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After more than a decade a new Scream movie is unleashed upon us. This series was last seen when the slasher-hype it created started in the mid-90’s was starting to fade again and made place for Asian Ghost Stories and torture porn with movies like Saw and Hostel. Now Wes Craven is returning to the series together with writer of the first two movies: Kevin Williamson. Also returning are the three main survivors of the previous three movies; Dewey who has been upgraded to sheriff, Gale, retired reporter and now Dewey’s wife and Sidney who has just finished a book on her experiences of he last three movies and returns to Woodsboro to do a book signing on the anniversary of the original murders.
Yeah, really convenient.
I guess you all know where it goes from here. Kids are murdered, an occasional parent too. Where are these parents btw? I can remember only one in the movie; Sidney’s aunt, the mother of her niece Jill (Emma Roberts). None of these other kids seem to have parents, Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) is the only other one we see at home and her parents are nowhere to found as well.
Wes Craven is an on-off director. For every Elm Street there’s a Vampire in Brooklyn, for every Scream there’s a Cursed. He is a director who’s material needs to be good, unlike James Cameron who can even make a Pocahontas rip-off about blue aliens and turn it into one of the highest grossing movies ever. So Craven must be thankful for Williamson’s script which is pretty fun. It touches upon the horror conveniences of the last decade like the slur of remakes that have been dumped upon us over the last years, including Craven’s own A Nightmare On Elm Street.
Again the rules have changed but then again not that much.
Having watched all three Scream movies a couple of months ago one aspect of what makes a good Scream movie is overlooked; Woodsburo. Somehow this small town is a character of its own, like the house in Elm Street or the Crystal Lake in Friday the 13th. That’s in my opinion one of the reasons the third movie didn’t really work. They took all the characters out of Woodsburo and put them into Hollywood, like fish out of the water. Compare it to all those franchises that end up in space, almost never works (Jason X being an exception).
When watching Scream 4 I had the idea in the beginning that they would focus on the new teens more to create a new trilogy and having the old characters pass on the torches, maybe by finishing them off like they did with Jamie Lee Curtis after she survived Michael Meyers for at least three times. I don’t see another trilogy here and this movie is a nice conclusion to a quadrilogy though there’s always a possibility to a Scream 5.
But wait with that, Kevin Williamson, until you have new horror trends to bash on.
