Scream 4 (2011) **/*****

When the original Scream was released in 1996 it was put out into a world that was, for the moment, done with horror movies. The first half of the decade was all but devoid of successful horror releases. Kids in the 90s watched the slashers of the late 70s and early 80s, but with a self-aware detachment. They were tacky, cheesy, formulaic, and enjoyable only when taken with a big spoonful of irony. The original Scream capitalized on this by making a tacky, cheesy, formulaic slasher film that was self-referential about the fact, and let the audience know that it was in on the joke. The victims in Scream were horror movie aficionados themselves, they knew all of the tired tropes, all of the worn out clichés, and they realized that their own experiences mirrored them. And from a storytelling perspective, it even made sense that this would be the case, as the murderer in the film was basing all of his knowledge of how to kill people on things he had seen at the movies. There you had it, a nice little exercise, a couple layers of meaning, and a fun horror movie that successfully tapped into the detached irony of the mid 90s to find an audience. It was a perfectly acceptable film that should have been enjoyed, set aside, and moved away from. But, unfortunately, it made a lot of money.

Suddenly more movies that were just as tired and cheesy as those movies from the past that Scream was making fun of started to get made, in order to capitalize on the horror success of Scream itself. And they started making money too. And then some sequels to Scream came out as well, and they made money too, even though they had little to offer other than rehashes of what the first one already did fine. The snake started to eat its own tail. And then, around the time Scream 3 came out, the final step in horror movie degradation took place. Instead of taking even the small amount of effort necessary to pump out more and more movies that looked a lot like the cheesy slashers of the 70s and 80s, filmmakers started to just straight up churn out remakes of them. And this was all started by the success of the original Scream. It was all started by a joke that people thought was funny, but then seemingly forgot was a joke. The audience’s appreciation of the slasher violence of the Scream series, at some point, stopped being ironic and started being taken at face value. And now, after a decade full of creativity barren horror movie remakes following Scream 3, we get Scream 4. I wondered if this would be a chance to go back to the roots of the series and reveal the mainstream horror genre, once again, as the joke that it largely is. Could Wes Craven and the original film’s screenwriter Kevin Williamson find a way to sharply satirize the fifteen years worth of valueless horror films that they unwittingly spawned, enough to make them go away and leave room for something more experimental and interesting? Turns out the answer is no. Scream 4 is just another stupid horror remake, disguised as a sequel.

But that’s not to say that there aren’t any pleasures to be had from watching these slasher movies. While they all have a formula, and they all seem to lack decent screenwriting, some are better than others. The original Scream, for instance, had more to offer than just being a satirical joke. It also did some of the slasher stuff legitimately well, and it was its ability to create real suspense and then horrify at the right moments that probably allowed it to be a success on such a mainstream level, and that caused a generation of people who were probably too young to “get it” like the film anyways and then move on to less intelligent fare like I Know What You Did Last Summer. Mostly what Scream had going for it was a dynamite opening scene. That establishing vignette of the girl alone in the house, the disturbing phone call, and the high stakes movie trivia game has over time became iconic, and is the Scream series’ go-to trademark. But, when you look past that opening scene, there really isn’t anything else the series has to offer. It’s one good scene that’s momentum has now been ridden into three sequels, and at this point the train is crawling into the station. Everything about Scream 4 comes off as tired and overdone. In the first film, it’s the first time that real slasher film murders had ever happened in the town of Woodsborough. It made sense that the kids in that movie might not understand the gravity of the situation, might make jokes about people getting killed, could get together for big parties while being directly threatened by a serial killer. Okay, so maybe it didn’t make sense, but it was easier to suspend your disbelief. At this point, after probably hundreds of kids have been brutally slaughtered in Woodsborough, it comes off as completely moronic and insulting that we still get kids running around unsupervised and throwing parties in the face of resumed killings. At this point you’ve really got to start asking where all the parents are and why everyone doesn’t have their children under lock and key. And to talk about those killings a bit, a large part of what gets remembered from these slasher films is the clever, gross, or over the top ways in which the kids get wholesale slaughtered by whichever bogey man you’re watching. The Scream series is kind of boring in comparison to things like Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street. Early on it established the butcher knife as its weapon of choice, and most of what you get is just very literal, straightforward slashings. But the original film had that garage door death. I think what everybody probably remembers most from that first film is the girl hanging from the elevated doggy door. Scream 4 has nothing of the sort. All we get is random stabbings and slashings, no creativity or ingenuity involved. And we get so many random stabbings throughout, that the very act of watching people be stabbed becomes numbing. In the first ten minutes alone they’ve stabbed about five girls. By the end of the movie they could have dragged my grandma out on screen and had a guy in a scream mask stab her to death, and I probably wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. Couldn’t they at least have had somebody knocked into a lawn mower or something?

