SCRE4M (*½)
Directed by: Wes Craven
Starring: David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Emma Roberts,
Hayden Panettiere, Anthony Anderson, Alison Brie, Adam Brody, Rory Culkin, Anna
Paquin, Kristen Bell, Aimee Teegarden, Erik Knudsen, Marielle Jaffe
Seen: July 7th 2011
*½
Out of ****
I had a look after seeing SCRE4M, and apparently the writer is over 16
years old, with a relatively accomplished career. I would have bet against based
on this script, as every single character sounds like a juvenile teen considering
the forced swearing and attempted comebacks making out the bulk of the
dialogue. The Ghostface Killer is still the very clumsy and near omnipotent
threat he’s always been, with yet again a few scenes of only his arm sticking
in through a jarred door brandishing the knife that can pierce even skulls… The
leading ladies are back in Courteney Cox’s Gail Weathers-Riley and Neve
Campbell’s Sidney Prescott, and it’s left to the viewers’ imagination to figure
out how on earth David Arquette’s Dewey Riley managed to become Sheriff of
Woodsboro – maybe to allow Ghostface to go on a rampage and pretty much
complete it before being caught, through blind luck.
SCRE4M starts with a series of movies within movies, informing us that
the STAB movies are now at a 7th iteration. Again the home alone girl
(this time girls) gets the first visit from the Killer and the news spreads
through Woodsboro like wildfire; especially since this is the 15th anniversary
of the original massacre depicted in Scream. This is the perfect time for
Sidney Prescott to return to town on her book tour to fearfully squirm whenever
Ghostface is mentioned as if she didn’t learn to deal with it during the 10
years of relative quiet. The movie tries so hard to trick the viewer into believing
certain characters look guilty that you know for a fact they won’t be. And while
Sidney, Gale and Dewey are back, the main characters this time are Sidney’s
cousin Jill (Roberts), her friend Kirby (Panettiere), the school hottie Olivia (Jaffe, who doesn’t
look like a school girl, but rather a plastic-surgery-victim-Volvo-driving-Soccer-Mom),
and the school cinema club geeks Charlie (Culkin) and Robbie (Knudsen). Ghostface
rampages and it’s not nearly as much fun as before in trying to guess who’ll
survive and who won’t, and who will be revealed once Ghostface pulls back the
mask, as there is virtually no story driving the series of boring attempts at
brutal stabbings of everyone.
The movie is full of reminders of better days, such as the musical cue
playing when a scene starts of at Woodsboro High, immediately taking you back
to the previous Screams. The tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating script takes it
one step too far as the movie becomes nothing but an attempt at self-sacrificial
humour and plot devising that falls flat on its face. As mentioned earlier, the
script feels juvenile in its forcing of bad language, as even Courteney Cox
utters every swearword like a teen eager to be overheard. The argument for murderous
motivation centred around fame is debatable, as this type of hunger for it is
nothing but psychopathic.
I loved the original trilogy of movies, and Wes Craven should have
left this series well enough alone, as with SCRE4M he does the entire series
damage rather than just making a bad standalone movie claiming
new rules in a new decade with very little changing, if anything.
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