Hey, here’s a thing that’s on Netflix!
When my wife and I moved in together, all of our various media merged into a single, slightly schizophrenic collection. My wife’s contributions were fewer, but tended to receive equal airplay. Chief among them were two properties: Friends and the Scream franchise. Pretty much anything Courtney Cox-themed, except for Misfits of Science and that one Bruce Springsteen video. So I’ve seen the first three Scream films more times than I can count. I covered the original in my very first year writing for this marathon, but it isn’t likely that I’ll ever tackle the similar-yet-inferior parts two or three. Somehow, though, I had missed the fact that there was a fourth installment of the series released in 2011, and more importantly, it was helmed by Wes Craven himself. Why not check it out and see if it could recapture some of mid-90’s magic of Ghostface.
Much like the first film, the best scene of the movie happens before the credits roll. It features two girls having a conversation about horror movies,receiving a scary phone call and then a twist where one or both of them get killed. Rinse and repeat two more times (SPOILER FOR THE FIRST TEN MINUTES OF A MOVIE AS IF YOU CARE – each time it was the pre-credit sequence for one of the movies from the in-story horror franchise, Stab. Zoom out, the next pair of girls is watching it from their couch.) The sequence is silly and unpredictable and over-the-top meta, and you get the sense that it’s the most fun Craven has had directing in years. I was a little disappointed, then, when the movie proper kicked off, and settled into the exact same formula as the prior three films. They try to blow it off with the characters discussing the rules of a remake as applied to the real-life killing spree they were experiencing, but even that is a retread of an idea that was novel fifteen years prior, but felt hopelessly stale by 2011.
So, should you watch this movie? It does have some things going for it. Ghostface has a remarkably consistent characterization, despite the fact that “he” is technically eight different people across the course of the franchise. He is a fun villain that is sort of the anti-Michael Myers. While both are masked stalkers with big knives, Meyers is silent, efficient and indestructable – Ghostface is a frequently clumsy chatterbox that spends more time on the phone than a pre-teen girl. Craven smartly takes everything supernatural about Myers and either strips it away or provides an explanation (i.e. when Ghostface seemingly teleports in order to surprise his prey by cutting off their escape, it’s simply another person in the mask.) Beyond the fun of one more go-round with the iconic villain, it’s also cool to see a cavalcade of familiar young actresses get to star in the franchise that they all probably experienced at slumber parties growing up. Craven knows how to craft a film, and this is no exception, well-paced and smartly directed. For me, though, I can’t really recommend it because it is so derivative of its predecessors. Ultimately, Scream 4 turned out to be the second best version of a story that only needed to be told once.
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