By Daniel Rutledge
The latest Scream film screams one terrifying question – what the hell was going on in the 90s?
This franchise was the biggest thing to happen in horror during that dark decade and Scream 4 shows just how drastically the genre has improved since the turn of the millennium.
The opening kills are some of the best in the film, but writer/director Wes Craven does a movie-inside-the-movie trick about five times in as many minutes, removing any tension the violence and iconic gruff-voice phone calls could have created.
The rest of the film sees three of the original trilogy’s main stars – Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette – caught up in a series of brutal murders by a new killer dressed in the Ghostface outfit, leading to a tediously drawn out finale.
The self-referential movie-inside-the-movie gags grow from silly to ridiculous to farcical.
“How meta can you get!” exclaims a character at one point. They might as well have just winked at the camera and yelled at the audience “Wes Craven is, like, soooo totally clever dude!”
Dotted through the film are a few laughs, thrills and nice bits of special effects work, but far less than what a fan can generally expect from a horror movie.
Also, in case you’re wondering, even though the film is R-rated and in the trailer has a character tease “fingers crossed for some nudity”, it fails to deliver on that front too.
Of the four Scream movies released, by far the best section of any is the opening scene in the first. Those ten minutes or so provide much more satisfaction than the entirety of this fourth, and hopefully last, entry in the series.
Two stars.
3 News
Scream 4
:: Director: Wes Craven
:: Starring: Courteney Cox, Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere, Adam Brody, Rory Culkin, Mary McDonnell
:: Running Time: 112 mins
:: Rating: R16 - contains violence, offensive language & horror
:: Release Date: April 14, 2011
:: Trailer: Watch here