Maybe you’re wondering who is receiving all of these stabbings though. I’ve gotten pretty far into ranting about the history of the series without even addressing the basics of Scream 4’s plot. What we get is a mix of a new generation of teenage victims and the return of the big three survivors of the original film, Sydney (Never Campbell), Dewey (David Arquette), and Gail (Courtney Cox). The new defacto lead is Jill (Emma Roberts), Sydney’s teenage cousin. She’s got a couple of best friends, and they all have some boyfriends, and the whole group acts as a pretty generic and exacting replacement for the cast of the first film. There’s the creepy ex, the sassy girl, the movie nerd, etc… As far as the original trio goes, Sydney has written a new book and the publicity tour has brought her back to Woodsborough, Gail is struggling to write a new book now that she is married to Dewey and living a slow motion, small town lifestyle, and Dewey has risen to the top of the police force and become the town’s sheriff. But none of that matters, because any smattering of story we get in this film is just excuse to get the characters back in this familiar setting so that they can go about replaying their standard roles. Gail gets to start snooping, Dewey gets to act clueless, and Sydney gets to somehow kick grown men who are on top of her twenty feet into the air.

When I first saw that this film was being advertised I assumed that it would be a handoff to a new generation of Scream kids so that the franchise could re-spawn and develop a couple more sequels. I envisioned the original players showing up just briefly so that the new-generation murderer could kill them off and they could pass the torch to the new kids. This doesn’t happen. This movie is about the original characters more so than it is the new kids, and that was one of my biggest problems with it. Are there any three actors on the planet that I am less interested in than Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette? Have any of these three even been in a film since the last Scream sequel ten years ago? There’s nothing that instantly comes to my mind, and with good reason, because they’re all largely terrible. Neve Campbell is probably a good enough actress, but she’s never had distinguishing enough qualities to make her a star outside of this series. And her character, Sydney Prescott, is equally as milk toast, and is only remembered because she was the generic virgin that has survived all of the films so far. The first film even explicitly told us that Sydney was a generic, boring, virgin archetype, and yet they’ve continued to use her over and over again for lord knows what reason. And Cox and Arquette I have even less nice things to say about. They are both bad actors who play one-note characters that are better suited to a Scooby-Doo cartoon than they are a feature film. And yet, they’ve been brought back over and over again to be the anchoring presences of three Scream sequels. Are there any other characters in horror film history that are this long lasting? And has anybody asked for them to be? I’ve heard nary a person describe the Scream sequels as more time spent with their favorite characters Sydney, Dewey, and Gail. Seeing these actors back in a fourth film didn’t push any nostalgia buttons for me, it just reminded me how comfortable I was with the fact that they went away.

