At its core, Kevin Williamson’s Scream 7 is a film haunted by ghosts of the past, both literal and figurative. In addition to its utter nostalgic obsession with the original film’s 30-year legacy, the sheer controversy behind its troubled production could have made for its own horror flick—with the politically-charged departures of stars Mellissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, and multiple directors forcing a complete creative overhaul. With so much of the original vision jettisoned, it’s hard to imagine Williamson’s film manifesting as anything other than a slight and trite cash grab. Yet, despite some glaring blemishes, Scream 7 rises out of the ashes as something unexpectedly fun.

As in its aggressively winking but absorbing opening sequence, which sees horror fans take part in a doomed escape room experience of the first film’s events, Scream 7 sets the weight of the original and its tumultuous creative retooling ablaze. The result is an experience that boasts some of the series’ blandest choices, as well as its most riotously gory and intense—a slasher that holds its franchise at knifepoint, for better and for worse.

After sitting out the sixth entry due to a pay dispute, Neve Campbell returns as an older, grizzled and paranoid Sidney Prescott, who avoids dredging up her violent past, much to the chagrin of her daughter, Tatum (Isabel May), who is named after her mother’s best friend and victim of the original Ghostface killers. It’s a grave legacy that weighs on Tatum, especially in the face of her mother’s interminable silence. Their growing disconnect comes to a head when a new killer surfaces and targets Tatum’s friends. As the body count grows, Sidney and Tatum are not only forced to reconcile but use their connection to each other and their dark pasts to fend off a final, fatal stab.

As the mother-daughter dynamic comes into focus, Scream 7 attempts to grapple with generational and inherited trauma, but despite rare moments that toy with authenticity, it almost completely falls flat. It’s a feeling that is compounded by an insistence to shoehorn series staples like Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) and Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) before completely abandoning them. At times, Williamson’s film reeks of desperation, threatening to stab the franchise to death to elicit one final, uninspired gasp.

Yet it’s a miracle that its slasher sequences contend with some of the series’ best offerings. Cheeky, intense, and defiantly gory, Williamson stages a bevy of deeply cathartic, campy set pieces that are as wince-inducing as they are raucously hilarious. From a beer tap impaling, to a theatre actor rendered into a disembowelled marionette, to a pulverizing volley of bullets, Scream 7 retains a direct, cosmic line to the 1996 original, tapping into its meta, visceral thrills one slice at a time.

As its final moments push the limits of belief and logic, even for a horror franchise known for its far-fetched storylines, Scream 7 wields the blade with enough flair to enamour even the most checked-out fans. Though it may be “a ridiculous retcon for a franchise,” as one character slyly mentions, it’s hard to feel too bad when its shortcomings are half the charm.

Scream 7 releases Feb 27th.