Call Them As I See Them: Scream 4 (2011)

I should preface this by saying up to this point I have only seen the first scream in its entirety, the nice thing about this sequel though, is that that’s really all you need to know to get what’s going on.

This movie is okay, far from great. There was a lot of humor that I think anyone who is a fan of the horror genre can appreciate that perhaps others might miss, and it does a lot to comment on and satire the current state of the genre (i.e. all of the sequels and remakes). Some can consider it giving into the same things that the film might be commenting on, I for one feel that it knows exactly what it is doing and I felt it treaded that line rather well.

With that said, there are some glaring problems with Scream 4 as well. The one that stuck out the most to me was the acting, which is either passable, or downright terrible. It gets really distracting when someone is attempting to be dramatic or sinister but fail miserably at it. Some of this can be looked over just for the shear number of characters that are in the movie, as well as the young and potential up and comers/those making a last ditch attempt at a career. It almost gets distracting the number of characters in this film, like the producers were thinking that they needed to cram as many names as they could into one film in order to keep people interested and it actually kind of works for the first five minutes or so, but by the halfway point its just too much, especially when you realize that half of the people are just cannon fodder.

The other thing that bugged me about Scream 4 is the same thing that most horror movies suffer from, and that is the laziness in the attempts to scare the audience, in other words, ‘jump scares’. A jump scare is essentially the cinematic equivalent to someone jumping out a yelling “BOO!” at you. Its not really scaring you, its startling very loudly. Really frightening someone means getting the blood flowing and heart racing, not just causing you to jump in the seat and make you uneasy for a moment. It’s a tactic that is cheap and only dilutes itself after a while, especially once you get to know when and where they are coming from.

All in all Scream 4 is a good movie that has its problems, it doesn’t nearly have the iconic status that the first film has and it kind of knows it, which is part of what makes enjoying to watch…once. The entertainment value loses its luster by the end of the film, its just enough to get through, anything else would just be wearing the joke too thin and it doesn’t have the horror elements to continue to scare either. Hopefully this marks the last film in the Scream series since its only going to sink further from