Scream 4 review

by Luke Jones

The Phantom Menace. Thunderball. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Reaching a fourth installment is an achievement few movie franchises manage, and even less manage successfully. Pirates of the Caribbean has a four-quel on the way next month but first out the gate is Scream 4, eleven years after Scream 3 seemed to cut the jugular of post-modern horror films.

Pleasingly Scream 4 chooses to continue the story of Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), original survivor of the first three films, rather than rebooting / remaking the first Scream. Returning to Woodsboro, town of the original murders, Sidney soon finds that her presence has prompted a fresh wave of teenage genocide as a cast of new and old faces find themselves chased by Ghostface.

The first movies were a balance of comedy and horror that breathed new life into the slasher flick made popular by classics such as Psycho and Halloween. With over a decade of ‘new’ horror movies to satirise, Scream 4 targets the recent trend for remakes and reboots that has seen virtually every horror movie of the seventies updated for modern audiences. Random is the new buzz-word as horror directors strive to pull the rug from savvy movie-goers, regardless of logic, and at times it is difficult to decide whether Scream 4 is sending up the cliches or succumbing to them itself.

The Facebook generation also get their dues, with virtually every character attached to their fruit-based smartphone at one point or another. Mobile phones continue to be the bane of modern thriller writers though, and it seems that the inhabitants of Woodsboro are either very forgetful or rich enough not to care given how many times they misplace their phones.

Yet in spite of it’s new focus Scream 4 is still a movie about teenagers being stabbed, and returning writer / director combo Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven are moderately successful at keeping the kills engaging. There’s still something viscerally satisfying about Ghostface, and his (or her) cartoonishly gory knifings. The scares still come from jump shocks rather than any genuine sense of tension, but the Scream series has always been more about roller-coaster style fun than psychological horror. Despite name-checking Saw early on there are no grandiose torture porn style deaths, which helps to keep the kills fun but also slightly toothless.

Also returning are Courtney Cox as now-retired journalist Gale Weathers and David Arquette, who provides goofy charm as her husband Sheriff Dewey Riley. Sadly it seems that their real life relationship troubles (the real-life couple separated but are now said to be working on their marriage) bled into the shooting of Scream 4 as their on-screen chemistry seems awkward and some lines fall flat, especially on the part of Cox.

Still they are only three returning characters in a film that also brings in a new generation to be terrorised. It seems that Wes Craven has been watching a lot of TV in recent years, as actors from Heroes, the O.C. and Battlestar Galactica appear in the form of Hayden Panettiere, Adam Brody and Marcy McDonnell. Leading the pack though is Emma Roberts as Sidney’s cousin Jill Roberts, the closest thing the film has to a new protagonist, and there are two new film geeks played by Rory Culkin and Erik Knudsen to fill the gap left after the killing of Randy in Scream 2. All of them do fine without being exceptional, but there is never a feeling that any of them are more than cannon fodder. To describe their fates would spoil the plot, but the eventual reveal of the killer is hardly surprising despite a lack of clues throughout the film.

It’s a problem that the film never manages to correct, that even from the start there is the feeling that this has all been done before. Satirising the remake trend may be the logical choice in updating the series, but as the remakes had little new to say so too it follows that Scream 4 feels redundant. Recent years have produced some excellent horror in varying forms, such as Paranormal Activity, Eden Lake and Drag Me To Hell, that use classic horror tropes but manage to update them and make them feel relevant.

Scream 4, then, manages to right some of the wrongs of no. 3 without really providing enough new material to rise to the heights of 1 and 2. Already before release there has been talk of this new movie being a springboard for a further two movies, but on the basis of this appearance it may be time to let sleeping serial killers lie.