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"SCREAM 4" : My 11th Favorite Horror Movie
It's that time again, Bidites. This installment of the countdown marks the prestigious (to me, anyway) third appearance of my favorite horror franchise. Some may be surprised that I rated this movie so highly but I mply can't deny that I enjoy the hell out of it and I personally feel that a lot of other horror fans don't rate it highly enough. In addition to being a slasher, this film is also a murder mystery, so I should warn you this article will probably contain a decent number of spoilers. Proceed with caution if you haven't seen it yet. And now, please join me in celebrating my 11th favorite horror movie of all time:
SCREAM 4
When Scream 3
finished its theatrical run back in 2000, Scream fanatics were led to believe that we'd seen the last of a passel of characters who had become iconic. I'm talking, of course, about Neve Campbell's steely yet sympathetic dney Prescott, David Arquette's bumbling and brave Dewey Riley and Courtney Cox's intrepid, fame seeking reporter, Gale Weathers. Perhaps to an even larger extent, I'm also referring to Ghostface in all his/her various incarnations, whose identity has now grown into a concept bigger than any individual killer. Now, I may be the biggest Scream geek on the planet but I'm sure I wasn't the only one who felt a heady rush of pure joy when I heard the news that a Scream 4 was on the way. Because I don't live in a cave, I started hearing the rumors of troubles on set shortly after. Kevin Williamson was apparently fighting with everyone, parts of the script were allegedly undergoing rewrites, scenes were being re-shot and there were even a couple of cast changes. The character of police officer Judy Hicks was originally supposed to be played by actress Lake Bell, but the role was ultimately filled by Marley Shelton. Lauren Graham was initially cast as Kate Roberts but decided to leave when her part was cut back, and
Battlestar Galactica 's Mary McDonnell soon came to the rescue and gned on to play the small part of Jill's vaguely airheaded mother.Scream 4 bears a few noticeable scars of its much publicized battle to become a finished product. Certain lines of dialogue make a little less sense in the theatrical film because they refer to details in scenes which were cut. Other cut scenes added depth and atmosphere to the picture, such as a brief close-up of a statue of Principal Himbry (Henry Winkler) who was murdered in the first Scream. In the finished film, the statue can barely be glimpsed. Cutting this heartfelt nod to the original clasc could not have shortened the movie by more than a couple seconds and I can only guess that it was a casualty of overzealous editing. A couple of other cut scenes indicate that Mary McDonnell would still have had a fair amount to do as Kate Roberts, even after whatever previous cuts were made to the role. Apparently, after she gned on, the part was scaled back even further. All the deleted and altered scenes are part of a special feature on the Scream 4 DVD. There are patches of certain scenes that were probably stricken for good reason, but for the most part, I prefer to think of them as being legitimate pieces of the Scream 4 story and I would love it if a new edition of the film was released with most of them put back in.The flaws of Scream 4 may be more apparent to me than to almost anyone. When you watch any film over and over, as I have this one, you tend to pick up little errors here and there that people less familiar with it haven't noticed. What I also notice more and more each time I watch this film is that any problems Scream 4 has are ultimately rather trivial in comparison to what the film gets right. For instance, Kate Roberts ends up being the most underdeveloped character in the franchise's history but it could be argued that her tiny role still works in the context of the film. Parents have always been notoriously absent from horror movies, no matter what ungodly terrors their children are facing. Kate Roberts appears in only 2 scenes, but that's 2 more scenes than a lot of horror movie parents appear in. Anyway, Scream has always been a series that sends up and mocks horror movie conventions even while the script calls for certain characters to live them out. By being absent for large chunks of the film, Kate Roberts becomes one of those characters who appears in every Scream - a hapless victim living out a cliche when she should really, really know better. Whether it was intentional or not, the fact that a top-notch actress like Mary McDonnell plays such a small part, and is dispatched so quickly, is apt to lead many viewers to turn a suspicious eye her way. After all, 2 previous Ghostfaces faked their own deaths before their identities were revealed. I saw Scream 4 in the theater with a bunch of other people and a good number of us suspected for a while that Kate Roberts would return and unmask herself as a new Ghostface.Flaws or no flaws, I'm