Another Scream movie? Just what we were all asking for!
I actually decided to revisit the first three, one per night, on the three nights preceding seeing the fourth. Let's recap:
Scream: A really good flick that both makes fun of and pays homage to the slasher horror films of the past few decades. A little dated, and a little diminished by the inevitable parodies it spawned (like the Scary Movie series), as well as the more intense horror flicks that have pushed the envelope even further (Hostel, anyone?). But it's still pretty damned fun. And pretty violent and bloody, by 1996 standards. Also, at the risk of being branded a pariah, I kinda love Matthew Lillard in this movie. He turns high-strung lunacy into an art form (these days he's mostly off-the-radar, which is just fine).
Scream 2: Again, pretty good flick that both makes fun of and pays homage to sequels. It's in-movie parody of the first Scream adds to the dated-ness of that flick, but it's a fun wink-wink at itself (Luke Wilson as Skeet Ulrich = Epic Win). Everything in 2 is more grandiose, intense, and over-the-top. The scene where Neve Campbell is on stage with a masked Greek chorus swinging knives at her was almost too much, but actually ended up being relatively artistic (and what an insensitive DICK her acting prof was. I mean, didn't he see Scream?).
Scream 3: Um... yeah... not so much. A not so good movie that both makes weak fun of and fails at paying homage to trilogies. Wes Craven & company phoned this one in, big time. Full of awful, heavy-handed red herrings. Populated by useless secondary characters that show up literally once for an introduction, then once more to die. An out-of-left-field villain with an out-of-left-field weak backstory to justify a non-plot. A head-scratching cameo by Jay & Silent Bob (seriously, WTFuck?). But Patrick Warburton was in it, so not a total loss.
Scream 4: I heard a lot of negativity surrounding this movie when it came out. People were just not digging it. And let's face it... there was really no reason for it to be made. Which is why I was sort of surprised by how much I didn't hate it. No, I didn't love it by any means, but this was so much more the movie that Scream 3 should have been.
The plot? Sidney Prescott returns to her hometown of Woodsboro to promote her new book. But uh-oh! It's exactly the 15th Anniversary of the original "Woodsboro Murders" (convenient!), and two girls have been murdered while watching the 6th (or was it 7th?) sequel to "Stab"- the movie based on the book based on the murders by Gale Weathers-Riley (Courtney "Puffy" Cox-not-for-much-longer-Arquette). Suspects include "seasoned" Sheriff Dewey Riley (David "I smelled a fart" Arquette), creepy Deputy Judy Hicks (Marley "googly-eyes" Shelton), Sidney's Aunt Kate (Mary "walking corpse" McDonnell) & cousin Jill (Emma "Eric & Julia mashup" Roberts), film nerd Charlie Walker (Rory "the littlest Culkin" Culkin), and, um... aww, fuck it. It's a Scream movie. You know the drill. Everybody's a suspect, even if they've been offed already. Hell, after 4 movies I wouldn't be surprised if I was the fucking killer.
So, yeah. There's lot's of stalking, stabbing, and screaming. But by now we're so used to it that it passes us by without much ado (except for the girl further down in my row- she jumped and uttered, "oh my GAWD" literally every time a new person suddenly appeared on screen, whether it was a suspenseful scene or not. Her boyfriend just snored). And the opening sequence(s) didn't help. It was a movie within a movie within a movie thing where people keep getting killed, then are revealed as characters in a Stab film being watched by other characters in a subsequent Stab film, until finally it's the "real" world of the Scream movie, but by then we're already too numb to give a hoot about our first "real" victims. And this was only the first 5 minutes. So, yeah- the cutesy, gimmicky, Matryoshka doll opening worked until we reached the final one. By then it was just a lump of hollow, painted wood with other lumps of hollow, painted wood inside.
Too esoteric? Sorry. Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll. Still too esoteric? Sorry. I'm not changing it. Deal.
Anyway, right then and there I was ready for the rest of Scream 4 to blow. And then it didn't. What we got was a laid-back slasher film that didn't take itself too seriously, which I can get behind. I think they learned from their mistakes with Scream 3. The problem is they scaled it back a little too much. Nothing really matters at this point in the series. And yeah, this one was supposed to be the movie that makes fun of and pays homage to reboots, but we only know that because they say so (or, specifically, because lame, useless character "Randy's sister" tells us), not because it at all resembled a reboot. If it was a reboot, there wouldn't be any returning actors, and we wouldn't be told their backstory- we'd experience it for the first time. Again. What they should have done was played it like a return-to-the-well sequel, à la Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull or Live Free Or Die Hard or Lethal Weapon 4, all of which most people loathed*, and talked about how returning to the well is always a bad idea. Let your tongue-in-cheek start there and then give us something new to see in order to prove the concept wrong, you know? But instead we got another Scream movie that followed the same basic outline (murder, character intros, more murder, "who's doing it?", even more murder, "it was me, and this is why"). Actually, they did something interesting in one of the "Stab" movie meta-scenes at the beginning: one character, not wearing a mask, kills the other on screen, letting us all know right off the bat who the killer is. But then it turned out to be another fake movie-in-movie thing. Too bad- that would have been a cool way to mix it up.
So what did I like about it? Well, that's hard to say. I wasn't too bored. Well...maybe a little, at times... certainly not when Alison Brie was, uh, bouncing around... er... did it just get hot in here? Uh... the movie flowed pretty well, I guess- no dead spots. The three returning characters are still charming enough, I suppose (but Courtney Cox needs to lay off the Botox, man). I enjoyed that it was a modest movie. A weird word to use in this context, but considering Scream 3 was so ridiculously, boringly self-aggrandizing ("look, this story is SO GREAT that we're going to set the second sequel on the movie set of the second fake sequel and make broad-stroke comments on what shallow airheaded douchebags Hollywood-types are, even though we're all Hollywood-types ourselves. See what we did there? Pass the Moët!"), Scream 4's return to the small town that started it all simply felt fresh. Also, the villain reveal felt right this time. In the original Scream the reveal made sense, and when you go back and watch it you can see the clues. 2's reveal was OK, but relied a little too much on its exposition. When you re-watch that one you can sort of see why they chose who they did, but it's thin. 3's reveal was a fucking joke. 4's not only made sense in the context of the movie, it made sense in the context of the Reality-TV/YouTube obsessed year 2011. The final shot sequence of the movie deals with that, and might have been the best part. It actually had social commentary! Crazy, right? It would have been better if that commentary had pervaded the whole movie, but you can't win 'em all, I guess.
So, a valiant effort by Mr. Craven & the gang. I'm probably being far too kind, but I'm giving Scream 4 a
6 out of 10 Red Right Hands
* Die Hard 4, Indiana Jones 4, Lethal Weapon 4: For the record, I liked all three of these movies. Suck it.
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