“Who gives a f**k about movies?”

Two years after the most recent Ghostface killing spree in Woodsboro, Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barera) and her sister Tara (Jenna Ortega) have relocated to New York with their friends Mindy and Chad. Leaving Woodsboro would seem to be the best way to bury the memories of that trauma – and for Sam to silence a certain voice inside her head. But a theory has erupted on the internet, namely that Sam herself was Ghostface two years ago…

And then bodies are found, with Ghostface masks left beside them. The first has the DNA of the most recent Woodsboro killers. The second has the DNA from the previous rampage. Things seem to be counting down to something – and Sam and Tara seem to be the centre of a plan being carried out by a very different Ghostface…

I really don’t like horror movies. Never watch them, they scare the pants off me. But the Scream movies aren’t horror movies. They’re Scooby-Doo episodes for grown-ups, with decent jump scares, a fair bit more blood and some knowing winks to the audience about the nature of such films. Yes, one or two of them aren’t as strong as the rest – I’m looking at you, Screams 2 and 3 – but they’re all jolly good wholesome fun. Well, maybe not wholesome. And maybe not jolly.

This is the first film to move away from Sidney Prescott (allegedly because they weren’t willing to pay Nev Campbell enough money) but to be honest, the last film was clearly setting up Sam and Tara as the new lead characters. Gale Weathers is in this one, but her role is really only an extended cameo. There’s one good sequence with Courtney Cox, but you feel the script was written in such a way that if Cox had chosen not to turn up, it could still have basically been the same film. So you wonder where Sid would have fitted in. I suppose it’s possible that Sid would have taken the role in the plot that Hayden Panettiere’s Kirby (returning from Scream 4) assumes.

But is it any good? Oh, yes. The in-jokes are good – my favourite being them dropping the fan-theory that Stu survived the first movie – the cast is first-rate. Melissa Barera is excellent, really quite unnerving at times, and Jenna Ortega gets a lot more to do here than in the last film. The opening sequence has a great twist in it – I won’t spoil it, but Ghostface does the last thing you’d expect him to do – and the overall whats-going-on is actually foreshadowed and misdirected pretty well (for this sort of thing), in more than one way.

So all in all, if you liked Scream V, well, this is better. That was a good film, but underpinned a bit by the gun-toting/quipping Sid/Gail double act in the second half. This is a straight-up thrill ride, one of the best in the series. Let’s hope the Core Four (watch the film) are back for more soon!