Scream 4 Reviews (2011)

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Self-awareness in film is nothing new, even if an ironic engagement with cliche while also indulging in those cliches can result in films that are exhausting to watch. The best films of this stripe, like The Incredibles or the original Scream, set out to provide genuine entertainment first, while plopping dollops of winking references up to those in the audience who might appreciate them. Scream 4, arriving after a 11-year layoff from Scream 3, takes a bit of a different tack, and settles for being a recursive commentary on the Scream franchise itself and the events therein, rather than overtly engaging the last decade of horror trends. It’s a curious approach, especially since the latter films in the franchise seemed more like memetic delivery systems than movies qua movies. Can a franchise that has consistently been about other films now be about itself?

What’s curious about Scream 4 is how quickly it dispatches with that last decade of horror history; if you were looking for references to Saw or Hostel or any of the other slasher franchies that have popped up in the last decade (and really, how crazy is it that they made seven Saw movies since the last Scream appeared?), you’re mostly out of luck, since aside from a character’s remark about hating “all that torture porn shit,” this movie is almost entirely about Scream, to the point where it, at times, feels like more of a remake of the first film than a reboot of the franchise proper. Which is probably a good thing, as topping Scream 3’s exceedingly goofy self-awareness would’ve been a recipe for trouble. (“I hate all that self-aware post-meta shit,” the same character opines. Indeed.) 4 makes a stab at it with a fun little five-minute intro piece that feels only slightly less over-the-top as the vignettes in Last Action Hero; it mainly serves as a method of winking at the audience and inviting them to be in on the joke, but it at least manages to succeed.

Which is why the next hour and a half feel so odd: after that amusing intro, Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson settle into what is essentially just another slasher film. The nerdy high school kid makes the same comparisons to horror films as Stu and Randy did in the first film, people say “I’ll be right back,” and then comment about how that probably means they’re going to get stabbed, and so on, but generally, the middle section of the film feels even less self-aware than the first Scream did. These are characters dealing with their own history and backstories, which are tangentially impacted by the horror films that Scream has always satirized, but for the most part we’re treated to murder after murder, presented relatively straightforwardly. If you like seeing young women get brutally stabbed, then Scream 4 is the film for you.

So, here we are in Woodsboro again, with a new group of horror aficionado high schoolers to pal around with Dewey, Sidney, and Gale, all alive and relatively happy. Sidney’s return to the site of the Woodsboro murders is occasioned by the the arrival of her new book about victimhood, Out Of Darkness. And, of course, a local Ghostface imitator decides to welcome her home by threatening her family, which by now has been pruned down to just her aunt Kate (Mary McDonnell) and young cousin Jill (Emma Roberts), one of the aforementioned high school crowd. Scary phone calls start popping up, but the film isn’t quite meta enough to have anyone question why these characters don’t simply turn their phones off for a few days (let alone why Sidney has never bothered to buy a fucking gun, or a taser, or at least some mace).

It’s interesting, if a bit self-indulgent, to simply remake Scream with interchangeable characters (Roberts for Neve Campbell, Hayden Panettiere for Rose McGowan, Erik Knudson for Jamie Kennedy, etc.), while also retaining the original core three characters to observe and react to the new set of murders. It’s odd, then, that Scream 4 pulls away from the observations that could’ve been pushed from such a set of circumstances, favoring instead to simply run the bulk of the film as a straightforward slasher movie. It’s all well-done enough, if you like slasher films, and the appearance of a monologuing villain helps spice up the last bit of the movie, but there’s still a curious tinge of reservation about the bulk of the film, as if Williamson couldn’t decide how precisely to balance the meta nature of Scream versus the need to be unironically entertaining, and simply chose an uncomfortable middle ground. (That may have something to do with the rumor that Williamson was replaced with Scream 3 scribe Ehren Kruger after arguing with the producers; Williamson receives the sole script credit, for what it's worth.)