joey could have had much more heft; the sense of suspense and fear of betrayal between the crew could be much thicker; and the personalities of each character could be better explored and fleshed out. Instead, it’s all about the gory set pieces.

The “what if the mole is actually a 12-year-old vampire girl” hook is strong enough that I really want to like Abigail, and it truthfully never loses its sense of fun, but it’s yet another nail in the coffin of my hope for Radio Silence greatness. They can craft some strong scenes and churn through some interesting ideas, even apply some clever misdirection, but they never pull it all the way together.

Let me reframe that a bit more positively: Ready or Not is a damn fun movie in a bunch of different, slightly contradictory ways. It intermittently has the light, funny tone of a horror-comedy, the gnarly violence of a slasher, the sadism of an exploitation flick, and an absolute corker of a final scene that serves as a gruesome punchline. It’s a remarkably slick and polished film, which surprises me given that Radio Silence’s last feature film, Devil’s Due, was a ratty found footage flick. (The real surprise is not just Ready or Not’s significantly more professional look and feel, but that they somehow did it on a smaller budget than Devil’s Due.)

Ready or Not takes place over the wedding day and night of Grace and her husband Alex (Mark O’Brien). Grace is a former foster kid, and Alex is a billionaire heir to a toys and games company, though the movie makes quite clear that Grace isn’t in it for the money. Post-nuptials, Alex reveals to Grace that his family has a tradition of gathering to play a game together following weddings. The new in-law must draw a card with the name of a game on it and play a round before being officially inducted into the Le Domas clan (and trust fund).

What Alex doesn’t mention is that one of the games that appears on the card — hide and seek — has a murderous bent to it. The seekers (everyone in the Le Domas family) must kill the hider (Grace). Of course, if she draws any other card — checkers or tic-tac-toe, etc. — it’s just a normal parlor game. Any guesses which card Grace draws?

The rest of the movie follows Grace trying to escape one weapon-toting billionaire after another. There’s a repeated joke (in fact one of the movie’s only real jokes) that these rich nincompoops don’t know how to use their weapons, and repeatedly inadvertently maim or kill one of the workers in the house. (Class warfare — get it?)

The cast is game: Andie MacDowell is great as the icy mother-in-law, and Adam Brody is downright fantastic as the brother-in-law who is the only one wondering whether this family tradition is maybe a bit fucked up. (I’m always down for a Seth Cohen appearance.) But the show really belongs Weaving, who makes an instant claim as a great scream queen. She’s agile and physical on screen, but not to the point that we ever question if she’s actually in danger. She’s remarkably beautiful, of course. And I can’t recall too many better feral screaming performances in any movie of recent memory than what Weaving delivers here.

Ready or Not is one of those broad satires ready to remind us that the uber-rich are greedy bastards whose very existence is dehumanizing to the rest of us. This idea was maybe a little less played out in 2019 than it is now, when it’s been the theme of a dozen or so high-profile movies since. It’s no more subtle here than any of those other films. But like The Menu, I was at least smiling most of the time.

After the setup, most of the film follows the same rhythm on loop: Grace finds herself tracked down by a Le Domas family member; Grace barely avoids death thanks to a key mistake by said Le Domas; Grace makes some maneuver to survive and escape, but at slightly greater physical harm to herself. This pattern of scenes is sometimes topped off with a little sketch of the Le Domas clan acting outrageously short-sighted and privileged the way only rich people came. And some specific iterations of Grace’s near-survival are more intense than others: there’s a particularly grisly encounter with a nail on a ladder at one point.

It’s… fine. It’s fun! You can see why it got Radio Silence the Scream gig — it flows with a steady drip of thrills and laughs. But it also feels like there’s a constant war going on underneath the surface for just how trashy, satiric, violent, spooky, and comedic to be at any given moment. And yet it may very well be Radio Silence’s best feature film through 2023 (I haven’t seen Abigail from 2024 yet). The ending is yet another bit of thematic self-sabotage (suggesting that rich people’s greedy impulses are not cruel whims but necessary self-preservation), but it is immensely funny and daring. And the set itself is quite cool: a Gothic mansion that seems to be rotting like curdled milk from the walls outward. I just kept hoping the film would take a leap that it never does.

