Scream 4 (Wes Craven, 2011)
Posted: September 17, 2011 Filed under: Films | Tags: A Nightmare On Elm Street, Amityville Horror, Black Christmas, Cinema, Dawn of the Dead, DVD, facebook, Film, Friday the 13th, Halloween, House of Wax, Last House on the Left, meta, Movie, My Bloody Valentine, Nick Cave, Piranha, Prom Night, Scream, Scream 4, Texas Chainsaw, The Fog, The Hills Have Eyes, Twitter, Wes Craven, When A Stranger Calls 1 Comment »
“Halloween, uh, Texas Chainsaw, Dawn of the Dead, The Hills Have Eyes, Amityville Horror, uh, Last House on the Left, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare On Elm Street, My Bloody Valentine, When A Stranger Calls, Prom Night, Black Christmas, House of Wax, The Fog, Piranha. It’s one of those, right? Right?”
Looking back, it seems almost impossible that Scream (1996) had Nick Cave on the soundtrack and, fifteen years after the original (more tellingly fourteen years after the resurface of the ‘straight’ slasher flick and eleven after the first of four parodies… part five is on it’s way in 2012), the idea is looking decidedly tired and increasingly irrelevant and safe. Oh, but they do mention the internet. They say ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’ and talk about uploading films and blogging and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Here’s the thing; Scream hit at the perfect time. This was before the internet and the great digital revolution that saw film become more accessible and collectable than ever. This was before we all became media students. The rules of the genre were always there but not really analysed outside of academia and nerdom; we all knew them of course, and had fun bemoaning them, but at the same time didn’t really take much notice, just sat back and let them work their magic. Scream changed that, it referenced the references and made ‘meta’ mainstream. Since then we’ve filled our house with movies and even kid’s films are crammed with cinematic in-jokes for the adults. It’s almost as if we now know too much about film to really enjoy…
…to be honest non of that matters. Scream was good partly because it winked knowingly but mainly because it was a brutal slasher movie with a Nick Cave swagger that made us jump and scream in all the night places. Scream 4 doesn’t work because it confuses references with brains and graphic violence with danger. It makes the cardinal sin of not being scary (heck, I’d have been happy if it had the guts to finish ten minutes earlier). We might all know what lurks under the hood and it’s true that genre needs to progresses to stay alive but at the end of it all we still want what is promised on the tin.
Scream 4 is available on DVD.
Excellent review Wynter, I was totally unimpressed with Scream 4. It wasn’t a patch on the first or second film. I think that’s down to the fact they were trend starters for a genre that was re-imagining itseld. But then it got overdone, there was Scary Movie to parody the whole thing, and horror has moved on again. Scream 4 seems too much like its a 1996 movie trying to be a 2011 movie and feel tired and cliched because of it.