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Arts & Entertainment

'Scream 4' Just Makes the Cut

Wes Craven reboots Ghostface franchise and leans more toward amusing than scaring moviegoers.

It has been a good long while since the once notorious “Master of Horror,” Wes Craven, managed to scare audiences. His work in the 1970s and ’80s had a rawness and urgency that proved to be deeply unsettling.

There’s little that could be considered tongue-in-cheek about Craven’s original versions of The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes and A Nightmare on Elm Street. But Scream 4 shows he has lost much of his mastery for shock and awe.

Even before 1996’s Scream, Craven had begun to experiment with injecting self-referential humor into his thrillers. After an unending slew of sequels transformed the director’s most unforgettable cinematic creation, Freddy Krueger, into a quipping sight gag, Craven took an ingenious gamble in 1994’s New Nightmare, casting himself and his longtime collaborators as a film crew stalked by Krueger’s inescapable demon. The picture wasn’t all that terrifying, but it sure was entertaining.

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Perhaps the same could be said about Scream, with the major exception of its opening sequence, a masterful variation on the audience misdirection typified by Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Few expected a star like Drew Barrymore to be killed off so early in the film, and her character’s startling knowledge of horror movie clichés couldn’t stop her from getting trapped in them anyway.

It was a masterfully executed sequence, and ended up being the last truly unsettling set piece Craven ever directed.

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Over the last decade, it's clear that the grisly auteur has mellowed quite a bit. His most satisfying films are about as far removed from horror as one could get: the touching fact-based drama Music of the Heart and the marvelous romantic short “Père-Lachaise” in Paris, Je T’Aime.

Anytime he’s turned his attention back to horror, the results have been pure schlock (Cursed, My Soul to Take), thus illustrating that Scream marked the beginning of the end for Craven’s success in the genre.

For all of its pop culture awareness and inventive in-jokes, the Scream films are really no better than any other run-of-the-mill slasher franchise. They have their cake and stab it too, toying with the genre without ever transcending or subverting it. This has inspired a generation of filmmakers to cloak their mediocrity with self-reflexive irony.

When the pilot episode of “V” blatantly ripped off the opening scene in Independence Day, the show made sure to have an extra observe, “It’s just like Independence Day!” as if that would cancel out the lack of imagination.

Though Scream 4 is certainly a cut above the botched third installment, it really doesn’t bring anything new to the table, despite a cast peppered with fresh faces. The action returns to Woodsboro, where the original slayings took place. Lone survivor Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell, ever on the verge of tears) has returned to town with a memoir about her experiences in overcoming the pain of the last three movies.

Sure enough, copycat murders spring up the instant she arrives, thus causing her to team up with old pals Sheriff Dewey Riley (David Arquette) and his wife, the once-maniacally ambitious reporter, Gale Weathers-Riley (Courteney Cox).

It’s soon revealed that Sidney has an equally pale-faced niece, Jill Roberts, played by the beguiling 20-year-old Emma Roberts, who has already proven to have more range than her considerably more famous Aunt Julia. Is Craven setting up Jill to be the new heroine of his series, or is she simply more fresh meat ripe for butchering? That’s one of the few genuine mysteries lying at the bloody heart of Scream 4, which recycles many of the usual teen personas (brooding jock, gabby blonde, heartless film geek), which are all just obnoxious enough to make one not care about seeing them get slashed.

Screenwriter Kevin Williamson opens the film with an extended set piece that’s hilarious in its repetition, yet never builds a momentum to increase its scare factor. Though Williamson has had great success on television (“Dawson’s Creek,” “The Vampire Diaries”), his films have often threatened to spiral into meta-meaninglessness.

His satirical blade has gotten progressively duller over the years, though he still manages to come up with a few sharp punch lines in Scream 4. When Jill’s ex discovers her in Sidney’s house while a killer is on the loose, he likens her presence there to being on "Top Chef with Jeffrey Dahmer.” 

What’s lacking in Scream 4 is any semblance of nightmare-inducing imagery. By now, the Ghostface killer has no more impact than the ghosts in Ghostbusters. The only genuine jolts are produced by false alarms, such as a passing car or the sudden appearance of a hanging plant.

Considering the film’s lukewarm reception on opening weekend (earning an estimated $19.3 million, according to Box Office Mojo, coming in a distant second after the animated comedy, Rio), it’s obvious that Scream is one outdated franchise that never needed to be resurrected.

Even the row of kindergarteners sitting behind me at the screening were more restless than frightened--their desensitized reaction was actually the most disturbing part of the evening.

However, I’ll acknowledge that the film ultimately won me over in its final 20 minutes, with a spot-on jab at America’s exploitative, fame-obsessed culture exacerbated by the Internet.

“You don’t have to achieve anything!” explains the homicidal celebrity-wannabe. “You just need to have some f---ed-up s--t happen to you.”

Scream 4 succeeds not as horror flick, but as a rather nostalgic and fitfully funny reunion for fans of the inimitable original. Let’s just hope it’s the last.

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