Directed by Wes Craven
Written by Kevin Williamson
Starring Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courtney Cox, Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere, Shenae Grimes
I guess it’s time to write a Scream 4 review. Oh! I'm sorry, I mean, "Scre4m."
Now, in this review I am going to tell you, literally, everything that happens in the film. Except who the killer is. Because you’ve SEEN everything else in the movie before.
Scream 4 starts out with our beloved Sidney (Neve Campbell) being a successful 32-year-old writer returning to her small hometown of Woodsboro on a book-signing tour. Sidney has finally recovered from the last film, in which she was, for a third time, terrorized by an evil murderer wearing the ‘ghost-face’ mask, as the urban kids have taken to calling it, I hear. Is she nervous? Nah! She’s not a victim anymore. She’s learned to take care of herself and she’s just going to deal with the bad memories. Her perky PR book tour consultant assures her it’s great publicity to take the book to her hometown (she’s practically a celebrity there!) and Sidney agrees. It’s also a fucking reunion! Dewey (David Arquette) is now the sheriff, and he’s married to Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) and they’ve settled down. Everyone else Sidney knew is dead, pretty much, so it’s just a reunion between them.
Wouldn’t you know it, though? There’s a goddamn body found in Sidney’s trunk! Is she crazy and murdered someone? OR maybe the killer is back? We know for sure when teenagers around town start getting creepy phone calls from what sounds like someone making fun of the voice in the original films. Sherriff Dewey won’t let Sidney, or anyone else leave town, and the hunt for the killer begins.
When you see this film, you will immediately notice something weird about Courtney Cox's face. She did weird stuff to it.
Now, the biggest question you’ll be asking at this point in the movie is, “why?” “why would someone start killing people for no reason just because Sidney came back to town?”, “why isn’t this movie good like I wanted it to be?”, and “why did they make this, when the script really is just blech?” If you can’t think of a good reason why someone would just up and randomly start killing people again when Sidney comes back to town, don’t feel shitty. Neither could Wes Craven or writer Kevin Williamson. They found a way to get Sidney back home, but never really had a bright idea about WHY killings happen again. And they certainly couldn’t figure out a good person to be the murderer. They play some silly games with us, Craven and Williamson, by throwing us a few fun red herrings (is it the creepy, hot deputy who remembers Sidney from high school? Is it Sidney herself?) but that’s all – just silly games. When they try to get the story rolling along we find ourselves trapped with a crowd of brand-new high school-age characters we’ve never met before, and their vapid, boring personas. Sidney, Gale, and Dewey are periphery characters who just happen along; everything is happening to the local teens, and the local teens are bunch of asswipes I don’t mind seeing dead.
Hayden Panatierre's character is actually interesting. Rory Culkin's, however, is not.
Why Williamson and Craven decided to focus on them instead of our beloved mainstays I’ll never figure out, but the result is that the movie isn’t very powerful and doesn’t really feel like a new chapter in Sidney’s life. Instead, her cousin (played by the really boring and bad actress Emma Roberts) and her way-more charismatic friend (Hayden Panatierre) and their 26-year-old high school porn star-looking friend (Some Actress) go to a party, get stabbed at, go to a screening of their favorite horror movies, get stabbed at, and then hang out in pink bedrooms and get phone calls and get stabbed at. Sidney even remarks to her young cousin at one point in the film, “You remind me of me at your age” which is just silly, because her cousin is a vapid bratty baby of the douche variety and Sidney was a really relatable character we gave a shit about in 1996.
Wow. What great passion shows on her face when she's acting.
This story feels rushed and corrupted by executives who wanted it to appeal to a younger generation, who think Emma Roberts is a star, but what’s really terrible about it is the outdated feeling to the horror movie metaphors that have become so part and parcel to the Scream self-aware, self-referential franchise. Because the killer now videotapes all the murders (though with no apparent intention to upload them to the Interweb, or to actually show the movies) the story is continually referred to as “2.0” by the young nerdy horror film fan in high school. If that reminds you of 2001, it’s because Wes Craven is an old man who apparently doesn’t understand that in 2001 bad movies like Fear.com were already using the 2.0/film it/Internet metaphor, and it sucked then. Ten years later it finally strikes Craven that you can “digitally do stuff with internets and it’s… technology and meta”. Craven tosses the word ‘meta’ around, even having his characters not understand what it means. We don’t understand what he means by “meta”. HE doesn’t understand what he means by “meta”. No one gives a shit. It isn’t “meta”. It’s a really unmoving new chapter in the storyline; the Halloween 4 of the series, if you will.
A good part!
Like George Romero and his really badly executed Diary of the Dead, Craven has just told his entire audience and fan base that he really doesn’t understand technology, the Internet, pop culture, YouTube, social networking, or any of that stuff the kids are doing these days. He moves at a different pace than viral videos do; much slower, and he doesn’t realize that all of his great updated ideas for Scream 4 are already yesterday’s plotlines. We don’t get any of the resolutions we should get for characters we’ve followed this long, which disappoints tremendously.
I particularly hate when characters reveal themselves as the killer and then immediately proceed from ‘normal’ to ‘craazzzzy’ in one second flat. There’s no transition period. For some reason actors and directors and writers seem to think that a sociopathic murderer would pretend to be sweet and normal their entire life and then all of a sudden reveal a completely psychotic personality that had been hidden for years. It never works, and it’s always embarrassing. It’s embarrassing here. Scream 4 does have one good line of horror film advice: “Don’t fuck with the original,” which Craven should have heeded.
Possibly watching her husband, Arquette, make a drunken spectacle of himself?
Oh, and I don’t think it could be humanly possible for me to like Emma Roberts less as an actress. She’s terribly uncomfortable in the entire movie and exudes a coldness that's really off-putting. Her co-teenagers are far more charismatic, and she’s just a bad actress. But I guess she’s Auntie Julia’s Niece, and we’re just gearing up to our new inherited monetary class system in the United States, so here’s to manufactured stardom and entitled children of famous people!
Some teenager in the movie. I don'ty know, they all look the same to me.
Rating: (2 out of 5):
You know, I thought the first flick was a clever little smartass movie, but its very premise kinda makes all the others irrelevant. It essentially mocks itself. The filmmakers should've thought of that and quit while they were ahead, rather than go back to the well with dollar signs in their eyes — I guess it's really hard to see the right path when those things are blinding you.
A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it's not open.