meh. I used to hate that word. I've seen it used in more reviews and movie talkbacks than I can count. To be able to sum up another's creative efforts with one wholly indifferent word reeked of pomposity. I hated it. Yet, as I walked out of the theater after seeing Scream 4 I used this word. Sure it might have just been part of an inner monologue caught between masturbatory fantasies of the 19 Year old sitting in the aisle in front of me with absolutely no regard to the visibility of her thong (thank you Victoria's Secret. You like me, you really like me) and the thought of another tub of coronary inducing buttered kernels, but it was there. It was also exactly what I thought of Scream 4.
Pandering to the teen crowd doesn't just annoy me... It downright infuriates me. Fuck your demographics and weekend returns. Horror movies are made to get teens to SNEAK INTO THEM. Let's let R.L. Stine and Christopher
Pike start their own franchises and bring back the hard R horror film. Scream 4 does little to support my cause. Although the film does support an R rating, it barely slides under the door with it. The movie itself feels so very PG-13 that It even carries all of the watered down stamps of most of it's contemporaries.
I was a fan of the Scream franchise. A series of films that still managed to be fun despite of their own self awareness, Wes Craven managed to give us a new horror icon set in a universe where Wes Craven could easily play himself and it would be par for the course. The films, flawed as the later chapters might have been, painted a fairly pretty mosaic of a new horror generation, one that knew "the rules" and had fun with them without sacrificing the suspense or the actual threat of the film's who-done-it man in the mask. This raised the bar for the witty, thinking man's horror film. Scream 4 tries to limbo under the bar only to land flat on it's back, wheezing, feeling it's age.
The biggest problem with Scream 4 lies in it's reluctance to choose any definitive identity. the word "reboot" is thrown around so often that we are led to believe that that is the angle the film is vying for, BUT reboot is a far cry when the main cast returns, if only to serve as an anchor to keep the story from delivering nothing more than another cookie cutter teen slasher film. Which is exactly what we are dished up. Campbell's Sydney returns to spit in the face of our villain, but we are left with such a facsimile of the original character that it barely offers a return to the feel of the original. If Williamson's script does anything, it's devalue the original core characters to the point where you're practical rooting for their mercy killing by the third act. More of a deffamation than reboot, Scream 4 lingers on reboot and then flirts with homage, but the heart just isn't there. The result is a film that shouts "in with the old, out with the new, Yet is so tied to its conventions that it flounders in it's own indecision. In the end it feels like a movie that is so desperate to capture a new younger market that it actually pretends to hate the very older characters that could have saved it.
Arquette and (Cox) Arquette are here, but the chemistry apparently died along with their marriage as there is simply not enough for them to do but weakly parody their characters. The younger characters are so uninteresting that we simply don't care what the hell they do at all. The first Scream accomplished something very unique by putting believable characters in a scenario that they themselves acknowledged was "right outta a horror movie". Sce4m (ugh) disregard characters all together in favor of occasionally winking at the audience and ribbing them while saying "hey, you get it... Cuz we still get it, right? Ummm... No.
Was it good to see Sydney, Dewey and Gail Weathers back on the big screen... Of course, it was. I just think they deserved better.
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