(Long Island, N.Y.) As a film critic, I occasionally get the privilege of actually getting to write my opinion of some truly great movies…but mostly, I have to wade through a lot of crap. Now, don’t get me wrong, ripping a bad movie a new one via pounding out a few paragraphs on my keyboard can be a lot of fun, but in the case of Scream 4, the new installment in Wes Craven’s horror franchise that nobody asked to be revived (10 blissful years have passed since Scream 3), it was more work than pleasure.
Craven (the now past-his-prime creator of A Nightmare on Elm Street) started the once-successful series back in 1996 as a parody of horror movie standards and clichés, but after three sequels Scream has simply become that which it once openly mocked. Good horror movies are already scarce these days…why dig up old bad ones and subject us to them as well?
You see, the whole gist of the Scream movies is that the characters are aware of the so-called “rules” of standard horror movies and they do their best to avoid doing the stupid things that stupid people do in horror movies that always end up getting them killed. Of course, this just meant that they’d come up with all-new stupid ways of dying instead. The first Scream handled this with some degree of success, which unfortunately led to a glut of cheesy tongue-in-cheek horror flicks in the 90’s that were a far cry from the (some would say) real horror flicks of the 70’s and 80’s. I, for one, was glad when that trend dried up and blew away.
Anyway, Scream 4 (or “SCRE4M” as the super-lame marketing types write it) continues the story of Ghostface, a masked killer whose identity changes with each installment. Series mainstay Neve Campbell returns as Sidney, the one victim that keeps surviving each movie. By this installment Sidney’s penned a tell-all book about her experiences with the Ghostface killers, and when she returns to her hometown (and scene of the previous killings) of Woodsboro to promote it…well, you’re all a smart lot, you guess what happens. Yup, someone else adopts the Ghostface identity and starts whacking numbskull teens, making Sidney a suspect in the process.
What follows is a fairly lame film that treads familiar waters, but after four entries, simply regurgitating horror movie clichés with a wink and a nod isn’t nearly as cleaver as it used to be. Instead, it just makes Scream into what it set out to make fun of to begin with; a parody of itself, so to speak. The problem, however, is that the filmmakers still think they’re being all “hip” and “cool” with the kids when Scream is now just viewed as a dated relic of the 90’s.
The other two returning actors from the series, David Arquette and Courteney Cox, add next to nothing to the proceedings, and the new gaggle of teenaged chowder-heads…um, excuse me, “actors” (haha)…are just there to line up
for the chopping block as random, faceless victims to Ghostface, a cinema serial killer not even fit to polish
Jason Voorhees’ machete. The film’s over-reliance on horror movie conventions, base, unfunny humor, a pretty mindless “whodunit” plot, and about 20 minutes or so that
should have ended up on the cutting room floor (in other words, this movie’s too long) all add up to you putting your cash back into your wallet and spending it elsewhere on something more worthwhile…say, toe clippers, or a hairnet. Perhaps a toilet paper cozy?
Still, I can’t bring myself to totally, 100% hate Scream 4, and there’s a dumb reason for that: in our era of endless reboots and remakes, this is one series that actually revived itself with an honest-to-goodness sequel. That’s amazing. Granted, it’s a rotten sequel that no one wanted, but not starting over from scratch is almost refreshing nowadays. That said, I hope Wes Craven waits another ten years before trying the next sequel.
So, in closing, if you just so happen to have a horror movie itch that needs scratching,
go out and support James Wan’s excellent Insidious instead of Scream 4. Trust me on this…your pal Chris wants you to have an entertaining movie viewing experience, not a physically painful one. It’s my job, after all.
