REVIEW: Scream 4 (Wes Craven, 2011) + A Series Overview

 

The people in the Scream movies strike a difficult balance.  They must be smart enough to know about horror conventions, and they must be stupid enough to do absolutely nothing with that knowledge.  They still answer the phones.  They still pull out knives instead of sticking guns in their purses.  They still spend time listening to monologues about movies that give them no useful advice.  We learn in Scream 4 that “the unexpected is the new cliché,” but all that means is that we’re in one big house during the finale instead of the big house we expected.

Familiarity should be expected in the fourth film of what was supposed to be a trilogy, but Scream 4 needs to find some way to rejuvenate the idea.  To make the familiar seem fresh, and make the cliché seem unexpected.  At times, Scream 4 generates some of that welcome frisson that makes this series, even on its worst days, preferable to something like the attention-grabbing desperation of the Saw saga.  Those films push the viewer around; the Scream films pull the viewer along.

Yes, the Scream series’ unique combination of sly wit, character engagement, and elegant horror set-pieces can still hit, and each movie manages at least one fantastic scene where those divergent elements collide.  The first film offered up the charming Drew Barrymore for cruel slaughter, the second film featured an unexpected demise in broad daylight.  The under-valued third film offered a morbidly hilarious sequence where the heroes struggled to stay together while the killer faxed them revised script pages.

The one great scene in this film revolves around Hitchcockian blonde Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) and her lovesick puppy Charlie (Rory Culkin).  Late in the film, Charlie’s hanging on by a thread, and Kirby has to answer the killer’s questions to save him.  The killer outwits her with a classy reference to Peeping Tom.  She begs for one more question, and as soon as the killer says “remake,” she cuts him off and lists the titles, one after the other, and Kirby’s desperation pushes past the meta-commentary on Hollywood’s lack of imagination.  Tears form, breath grows rapid.  She doesn’t want to lose her friend.  She’s about to lose her friend.

There are more references to classic horror-thrillers.  Along with the Peeping Tom reference, a whiteboard in the Cinema Club charts out the rising action of Hitchcock’s Rear Window.  And of course Hayden Panettiere’s hair recalls not only Tippi Hedren in The Birds, but Kim Novak in Vertigo.

I dwell on Panettiere's Kirby a little too much, but there are a few good reasons.  First off, she’s drop-dead gorgeous.  More importantly, she’s the only interesting teenager on-screen.  Her sly smiles suggest hidden depths and interests.  The returning characters are who they’ve always been, and there’s no real risk of danger to Sidney or Gale, or even Deputy Dewey (David Arquette), who’s been inviting death since the end of the first film, and deserves points here for creating what must be the most worthless cop in the history of the genre.  His job here is to arrive too late to things.  So with the assumed survival of those three, attention moves to the new characters.  Apart from Panettiere, the only one to leave a real impression is Alison Brie as Sidney’s ambitious manager.

Since the series deals with multiple killers in previous entries, there’s not much interest in guessing who they are.  Easier to just wait for the big reveal and what’s-my-motivation monologue.  Some token commentary goes to the disease of reality culture and the rise of internet stardom, and that might explain why one of the killers is so utterly dull outside of the mask.  We live in an age where TV networks hire "real" people and give them direction and storylines to follow, and that might be just the ticket for a bland personality yearning for attention.  But that trend has little to do with the horror genre.  Craven and Williamson would've been better off devoting more time to the way Robbie (Erik Knudsen) constantly v-logs his teenage life, which ties into the newer trend of documentary horror like Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield.

Neve Campbell continues to provide a steady fulcrum to this series, but each time, it’s a little more depressing watching her come back to the same place, hit the same marks, and deliver the same lines.  When the first Scream came out (and Good Lord, that was fifteen years ago), Campbell was an ingénue with great promise.  She’s kept busy since, but returning to this series isn’t what she deserves.  Better to launch some fresh faces and re-tool the premise into something bold and reckless.  Maybe the next one can be in space.  Or use time-travel.

RATING: C+

And a quick series recap:

The first ten minutes of Scream are as perfect as horror can be.  Terrifying, funny, suspenseful, sympathetic to its characters.  Drew Barrymore does such a good job, and instills Casey Becker with such immediate likability (she’s kind on the phone, bubbly without crossing over into ditzy).  The remaining ninety minutes of the film never reach that height.  Of course, they’re still excellent.  The scenes of suspense feature impressive staging from Wes Craven, with help from Marco Beltrami’s elegant score, and Williamson’s dialogue pushes not just the self-reference, but also the sharply defined personalities of the main characters.  Hapless Deputy Dewey, selfish-but-driven Gale Weathers, quietly intelligent Sidney Prescott.  The finale comes closest to the success of the opening, especially when a dying killer laments, “My mom and dad are gonna be so mad at me!”

RATING: A

Scream 2, like its progenitor, features a fantastic opening and an admirable follow-through, but because it’s so beholden to the original, tiredness seeps through the cracks.  The setting shifts from high school to college, but the product is much the same, a slasher by-way-of whodunit, with suspects killed off in inverse relation to their level of stardom.  As mentioned, the first ten minutes of the film offer a stunning horror sequence, this time with the killer murdering an innocent in plain sight: at a theater that’s showing Stab, the fiction film based on the Woodsboro murders.  The film-within-a-film is notable not just for cheeky self-awareness, but for how different it is than the original Scream.  The actress speaks in drivel, she’s prepares for a shower (cue the dropping bathrobe).  In short, Stab panders.  Of course, Scream 2 does too.  That’s what how sequels function.  The ending doesn’t tie up with the impact of the original, although its stage setting gives the film a nice bit of symmetry, and Liev Schrieber’s sleazy Cotton Weary evolves from a bit player into an admirably sleazy wild card.

RATING: B+

The first two Scream movies told basic slasher stories, and, even with the reflexivity, there wasn’t much to chew on after watching.  Scream 3, however, is very upset with how the horror genre treats women.  The actresses in this film travel to Hollywood with dreams in their heads, and the system almost invariably screws them, figuratively and often literally.  It happened to Sidney’s mom, it happens to Angelina (Emily Mortimer), it may be happening to Judy Jurgenstern (Parker Posey), and the archivist in the studio basement points out that she was up for the role of Princess Leia, but who got it?  “The one who fucked George Lucas.”  That buried anger helps alleviate the larger problems of the “final” entry in the Scream saga.  More significant than the uninteresting victims and been-there-done-that-twice aura is the lack of stakes.  Will Gale, Dewey, or Sid ever truly be at risk?  Not even an ominous message from the video spirit of Randy (Jamie Kennedy) can revive the tension.  His rules of a trilogy avoid noting that the third part almost always disappoints.  Given this series, it’s a wonder nobody pointed that out.

RATING: B-