I’m not quite sure how Radio Silence operates, and I can’t say I’m curious enough to do much digging. Calling yourselves a “collective” probably just a hip way of labeling a production company. Sure enough, they brand themselves as “Radio Silence Production” these days. The whole “collective” concept makes a bit more sense for microbudget operations where the foursome would make up the majority of the crew by themselves; and, indeed, their roots are in shoestring budget horror shorts. The group’s break into Hollywood occurred in 2012 when they produced one segment in the found footage anthology V/H/S. The film earned mediocre reviews, but it became a line of semi-regular horror anthology films, and the pool of directors from that original entry went onto significant Hollywood success, so it has endured as a curio. Adam Wingard (of the recent Godzilla-Kong movies), Ti West (of X and Pearl), David Bruckner (of The Night House), and Joe Swanberg (keeping the mumblecore spirit alive) all join Radio Silence in contributing segments to V/H/S.

Two years later, Radio Silence released their feature debut, Devil’s Due, one of only two features they’d make before landing the Scream gig, along with 2019’s Ready or Not. Devil’s Due is a found footage joint from the crest of the style’s trend. (The budget is weirdly big for the subgenre at $7 million.) It’s a lo-fi Rosemary’s Baby of sorts, the tale of a newlywed couple going through a Satanic pregnancy. The film opens with a man holding a camcorder, voyeuristically spying on some young woman getting dressed, evoking the opening scene of Halloween. Except… it turns out that we’re viewing from the perspective of the woman’s fiance, and the beautiful, barely-dressed young woman is excited to see him. Surprise!

I actually like this opening scene — misdirection turns out to be one of Radio Silence’s strengths. We see it in a few interesting scenes in the first half of Devil’s Due, but also in my favorite scene of either of the Screams that Radio Silence made: In Scream 5, an extended scene where the jump scare gets constantly postponed. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett manage to make these scare fake-outs and herky-jerks feel like a satisfying surprise rather than a cheap tease.

The opening act of Devil’s Due follows the wedding and honeymoon of Zach (Zach Gilford) and Samantha (Allison Miller). Zach has decided that he is going to be a camcorder guy (I know them well; my dad was one), pulling out the camera all the time, sticking it in people’s faces, capturing little moments of everyday life so he can remember them when he’s old and lonely. It’s a shtick that’s cute, slightly annoying, and very convenient for a found footage film. While on their honeymoon in the Dominican Republic, they get roped into attending a shady party with locals by a cab driver that ends with them blackout drunk. Some camera footage captures snippets of attendees of the party preparing some sort of ritual. How the “record” button was hit at that exact meaningful moment, and how the camera ended up back at the hotel with Zach instead of stolen and pawned, is left a mystery. That’s how these things go in movies like this.

When they get home, life is good for a bit, opening wedding presents and playing with their dog together; and then life is even better when Samantha learns that she is pregnant (the pregnancy test moment, again, helpfully caught on camera). And the start of their pregnancy is mostly good. They get baby clothes and assemble a crib and celebrate with their friends and family. There are some hints of creepiness on the fringes, but mostly it’s just two people in love, excited to bring more love into the world.

And so I started wondering what would happen if the movie never pivoted to the sinister? What if the suggestion of satanic happenings stayed mere suggestion, and this pregnancy ended with healthy and happy little family? I honestly wouldn’t have minded. I would have happily spent 90 minutes with this couple, watching them discover the joys and challenges of expectancy and early parenthood. I like Samantha and Zach. I hope the kale smoothies they made in the juicer they got at their wedding were tasty. I especially admire how Zach just dives in on being a dad, undertaking home projects and attending ultrasound appointments. You know he’d buy The Expectant Father at Barnes and Noble, and actually read it. After the baby was born, he’d take some of the middle-of-the-night shifts to lighten Samantha’s burden. I like good movie dads, and he’d be one in a happy version of this film. Maybe it would be titled Normal Baby’s Due. And no shade on Samantha, either; I’m sure she would be lovely as a mom.