thrilled that this movie managed to batten down and tough out the shitstorm it faced on its way to theaters. Both as a horror fan in general and a Scream fan in particular, there's a ton of stuff here I'd hate to have missed out on and it is still a strikingly coheve and effectively menacing slasher flick. Ghostface's attacks are more savage and often more elaborate than ever before and "he" is perhaps even crueler during "his" frequent phone calls than previous incarnations have been. He accuses dney of capitalizing on the murder of innocent people as she's standing in a room he painted with the blood and entrails of his latest victim, whose murder he went out of his way to draw as much attention to as posble while it was happening. He seems even more eager to vividly describe the exact nature of the wounds he wants to inflict on his victims this time, too, and the fact that he's so damn good at it helps Scream 4 strike the proper balance between chills and laughs.The (literal and figurative) butchering of the character of Kate Roberts notwithstanding, Scream 4 also boasts an impresve number of memorable new cast additions. Of course, many of them run afoul of Ghostface's blade in short order, but even the ones who die the soonest get some solid fleshing out before departing this mortal coil. Olivia Morris (Marielle Jaffe) is the first character in any Scream to make avoidance of dney a survival strategy, aptly noting that, with the large body count she has left in her wake, dney might be more at home in the Final Destination films and referring to her as "the Angel of Death". Rory Culkin and Erik Knudsen get many of the best lines as Woodsboro High Cinema Club predent Charlie Walker and his constantly video-blogging friend Robbie Mercer, gleefully taking up the job of laying out the new rules of horror movies for this more technologically advanced and movie-savvy new decade. Marley Shelton does such wonderful things with the role of Judy Hicks that I ended up grateful that the part went to her instead of Lake Bell. Shelton makes Judy a sweet, loyal and by-the-book police officer with a hopeless, dopey crush on her boss who seems harmless and suspicious all at the same time. Her best scene is perhaps the one where she asks dney if she remembers her and dney honestly says she doesn't. It turns out the two of them went to high school together. Judy claims to understand that dney probably remembers bloodshed and fear from her high school days more than anything else, but her eyes say otherwise as she backs away from dney, disappearing ominously into the shadows behind her. Trying to decipher whether its resentment, rage or mple sadness in Judy's eyes when dney admits she has no recollection of the woman is one of Scream 4's great pleasures, in my opinion, and it effectively deepens the mystery surrounding who the new Ghostface(s) might be.As good as the actors above are, my favorite newcomers this time around are Hayden Panettiere as Kirby Reed and Emma Roberts as dney's coun, Jill. Kirby's character has a surpringly gnificant part in a film known for cutting roles as much as posble. Perhaps even more than Charlie or Robbie, she seems like a new riff on the character of Randy Meeks from the original trilogy, albeit female, saser and far more fashionable. She is not in love with dney the way Randy was, but it was dney who inspired Kirby's love of horror films. She also clearly has extenve knowledge of horror movie trivia, which she attempts to employ to ensure the survival of herself and her friends. Also like Randy, she is not completely rattled when Ghostface gets her on the phone, instead thinking she can beat him at his own game. Remember how well that turned out for Randy? It works out about as well for Kirby. I found myself really rooting for and caring about Kirby and I conder her to be both a well-developed original creation in her own right and a heartfelt tribute to Randy Meeks.For her part, Jill seems rather pasve for much of the film, yet she shows flashes of anger whenever her ex-boyfriend Trevor (Nico Tortorella) comes around. It turns out there is a damn good reason for Jill's seeming pasvity in certain key scenes and once that reason stands revealed, both the character and the actress playing her really come into their own. A while back, I wrote another somewhat controveral article in which I spoke at length about my fondness for the performance of Emma Roberts in this film, so I won't repeat myself here. Suffice to say, the intenty and commitment to her character that Roberts displayed is reason enough all by itself to make Scream 4 my favorite of the Scream sequels. Not to be outdone, the 3 returning stars deliver strong performances as well, particularly Neve Campbell. dney Prescott seems at once stronger and more beaten down than ever before. She has managed to build a new life for herself as a best-selling author and when Ghostface disrupts that new life, she is perhaps more ready than ever to fight back. She's always