Scream 4 (2011)

Directed by: Wes Craven

Starring: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Hayden Panettiere, Emma Roberts, Rory Culkin, Erik Knudson, Marley Shelton, with Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell

Genre: Horror / Slasher

Rated: R

It’s been a long time coming, but Scream 4 has finally hit theaters. For fans of the originals, there hadn’t even been a thought that there would be a fourth installment until it was announced last year. With the three original cast members (Campbell, Cox, and Arquette) returning to their roles, the original writer and Wes Craven holding his spot as the director of the franchise, I had high hopes for this film. It did not disappoint.

The story follows Sidney Prescott (Campbell) as she returns to Woodsboro, California. It’s her last stop on her tour for the self-help book she has written. The day she returns to Woodsboro, two girls are found brutally murdered in their home, and it’s clear that the murders have started again. The new killers are trying to “remake” the original events/ Stab (the fictionalized movie based on Sidney’s real life experiences in horror).  Now it’s up to Sidney to protect her loved ones from the killer.

I was pleasantly surprised by this film. I went into it expecting something of Scream 2 caliber (the last sequel writer Kevin Williamson and Craven collaborated on) but I think it surpassed both of the previous sequels. It still takes on genre clichés and lists new rules, but more commentary is added to this one. They poke fun at the Iphone/smartphone craze for applications by having an app for talking like Ghostface, which I thought was pretty clever. They also had characters pointing out their bad situations and saying, “If this were a movie, I’d be dead,” making the film even more self-referential than the first.  Lastly, they tackled the fact that the news media is always the last to know important updates – it will be all over the web before a journalist can print the story. This is referenced a couple times throughout the movie – and is completely relevant to today’s society, where newspapers and cable news are falling behind blogs and internet updates.

The acting was very well done. The original cast was as good as ever, fitting back into their canonized roles with ease. I was most worried about the new cast of up-and-comers. I’d only ever seen Panettiere and Culkin’s work before so I really didn’t know what to expect. The young cast did very well, which made me happy. The characters were also likable, and I actually cared what happened to them, which is something I haven’t felt since the first film. Hayden Panettiere plays Kirby, a cross between Tatum and Randy from the first film, and probably my favorite of the new girls. She’s a loyal friend and a movie nerd, mixed with a bit of a party girl. Emma Roberts was pretty good as Sidney’s cousin Jill, but sometimes her voice got a little too high pitched when she was yelling towards the end and that got a little irritating. Culkin was another Randy-like figure, a self-proclaimed geek who runs the Cinema Club at Woodsboro High with his friend Robbie (Knudson). Robbie, another self-proclaimed nerd, walks around school filming everything for his live blog posts on the internet. Lastly we have Trevor and Olivia – the least likable characters in the film, but still well-acted for the little screen-time they had.  They probably could have been developed a little more, but they were fairly secondary characters to the rest.

The writing is great – on par with the original film. The dialogue was fitting to each of the characters. Ghostface’s dialogue during the phone sequences was a bit more brutal than any of the previous films, but it worked. Also, there were a lot of nice twists within the film, which I really cannot discuss without spoiling the viewing experience. I didn’t see many of them coming which was a nice change as normally I can predict what is going to happen quite easily in horror films. The humor is more pronounced than the first two films, but much less obvious than in part three, which was also nice. The audience was given a decent mix of horror and humor without either one overtaking the other.

The gore is good old-fashioned 90s-style gore. There was no CGI, just prosthetic work and lots of fake blood. It is a little more intense than any of the previous films – there is a scene were a victim’s intestines are lying on the floor next to the body. Graphic, but awesome. Still, after what that victim went through, it really wasn’t surprising. All the gore matched the severity of the deaths. That was a great change of pace since most modern horror flicks go overboard with it.  

I will say that I should not have read the Entertainment Weekly article on this before watching it. It got my hopes up for the beginning, saying it’s the scariest first kill sequence since the first film. It wasn’t. I didn’t know these characters enough to care what happened to them. There was a lot of build up, and while the kill was still good, it in no way matches up to the iconic opening scene in the original. If I hadn’t read that, I probably would be less disappointed in this scene, so that bothers me a bit.

Two other things I liked about this movie: 1.Kristen Bell and Anna Paquin’s cameo scene and 2. The cop being named Anthony Perkins (the actor who played Norman Bates in the original Psycho.) I found Anna and Kristen’s sequence shocking and funny. I also just love little references made in the script to previous horror classics. It shows the writer is still first and foremost a horror fan.

Overall: A worthy sequel to a long dormant series. Horror and comedy were blended successfully without either one being more prominent than the other. The new characters were likable, the acting good, and the gore CGI free. Definitely worth a check if you’re a fan of the original trilogy.

7/10

Last Word: “You’re forgetting one rule about remakes … Don’t FUCK with the original!” – Sydney Prescott