Gale (Courteney Cox) is married to Sheriff Dewey (David Arquette), written out and a little bored.
Sidney (Neve Campbell) has just penned a memoir, “Out of the Darkness”, about her self reinvention and refusal to play the victim. The last leg of her book tour brings her back to Woodsboro, and the chance to reconnect with old friends and niece Jill (Emma Roberts). Unfortunately there’s someone else out there who wants to get back in touch: Ghostface.
Soon dead bodies are piling up, and nobody knows who can be trusted.
When the first Scream appeared in 1996, it seemed like something new by making mischief with the old conventions and clichés of the slasher genre that had dominated horror since Halloween. Kevin Williamson’s script was clever and funny enough to please both gore-fiends and academics.
That freshness inevitably paled as second and third installments appeared, and Williamson and Craven laboured to keep everything playful and scary.
Number four often feels closer to comedy than horror. It does serve up a few jolts, but the series is no longer capable of genuine surprise, only tweaks on its own formula. You will have a pretty good idea of who is going to survive, and the mystery – who has resurrected Ghostface? – is rote.
Save for the hints of pathos that Neve Campbell sneaks into her performance it only pays lip service to psychology, and when one character here moans about the lack of character development in the torture porn of theSaw films, it’s hard not think of that black pot calling out the kettle.
That said, the new pic does its best to capitalize on the time lapse since the third effort. First of all in an amusing catch up on those “Stab” sequels we’ve been missing (including cameos from Kristen Bell and Anna Paquin). Anyone can now get hold of the Ghostface app to disguise their voice on the phone for cheap laughs.
The high school film geeks are shooting a reality webcast and mount a “Stab” movie marathon. But for all their digital interconnectivity, it’s amazing how easily Ghostface repeatedly avoids detection. Sheriff Dewey needs to catch up on his CSI.
I suspect there will be plenty of older fans who will revisit Scream out of nostalgia, but newcomers will likely be underwhelmed.
Craven does his best to keep a balance between the new crop of teen protagonists and the old guard, who may be considered too wrinkly to care about by today’s teen audience. But Williamson might have made more of the generation gap; onlyCox’s hardboiled Gale interacts with the kids in an entertaining way.
There is talk of a two more films, a second trilogy. We’ll see. I suspect there will be plenty of older fans who will revisit Scream out of nostalgia, but newcomers will likely be.
Scream 4 Part 1 - 9