My mind is wandering here, which is, I think, a reflection of how middling Devil’s Due really is. Of course, my proposed happy version is a myth; things do very much go wrong for the couple. Samantha is overcome with urges to act evil and violent. Her actions range from the silly sort of unsettling (she eats raw ground beef despite being a vegan) to actually quite creepy (a priest she crosses paths with has a stroke and starts spurting blood out of his nose in the middle of Mass). There are a few unsettling body horror moments, like when the fetus starts to violently protrude from Samantha’s round belly.

The best horror moments of the film are the ones where the cursed pregnancy serves as a metaphor for both the horrifying bodily metamorphosis of pregnancy and, more generally, the dark indignities and terror of exiting freewheeling young adulthood into chained down middle adulthood. There’s an undercurrent of realistic dread here, as if the optimism of the opening wedding and honeymoon simply can’t survive in this cruel grown-up world.

Significantly less effective — and, sadly, dominant in the final act — are the moments when Devil’s Due focuses on a satanic cult following Samantha and Zach around. Whether through a cursed insemination or some other off-screen mechanism, this cult has planted this devil baby in Samantha. They do provide good cover for how we’re able to observe Samantha and Zach as he becomes increasingly demoralized and turns on the camera less frequently: They install a bunch of hidden cameras in the house so they (and we) can see the ins and outs of this blighted gestation.

The entire ordeal is ultimately bleak and unpleasant to sit through much more than it is scary. Parts of it work, but the horror meat and potatoes content ranges from perfunctory to disappointing. It’s capped with a colossally stupid and angering penultimate scene set in a police station, followed by an unrelated, slightly less stupid final scene that’s the equivalent of that one-last-jump scare in most horror films.

This is not a dumpster fire of a film; found footage horror pretty much always works as immersive and tense when it’s executed at a baseline level, a bar which this film reaches. But it only barely reaches baseline bar, and I can’t say I feel any enthusiasm for it. It’s just replacement level in every way. Devil’s Due is certainly not a film I would expect to earn a recruitment to steward Wes Craven’s Scream franchise; but, lucky for Radio Silence, they had a film in the pipeline that would serve as such a calling card: a real buzzy horror-comedy hit much more in the Scream ethos, Ready or Not.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Scream VI proved to be a significantly more engaging and satisfying experience than its re-reboot predecessor. It’s clear that Radio Silence drew heavy inspiration from Scream 2, much in the same way that Scream (5), the first post Wes Craven entry, was an homage to the original. Like part 2, Scream VI strikes a good balance between tension and comedy throughout its runtime. But the film’s high point is on the “horror” side of the ledger rather than “comedy”: It’s a particularly scary sequence taking place on a subway ride, the masses of people a cloud of fog for Ghostface, that ranks among the better stalking sequences in the franchise’s history.

One of the film’s strengths lies in its returning cast of teenage characters, who have dubbed themselves the “core four.” Their development and chemistry are a highlight of this outing, and it’s clear that the filmmakers have put a lot of thought into fleshing out these characters and their relationships. I care about Sam, Tara, Mindy, and Chad almost as much as I ever did Sidney, Dewey, and Gale. Scream VI also brings back Hayden Panettiere from Scream 4, who was one of the best sidekicks in the franchise’s history. (No sign of Adam Brody despite my pleas.)

While it’s a net positive entry in the franchise, Scream VI is not without its problems. And it frankly doesn’t go quite far enough to justify the series ongoing existence. Like all of the other entries in the series (with the arguable exception of the original), the film runs about 15-20 minutes too long, with the result being that the final stretch loses quite a bit of the film’s narrative momentum. But the reveal of Ghostface’s identity is more intriguing and mold-breaking than part 5, which pulled an unsatisfying double-reverse fakeout.

Two other, related issues that plague Scream VI: First, the characters are making dum-dum decisions left and right. It’s the exact kind of horror movie idiocy that Scream has taunted in the past. And when the characters subsequently get stabbed, the movie lets an astonishing number of victims survive. This considerably lowers the sense stakes and danger, making it harder to take the threat of Ghostface seriously. If every main character who gets stab makes a miraculous recovery, why should I ever be scared on their behalf?

