Starring: David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and Rory Culkin
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 111 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011
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Writing a review for a Scream film is like preaching to the converted and, according to box office results, their name is Legion. Non-horror fans will see the title and move on.
So. Wes Craven is a professorial-looking type who has been making horror films for forty years or more. He obviously loves the genre and playing with its conventions. Not only did he make the Scream trilogy, it was he who introduced Freddy Krueger to the world (allegedly named for a boy who bullied Craven at school) to give everyone nightmares on elm street.
It is over a decade since Scream 3. So, why now for Scre4m (which is what the title does on screen, transforming from Scream to Scre4m)? Well, for one thing, why not? But, what has interested Craven over the years is playing with the conventions, drawing the audience attention to them and both utilising them and poking fun at them. But, this is the particular sphere of Kevin Williamson, the writer for the original films and the writer for this one, a clever movie buff indeed.
Most of the characters here are horror movie buffs, the high school students who are wizzes at horror trivia, the heads of the high school’s movie club who hold an annual Stabathon marathon (the 7 movies based on the main character, Sidney Prescott, and what happened to her in the original Scream). Because it is the age of social networking, a Scream film of 2011 has to have internet broadcasting etc. So, there are loads of references to movies and stars (with a dying cop cursing Bruce Willis and the way he can survive police thrillers!) and lots of discussions about what the rules of horror films are and how they can be changed or broken.
Scream 4 is a very amusing exercise in horror cinema deconstruction for movie buffs.
The opening parodies the first film with murders of students who turn out to be watching a Stab film and discussions of the relative merits of Stab and horror before one girl dispatches the other (because she talks too much). We are laughing as the film begins.
For the fans, the main characters are here again (certainly looking a decade older too). Neve Campbell is Sidney Prescott, promoting the book which has served as therapy to get her over her Scream traumas. Former journalist, Gail Weathers (a still acerbic Courtney Cox) who wrote the original books on which the Stab series was based is not too pleased but is happy enough when there are more murders and she teams with the film club managers to solve the murders. Sidney’s publicist is delighted at the increase in murders and potential sales until, of course, she goes the way of the victims. David Arquette is still Sheriff Dewey, married to Gail and trying to cope with the increasing number of deaths.
This time, the central victim seems to be Jill, Sidney’s cousin (Emma Roberts) whom Sidney is at pains to protect – and there are plenty of suspects, especially Dewey’s deputy or Jill’s rejected boyfriend. (Unfortunately, this reviewer missed the main murderer completely! – which means that Willliamson and Craven were very smart with their clues and where they were drawing audience attention.)
Not meant to be taken too seriously (except when we are analysing genres and their rules), there are some frights, some screams, some red herrings, some suspense – and prolonged endings which we may not have been expecting either.
Scream 4 will reinforce the converted’s faith.
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