Scream 4

admin | April 18, 2011 | Comments (1)

DIR: Wes Craven • WRI: Kevin Williamson • PRO: Wes Craven, Iya Labunka• DOP: Peter Deming • ED: Peter McNulty • DES: Adam Stockhausen • Cast: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette

Way back in 1996, the original Scream revitalized the horror genre with its (then) original mix of self-referential humour and gory guessing games. A year later, Scream 2 arrived to poke fun at sequels, and then in 2000, Scream 3 ended the trilogy on a kind of bum note of movie-within-a-movie messiness. Now over a decade later, and original director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson have a new back catalogue of horror clichés to poke fun at and a new hot, hip cast to tear to shreds.

Original scream queen Sidney (Neve Campbell) is back in her horror hometown Woodsboro to promote her new self-help book, and while there she meets the other survivors of the series: bickering married couple David Arquette and Courtney Cox (who are real-life divorcees, adding some spiciness to their scenes). But wouldn’t you know it, Ghostface is out hacking people up again, and seems to be aiming for Sidney’s niece, Jill (Emma Roberts), and it’s up to Sidney and her old pals to find out who this new Ghostface is and stop them… unless one of them is Ghostface.

Half of the fun of the Scream movies is that it’s basically a really violent version of Murder, She Wrote. The number of red herrings and fake suspects on screen is staggering, and doing a mental checklist of who it couldn’t possibly be (or could it?) is always enjoyable. Mix in with this Williamsons’s ability to mix cutting-edge references with a cleverly twisting plot, and you’ve got the makings of a great franchise entry.

But it’s far from perfect; the new hot, hip cast (headed by Roberts, along with Hayden Panettiere, Rory Culkin, Alison Brie, Adam Brody and a whole lot more) are all great in their roles, but seem to be little more than meat for the cleaving. Also, despite their being a lot of new horror ground for Craven to poke fun at, the film seems more concerned with making it relevant for the kids (Instant Messaging, live-streaming web-blogs, etc), rather than making it relevant for the genre.

All in all, the film can be summed up as follows; not as good as parts one or two, but better than part three.

Rory Cashin

Rated 16 (see IFCO website for details)

Scream is released on 15th April 2011