‘Scream 7’ review: It may be time to ghost Ghostface once and for all.

For three decades, the meta-horror franchise “Scream” has outmaneuvered its fandom with so many convoluted murder motives that the only shocker left would be a straightforward, sincere slasher. Pity it now goes for one more triple lutz that leaves the series limping.

It pains me to say as much, since “Scream 7” is the first one directed by Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter of the original 1996 “Scream,” which wielded wit, savvy and misdirection to skewer tropes that had made the genre predictable. You could argue that horror maestro Wes Craven, who kicked things off, unleashed the villainous Ghostface to take down an earlier monster from his filmography, the slicing-and-dicing Freddy Krueger, who by then had rampaged through eight movies, fewer than half of which were any good. Now that Ghostface has become the face of lame and derivative sequels, who’s going to kill him?

There’s no need to recap the last six entries. Let’s pare the history down to the basics. Longtime survivor Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) has moved away from her hometown of Woodsboro to live a low-key existence as a coffee-shop owner in a hamlet. Having evaded 12 homicidal masked madmen, madwomen, mad-cousins and mad-siblings, Sidney is now a married mother of three who prefers the last name Evans. Her cop husband, Mark (Joel McHale), is doting and funny. Her 17-year-old daughter, Tatum (Isabel May), is surly. Her two younger kids are stashed away at their grandmother’s house, presumably for “Screams” 8 and 9.

Campbell has been in every “Scream” installment except the most recent one released in 2023, which was then trying to reboot the series with a pair of sisters played by Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega. (Those rising actors left the series for reasons that, if this installment under-performs, may keep its executives awake at night.) You’ll frequently hear Sidney apologize for not being in New York. In a film this self-referential, that’s not just her character noting her off-screen absence. It’s the script, written by Williamson and Guy Busick (“Ready or Not”), embracing the awkwardness that Campbell publicly acknowledged she said no to starring in that film because she felt she would be underpaid.

Campbell’s own scary threat worked. Now she’s back to anchor a plotline about how trauma-scarred Sidney is perhaps too overprotective of her teen, blanching when Tatum’s boyfriend Ben (Sam Rechner) sneaks in through her bedroom window, or when her daughter borrows a blazer that young Sidney happened to be wearing back in the ‘90s on the night a lunatic held a gun to her neck. Meanwhile, Tatum is irritated that she’s been raised to feel weak and she has a point: Her mom did name her after a deceased high school friend, a blond played by Rose McGowan, who died dangling from a garage-door window.

The opening carnage is pretty good. A tourist couple (Jimmy Tatro and Michelle Randolph) has booked an overnight stay at the inaugural crime scene, now a tacky, themed rental that celebrates where each victim got murdered with a shiny plastic bloodstain. The guy is a selfie-taking superfan who answers Ghostface’s traditional phone call with an excited “Hello!” The girl has less to do, but like all the women in this entry, she puts up a respectable fight. Her death feels a little unfair, but it’s not as cruel as the next one: a victim who gets disemboweled while swinging from the ceiling as helplessly as a piñata.

I will continue to give the franchise credit for great casting. The newer actors — Mckenna Grace, Asa Germann, Celeste O’Connor — seize their chance to make an impression (hey, it took Mikey Madison just three years to go from “Scream V” to an Oscar), while old faces pop up that you’re glad to see.

The only non-spoiler cameo is Courteney Cox’s reporter Gale Weathers, an antagonist-turned-mascot who goads Sidney into admitting that their relationship is “complicated but enduring.” It’s nice to see them together, even if Campbell and Cox have always played their characters as foils on two different wavelengths. Campbell’s Sidney is earthy and genuine; Cox’s Gale is a comic rascal who here arrives with two siblings from the last film, Chad and Mindy (the impish Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown), aspiring journalists who have latched onto her like remora.

As ever, the side characters try to look suspicious until one (or more) of them is declared the killer, a gotcha that feels as arbitrary as roulette. The script burns so much energy trying to come up with a surprise that it suffers from brain drain. Unlike a proper mystery, the audience never has the footing to hunt for clues. When Ghostface dismisses Gale as “an old irrelevant hag,” there’s no way of telling if that Gen Z dis is a hint, a feint or a mistake. Even after making it to the climax, I still don’t know (and I suspect a rewatch won’t make a difference).

That anything-goes randomness infects the entire film. One scene makes a fuss about Tatum playing a dog in the school musical. Forget about it — it doesn’t matter. Another reveals that Sidney has security cameras linked to her phone, yet she forgets about them to go barging into her dark house.

From abandoned panic rooms to flubbed Ghostface executions, the characters make so many dumb choices that eventually we’re convinced that Williamson is frustrating us by design. Maybe in the boldest meta twist of all, the inventor of “Scream” wants to kill it off himself.