My reaction to the new kids was less negative, and I wish that they had gotten more of the focus of the film. As is, they weren’t offered much more than the opportunity to be placeholders on the killer’s victim list. Emma Roberts’ Jill is the new Sydney, Hayden Panettiere’s Kirby is the new whatever Rose McGowen’s character was named, and Rory Culkin is the new whatever Jamie Kennedy’s character was named. This isn’t just my snarky observation, the characters come out and tell us that they’re the new versions of old characters. More on that later. So yeah, mostly the kids are just generic teenage faces. But I thought Hayden Panettiere injected a lot of personality into her character. Anthony Anderson and Adam Brody were entertaining enough as a pair of police that could have easily taken on the bulk of Arquette’s duties with nobody complaining. And Alison Brie manages to steal the movie from everyone else as Sydney’s high-strung publicist, a character that could have easily taken Gail’s place in the story, but instead is given a criminally small amount of screen time. If these characters had gotten more of the focus, and the original actors were just used as cannon fodder to get fans of the first three movies into the theater, then the franchise might have had new life breathed into it. Instead all we hear is its dying gasps.

Now, back to what I was saying about the new characters being analogues for old, and the self-aware way that they reference this. Here is where the film tried to update itself and remain relevant. While the first film deconstructed the slasher films of decades previous, Scream 4 made it its task to deconstruct the remakes of the last ten years. Except that it didn’t. The characters acknowledge that they’re living out a remake of the events of the first Scream, and they talk about the new set of rules that have been set up over the past ten years, but we never actually get good examples of these new rules. We get a throwaway line that everyone is fair game now, and a contradictory of that first statement and completely false assertion that the only people who are safe in modern horror remakes are homosexuals. I’ve sat through a lot of these remakes over the past ten years, and I can’t think of any cases where the sole survivor was gay. Probably there is one that isn’t coming to me, but to try to establish it as a new rule on par with the rules laid out in the first Scream is a stretch at best, and a lie at worst. Also, there is a bit of talk about how in a remake you have to make sure to outdo the original; that might be a novel thing to explore if it wasn’t just more repetition of what Scream 2 already told us about sequels.

The other way that the film updates itself for a new generation is to add in a webcam and some Facebook references. In the traditional Scream opening we don’t just get a killer making creepy phone calls, he’s posting on the girl’s Facebook wall as well. This leads into a bit of commentary about modern celebrity and our current culture of voyeurism; but all of the insight that Scream 4 has prepared for us is trite, surface level, and obvious. And yet the characters monologue on in endless, smarmy, self-satisfied fashion about how we are willing to broadcast our lives to the world and the dangers that can come of this behavior. It’s boring to sit through and kind of embarrassing in its pointedness. If Scream 4 was content to just be a stupid slasher movie, then clunky dialogue and endless exposition wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but when it delivers this stuff to us in such a too-cool-for-the-room manner, then you end up just wanting to punch the movie’s face. And when you factor in that this thing is at least fifteen minutes too long, the wordy lectures and constant use of the word “meta” start to look extra egregious. I don’t want to spoil too much about the ending, but I will say that there is a false climax at one point, and after it happened I could literally hear groaning as everyone in my theater, who were previously laughing and having a good time, tuned out of the film. They had seen enough already, and so had I. Looking back at the movie’s slow moments, I could probably find fifteen minutes to cut of just uselessly wordy monologues, and that’s ridiculous.

When you get right down to it, this isn’t anything more than a stupid horror movie, a cliché filled slasher film. It has nothing else to really offer, but it wants to pretend like it does by using the word “meta” and being self aware of the fact that it is just regurgitating things that have already come before. It acts as if it’s okay to lazily rely on boring retreads of things that have been successful in the past, just as long as you admit that you’re doing it. I disagree. At this point, another Scream movie needs to be more than just self-aware of its own badness to justify its existence. If Craven and company were going to go to the well one more time, then they needed to go beyond pointing out horror movie archetypes and create some innovative ways to subvert those archetypes and surprise their audience. At the end of the film’s third act, I think that they thought they did, but I would have to respectfully disagree. Copying the plot of a movie you already made fifteen years ago and then adding in one change isn’t innovative, it’s laziness. So why does a fourth Scream movie even exist? Seemingly so Wes Craven can keep telling us the same joke over and over again and take the price of another ticket out of our pockets every time. I’ll bump it a notch above one star because it’s not incompetently made and the rowdy opening night audience I saw it with enjoyed the thrills for what they were (up until the last fifteen minutes), but that’s all I can give. Recommendation to avoid.