Scream 4 movie trailer

Scream 4

If there was ever a horror film that made fans of the genre feel old, it's Scream 4. Wes Craven, himself an auteur whose glory days are far behind him, rejoins screenwriter Kevin Williamson to resuscitate the film series that gave both of them their last big screen hit. The franchise continues to follow the exploits of Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and the masked killer who, in typical genre form, refuses to die. Derivative, uninspired and painfully unconfident about its ability to scare audiences without the help of a phalanx of foley artists, Scream 4 seems unlikely to draw in older fans of the original trilogy, but should do well with teenage audiences, and should subsequently enjoy a healthy run on home video.

Ten years after the events of Scream 3, Sidney Prescott returns to her hometown of Woodsboro, California, to promote the self-help book she wrote to come to terms with her experiences fending off the Ghostface killer. To unfortunately commemorate her arrival, however, two local teens fall prey to a Ghostface-style slasher, plunging Woodsboro into another murder mystery, this time with Sidney herself as a potential suspect. In the meantime, reporter-turned-novelist Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) struggles to follow up the success of Stab, her best-selling account of the original murders, and thrills at the prospect of a new story, because her husband Dewey (David Arquette), now chief of police, can get her exclusive access to evidence. Simultaneously, Sidney's niece Jill (Emma Roberts) and her friends, including her ex-boyfriend Trevor (Nico Tortorella) and closeted horror geek Kirby (Hayden Panettiere), try to piece together clues about the mystery while also evading Ghostface's blade.

Predictably, her teen counterparts dismiss the murders and instead celebrate the anniversary of the Woodsboro killing with a marathon screening of the Stab films, which were loosely based on Sidney's experiences. Struggling to maintain control of her life as the killer decimates the people she loves, Sidney rallies for one last showdown with Ghostface in order to protect her family and friends, and hopefully put her past behind her for good.

In the pantheon of screenwriters who became successful because of Quentin Tarantino's self-conscious brand of post-modernism, Kevin Williamson is the most transparent, and least poetic: there's not an idea he can't overshadow with dialogue acknowledging how good or bad it is. Even the film's opening, a brilliant bit of metatextual fun that takes us through a funhouse ride of horror realities before it arrives at the "actual" story, undermines its own effectiveness by forcing the characters to talk endlessly about horror clichés and movie conventions. By the time you get to Sidney's story, you barely care, and Williamson spends so much time constructing frameworks of references and influences that nothing in it seems unexpected, much less original.

Craven's ability to render heart-stopping sequences is either completely gone or on vacation; there's not a single scene in Scream 4 that remotely approaches the suspense he mines in the deservedly iconic opening of the first Scream, and the kills themselves are mostly uninspired stabbings, augmented by extremely loud stabs (no pun intended) from the score. Early reports suggested the film would take on horror films from the last decade, which it does in disappointing measure: it mentions torture porn and J-horror in passing but never interjects them into Ghostface's usually-limitless imagination. Although one character is eventually tortured, the scene plays more like a reference to the opening of the original Scream than any of the Saw films, and the remainder of the deaths are scarcely frightening enough (much less gory enough) to be memorable.

If there's a bright spot in the film, it's in the performances, in particular Roberts as Jill and Panettiere as Kirby; while the script doesn't give the audience enough credit to give them genuine intelligence, the two actresses maximize the potential of their characters and make them compelling within the film's collection of victims. But the bottom line is that in spite of these criticisms, the film should still do sizable box office, precisely because its target audience is either unfamiliar with or uninterested in the actual execution of its ideas, and will thrill eagerly at the prospect of clockwork jump scares and a set-up that defines the difference between clever and smart. But even if you absolutely love the original trilogy, Scream 4 is irrefutable confirmation that they just don't make them like they used to.

Distributor: Dimension Films
Cast: Neve Campbell, Emma Roberts, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Hayden Panettiere and Alison Brie
Director: Wes Craven
Screenwriter: Kevin Williamson
Producers: Wes Craven, Carly Feingold & Iya Labunka
Genre: Horror
Rating: R for strong bloody violence, language and some teen drinking.
Running Time: 103 min.
Release date: April 15, 2011