“How meta can you get?” asks former reporter Gale Weathers-Riley in the new movie “Scream 4.” Well, apparently you can get so meta that the point you’re trying to make gets obscured and makes it hard to tell whether this movie is actually any good.
When Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), the heroine of the first three films, returns to her hometown of Woodsboro, so do the town’s infamous murders. Sidney reunites with Sheriff Dwight “Dewey” Riley (David Arquette) and his wife, Gale (Courtney Cox), who is now a struggling author after writing books based on Sidney’s experiences. Joining them is a batch of new teens who are just as doomed as Sidney’s friends were in the other movies.
The “Scream” movies are known for referencing the horror films before them, laying the cheese on thick and establishing the “rules.”
With “Scream 4,” the cheese remains but the rules have been changed, and now the movie is not only referencing classic slasher flicks, but also its own series predecessors.
The movie both furthers Sidney’s story and introduces a new group of teens who parallel those in the first. Sidney’s cousin Jill (Emma Roberts) is the new leading lady, Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) is the sassy best friend, and Charlie (Rory Culkin) and Robbie (Erik Knudsen) are the horror film experts.
The “new decade, new rules” theme is interesting, but it lacked the depth that would have made “Scream 4” translate to this decade better. There were only a few new rules, the main one being that the slasher has to film his kills. It would have been fun to see them play around with more new rules.
With the old cast mixing with the new, there are a lot of characters to keep up with, and few are fully developed. Even when the killer is revealed, there still seems to be no real reason for half the murders, except to keep up with the story within a bigger story. This might be asking too much of the people who just came to see people getting stabbed.
Director Wes Craven may think tons of bloody murders equals excitement, but there needed to be a little more going on to hold the audience’s interest. Despite there being so many characters, not a lot was happening other than the murders.
The murders were on par with what’s come to be expected from the “Scream” series — but maybe too on par. All of the kill scenes could have been copied and pasted from any of the previous three. The third movie came out in 2000, so with the other films in such distant memory, it was hard to remember if the killings were exactly the same or if they were just similar and unoriginal.
Of course, since this is a satire of slasher films, any of these complaints can easily be defended as being done on purpose.
It’s kind of a genius cinematic move when you think about it: Anything bad in the movie, intended or not, can be explained away by saying that was the point, that it’s all part of the greater joke. It’s a foolproof plan. It’s hard to tell what was bad on purpose and what was unintentional, and that works to the film’s advantage.
“Scream 4” is so self-referential and meta that it’s hard to tell whether it’s good or bad. It follows the model laid out for it to a T. But although the predictability kept it true to the series, it also made it a little boring.
On the upside, though, its unapologetic camp makes it fit in well with the others in the series, and the clever dialogue made for lots of laughs, which made it enjoyable enough.
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