gotten in a few good blows against every Ghostface to ever make an attempt on her life but she's never had moves quite like this before. In one pivotal scene which crackles with tenon, dney flips Ghostface over her head and down a flight of stairs before bowling him over in the hallway with a swift kick right to the face. However, her quick reflexes and willingness to give as good as she gets don't do much to ease dney's obvious feelings of frustration and helplessness. The first time Ghostface telephones dney in Scream 4, she answers with a defeated, regned "What?" that contains more real emotion and genuine acting talent than entire monologues delivered by many actors in other horror films. Scream 4 is more off-the-wall than the previous installments, in some ways. For the most part, this is a good thing, as in the opening scene, which is more elaborate and playful than the previous ones have been, yet ultimately still ends in grisly tragedy. Contrarily, Scream 4 also goes to a somewhat darker place than the previous films. The motive of the killer(s) this time around is more cynical, detached and cutting than we have seen from this franchise before - and that is really
saying something. Unfortunately, the motive also seemed a bit more believable to me this time around. I adore the other Scream films but the actions and mental states of the previous killers sometimes seem like a bit of a stretch to me when I really scrutinize them. Not so this time around. I call it "unfortunate" that Ghostface's motive seems real in Scream 4 because I'd rather not believe that society has gotten to a place where some people might actually commit murder if they thought it would earn them easy fame and a life free of having to work a normal, nine-to-five job. Sadly, when Ghostface belts out lines such as "You don't have to accomplish anything, you just have to have fucked up shit happen to you," and "I don't need friends, I need fans," it doesn't seem like quite as much of a stretch anymore to imagine a real person feeling that way. This sense of regretable authenticity made Scream 4 genuinely disturbing to me.Despite the tribulations this movie endured and their debatable effect on the finished film, Scream 4 is still the scariest and most hardcore of the 3 sequels in the franchise. It displays a willingness to push the envelope in almost every way posble that succeeds far more often than it fails and restores an unpredictability to the series which started seeping out of it somewhere around the end of Scream 2. I even thought there was a chance that dney, Dewey or Gale might actually get killed this time around, which I didn't conder to be much of a posbility during my first viewing of Scream 3. In my view, Scream 4 often gets far less credit than it deserves, but the fact that it has become something of an underdog only makes me love it that much more. Stay tuned for my next installment!
SCREAM 4
When Scream 3finished its theatrical run back in 2000, Scream fanatics were led to believe that we'd seen the last of a passel of characters who had become iconic. I'm talking, of course, about Neve Campbell's steely yet sympathetic dney Prescott, David Arquette's bumbling and brave Dewey Riley and Courtney Cox's intrepid, fame seeking reporter, Gale Weathers. Perhaps to an even larger extent, I'm also referring to Ghostface in all his/her various incarnations, whose identity has now grown into a concept bigger than any individual killer. Now, I may be the biggest Scream geek on the planet but I'm sure I wasn't the only one who felt a heady rush of pure joy when I heard the news that a Scream 4 was on the way. Because I don't live in a cave, I started hearing the rumors of troubles on set shortly after. Kevin Williamson was apparently fighting with everyone, parts of the script were allegedly undergoing rewrites, scenes were being re-shot and there were even a couple of cast changes. The character of police officer Judy Hicks was originally supposed to be played by actress Lake Bell, but the role was ultimately filled by Marley Shelton. Lauren Graham was initially cast as Kate Roberts but decided to leave when her part was cut back, and
Battlestar Galactica 's Mary McDonnell soon came to the rescue and gned on to play the small part of Jill's vaguely airheaded mother.Scream 4 bears a few noticeable scars of its much publicized battle to become a finished product. Certain lines of dialogue make a little less sense in the theatrical film because they refer to details in scenes which were cut. Other cut scenes added depth and atmosphere to the picture, such as a brief close-up of a statue of Principal Himbry (Henry Winkler) who was murdered in the first Scream. In the finished film, the statue can barely be glimpsed. Cutting this heartfelt nod to the original clasc could not have shortened the movie by more than a couple seconds and I can only guess that it was a casualty of overzealous editing. A couple of other cut scenes indicate that Mary McDonnell would