Despite these shortcomings, Scream VI is an easy watch, a perfectly decent addition to the reliable franchise, thanks in large part to its fresh setting and strong character dynamics. I would place it in the same approximate tier as Scream 2 and Scream 4, though at the bottom of that tier. It doesn’t reach the same high points as those outings, but it’s a little more consistently tense and engaging throughout its runtime.

Scream VI is an ultimately a satisfying but inconsequential slasher. It has enough connective thread to the rest of the series to satisfy Scream-heads, but brings in some fresh ideas to keep it interesting. Scream may be running out of ways to break new clever ground in its horror meta-commentary, but so long as it can maintain its punchy comic tone and solid stabby scares, I’ll keep watching.

My ranking: Scream 1 > Scream 2 > Scream 4 > Scream 6 > Scream 5 > Scream 3

But, Scream 5 (directed by the Radio Silence team of Ready or Not fame, the first in the series not directed by Wes Craven, who passed away in 2015) is not the best Scream sequel despite that coherency. In fact, I have it near the bottom of the totem pole, above only Scream 3. That’s not really that much of a diss because all of the Screams are solid entertainment, Scream 5 included. I had a good time! It’s tense and scary fun, with some enjoyable characters and performances, and a few memorable moments. A handful of yuks are thrown in for good measure.

On the other hand, I woke up the morning after watching it and had trouble recalling more than one or two distinct features about the film. My short-term memory is not as sharp as it used to be, but Scream 5 slipping from my brain is not due to faulty brain chemistry, I don’t think: For as polished and well-executed as the movie is, it lacks much reason for us to care.

Part of the problem is that the movie’s central thesis is a retread of Scream 4’s: For a movie series that’s this meta, it feels redundant to twice have a story built around the idea that this whole outing is essentially a soft reboot, i.e. a “requel,” as the movie labels itself. And Scream 4 told the joke better, with its hysterical fake-out openings and terrific villain revelation.

There are a few things that work in Five Cream’s favor. The first is that the kills are the most gruesome and creative in the series to date, a tribute to Radio Silence’s background in practical comedy violence. Most of the deaths are straightforward stabbings, but extra nasty: Blades sliding through hands, slowly entering necks, etc. It really escalates the sense the sense of doom and danger of the proceedings. The scares are well-paced, too, doled out steadily during the movie’s runtime. Put another way, Scream 5 might be the best slasher qua slasher of the series yet.

I also think the movie does right by the returning cast, David Arquette as Dewey in particular. It’s the first time in the entire series that I walked away wondering if a Scream movie should have, in fact, given us more Dewey than it did. (On the other hand, Courtney Cox’s  plastic surgery is one of the scariest things in the whole film.)

Scream 5 also features one of the tensest and best scenes in the entire franchise, notable for what it doesn’t do rather than what it does. Near the halfway point, we follow one of the teens we expect to shortly die for four full minutes without a single jump scare or flash of violence until the very end. Just watching him make lunch, get dressed, etc., constantly waiting for Ghostface, the stabby villain of the series, to appear. Trust me that four minutes, whether or not it sounds like a long time, feels about ten times longer since we’re white-knuckled waiting for a jump scare the entire time. It’s a masterful little construction of suspense.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t quite stick the landing: The murderers end up being the two most suspicious characters from the start. I think part of the idea is that it’s a sort of reverse twist: by feinting at these characters as the true identities of the murderers, we as an audience expect it not to be them, so the real surprise is that it is in fact these kids who looked suspicious in the first place! Herrings red no more! But in practice, it just comes across as the predictable, boring culprits. (Though I did enjoy the bit of commentary behind their motives; it’s a spin on toxic internet fandom taken to its violent extreme.)

As ultimately unremarkable as the movie is, it’s still a perfectly watchable and competent experience, delivering most of what I hoped for — not something to take for granted in a horror sequel coming 10 years after the previous entry with a new director for the first time. I like the teen cast well enough that I’ll happily watch Scream 6, which has already been greenlit. I just hope that one will give me a little bit more to remember the next morning than Scream 5.