Scream 4 (2011)
Scream 4
★☆☆☆☆
Directed by: Wes Craven
Written by: Kevin Williamson
Since the beginning of the franchise, I have maintained that the Scream movies are not horror. In fact, most horror movies these days are not horror in the definition of the genre I adhere to which is that horror movies have to at least contain a hint of a supernatural element in order to qualify. Because, my theory goes, otherwise the movies are a subgenre of the suspense/thriller category which permits non-supernatural terror to occur. That subgenre certainly takes elements that were established within the parameters of many supernatural horror movies—especially slasher pictures. Namely, overt violence and gleeful revelry in gore. But lacking a supernatural component, you can't really compare and contrast films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Saw and Hostel with The Exorcist, Night of the Living Dead and Nightmare on Elm Street because the fundamental conceit is different.
Granted, Scream has long tried to side-step this technical quibble by internally avoiding (for the most part) the term "horror" in favor of the more generic "scary movie." But it feels important to me to make the distinction because Scream's self-awareness of a world in which horror/scary movies exist and yet suspenseful events that mirror the lampooned deconstructions still happen often to comedic (or, more aptly, ironic) effect is supposed to carry the cachet of horror and yet it must, in order to work, fixate on a plausibility that anchors it within the suspense parameters.
To be honest, trying to unwind the twisted layers of postmodern irony present in Scream is an exercise in futility. To a certain extent Scream's sequels have been criticism-proof because they have such a winking self-knowledge they can just as easily cite any legitimate gripe as parody, satire or outright homage and in a certain way of thinking get away with it because, who knows what was intended? Is the fact that Scream 4 includes an early death sequence involving a garage door—implausibly operating despite universal safety precautions that would inhibit it—a second example of idiocy on the part of the writers or an intentional self-parodying reference to the oft-bemoaned garage-pet-door death sequence from the original Scream? Is the fact that the opening intro-within-an-intro-within-an-intro (Scream-ception, anyone?) contains a bit of banter regarding Scream (proxied here as Stab) being, in fact, suspense more akin to torture porn than true horror an exemption of its intentional misclassification or just a dismissive acknowledgement of it? It's frustrating to try and get a handle on the levels of shrugging, smirking, logic-mocking smarm on display here although it helps to understand that Scream 4 (I refuse to write it as Scre4m—gah), itself, doesn't really give a rip about anything, including itself.
Which makes it all the easier to not care about Scream 4. Previous sequels, especially the mind-lubricated third installment which I've seen at least three times and still can barely keep in my head such is its forgettability, failed principally because they let the tangle of the franchise protagonist Sydney Prescott get too tightly integrated into its own mythology and by the end of the third movie we have to include some long-lost brother plot that we don't care one iota about just to give someone an excuse to keep tormenting Neve Campbell's character. For a franchise that was supposed to re-enable suspension of disbelief by setting the suspense in a world more closely mirrored to our own where scary slasher pictures are as ubiquitous as they actually are, it continued to defy logic that separate, uniquely motivated killers would all use the same modus operandi. Suspension of disbelief, indeed.
There is a snarky line in Scream 4 where a character (it doesn't matter which one since nothing in the movie is particularly memorable except for Hayden Panettiere's unfortunate hairstyle) bemoans that nothing gets greenlit in Hollywood anymore unless it's a remake or a reboot, which I suppose is funny because Scream 4 is an anti-remake reboot. Or something. The sad part is that Scream, as a franchise, has continually dropped the ball when it came to actually deconstructing the genre it claims to be picking apart. We've now had so many chances to do something different and original from having one of the principals snap and become the killer for a later installment (it's not a spoiler to say that neither Dewey, Gale or Sydney are Ghostface in Scream 4) to having the protagonist actually die (Randy doesn't count, he was always dispensable) to having the killer actually get away with it (a truly squandered opportunity in Scream 4, especially, though I admit that in legitimate horror movies this isn't actually that uncommon to a degree). I can think of countless other ways any of the Scream sequels could be improved—what if they had actually added the element of the supernatural at some point? What if the notion of an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre(s) actually mattered for more than a scene or two in each film? Instead Scream itself has become formulaic in a way that, as I said before, kind of defies criticism.
But here's the thing, and this is not above reproach, no matter how much irony you try to blanket the franchise with: Scream 4 is not scary. Not even a teeny, tiny bit. It's not funny, either. It's barely even entertaining. Despite all it's self-defense mechanisms and too-cool-for-school self-importance, it's a crappy, barely watchable movie. It's not that it didn't have to be made, it could have gone a different way and become something of note, something that had a point or a purpose. But no. Instead it donned its cinematic hipster slouch and sneered its way into that dippy middle ground of pointlessness where a movie isn't even bad enough to be lampooned or good enough to find purchase with a select number of misguided souls and instead must comfort itself with utter vanilla mediocrity so encompassing it might as well not even exist. If you want to see a genre deconstruction, go watch Wes Craven's New Nightmare and see what self-referential horror can actually be. If you want to see cartoonish parody, watch the Scary Movie franchise which are awful but at least they revel in being awful instead of posing as pop culture commentary while actually being as or more vapid and ephemeral as gore-makeup magazines once you peel away the protective coating.
Just whatever you do, don't see Scream 4.