SCREAM 4 directed by Wes Craven, written by Kevin Williamson, with Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette and Emma Roberts. An Alliance Films release. 112 minutes. Opens Friday (April 15). See listing. Rating: NN
A decade after the dead-teen-ager series ground to a halt with Scream 3, Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson bring us Scream 4, attempting to revive and reboot their self-reflexive franchise for a new generation.
Scream 4 reassembles the series’ survivors – Neve Campbell’s perpetually endangered Sidney Prescott, Courteney Cox’s pointy journalist-turned-author Gale Weathers and David Arquette’s easily distracted lawman, Dewey Riley – and brings the action back to Woodsboro. It’s the last stop of Sidney’s book tour… and, of course, it’s the first stop on the ghost-faced killer’s comeback.
As the bodies pile up, Sidney, Gale and Dewey realize that the old game is back on: everyone’s a suspect, anyone can die at any time, and your chances of surviving are astronomically higher if you don’t leave the room while promising to come right back.
But here’s the thing: none of it’s actually scary. Craven pulls off a couple of tense moments, but that speaks to the strengths of the formula, not to our investment in the characters. The oldsters are joined by Emma Roberts as Sidney’s cousin, Hayden Panettiere as her slasher-savvy pal, Marley Shelton as a pushy cop, and the invaluable Alison Brie as Sidney’s remorseless publicist, among others.
The story offers the occasional nod to Facebook friends and text messaging, but Williamson and Craven really just want to make the same movie all over again, with attractive teens getting creepy phone calls (there’s an app for that) and debating what they’d do if they were living in a movie. And this particular movie’s frame of reference is shockingly limited the only post-Scream film that gets a shout-out is my beloved Shaun Of The Dead, but that just points out how high the bar has been raised for self-aware horror these days.
Scream 4? More like a wheeze.
normw@nowtoronto.com