still have had a fair amount to do as Kate Roberts, even after whatever previous cuts were made to the role. Apparently, after she gned on, the part was scaled back even further. All the deleted and altered scenes are part of a special feature on the Scream 4 DVD. There are patches of certain scenes that were probably stricken for good reason, but for the most part, I prefer to think of them as being legitimate pieces of the Scream 4 story and I would love it if a new edition of the film was released with most of them put back in.The flaws of Scream 4 may be more apparent to me than to almost anyone. When you watch any film over and over, as I have this one, you tend to pick up little errors here and there that people less familiar with it haven't noticed. What I also notice more and more each time I watch this film is that any problems Scream 4 has are ultimately rather trivial in comparison to what the film gets right. For instance, Kate Roberts ends up being the most underdeveloped character in the franchise's history but it could be argued that her tiny role still works in the context of the film. Parents have always been notoriously absent from horror movies, no matter what ungodly terrors their children are facing. Kate Roberts appears in only 2 scenes, but that's 2 more scenes than a lot of horror movie parents appear in. Anyway, Scream has always been a series that sends up and mocks horror movie conventions even while the script calls for certain characters to live them out. By being absent for large chunks of the film, Kate Roberts becomes one of those characters who appears in every Scream - a hapless victim living out a cliche when she should really, really know better. Whether it was intentional or not, the fact that a top-notch actress like Mary McDonnell plays such a small part, and is dispatched so quickly, is apt to lead many viewers to turn a suspicious eye her way. After all, 2 previous Ghostfaces faked their own deaths before their identities were revealed. I saw Scream 4 in the theater with a bunch of other people and a good number of us suspected for a while that Kate Roberts would return and unmask herself as a new Ghostface.Flaws or no flaws, I'm thrilled that this movie managed to batten down and tough out the shitstorm it faced on its way to theaters. Both as a horror fan in general and a Scream fan in particular, there's a ton of stuff here I'd hate to have missed out on and it is still a strikingly coheve and effectively menacing slasher flick. Ghostface's attacks are more savage and often more elaborate than ever before and "he" is perhaps even crueler during "his" frequent phone calls than previous incarnations have been. He accuses dney of capitalizing on the murder of innocent people as she's standing in a room he painted with the blood and entrails of his latest victim, whose murder he went out of his way to draw as much attention to as posble while it was happening. He seems even more eager to vividly describe the exact nature of the wounds he wants to inflict on his victims this time, too, and the fact that he's so damn good at it helps Scream 4 strike the proper balance between chills and laughs.The (literal and figurative) butchering of the character of Kate Roberts notwithstanding, Scream 4 also boasts an impresve number of memorable new cast additions. Of course, many of them run afoul of Ghostface's blade in short order, but even the ones who die the soonest get some solid fleshing out before departing this mortal coil. Olivia Morris (Marielle Jaffe) is the first character in any Scream to make avoidance of dney a survival strategy, aptly noting that, with the large body count she has left in her wake, dney might be more at home in the Final Destination films and referring to her as "the Angel of Death". Rory Culkin and Erik Knudsen get many of the best lines as Woodsboro High Cinema Club predent Charlie Walker and his constantly video-blogging friend Robbie Mercer, gleefully taking up the job of laying out the new rules of horror movies for this more technologically advanced and movie-savvy new decade. Marley Shelton does such wonderful things with the role of Judy Hicks that I ended up grateful that the part went to her instead of Lake Bell. Shelton makes Judy a sweet, loyal and by-the-book police officer with a hopeless, dopey crush on her boss who seems harmless and suspicious all at the same time. Her best scene is perhaps the one where she asks dney if she remembers her and dney honestly says she doesn't. It turns out the two of them went to high school together. Judy claims to understand that dney probably remembers bloodshed and fear from her high school days more than anything else, but her eyes say otherwise as she backs away from dney, disappearing ominously into the shadows behind her. Trying to decipher whether its resentment, rage or mple sadness in Judy's eyes when dney admits she has no recollection of the woman is one of Scream 4's great pleasures, in my opinion, and it effectively deepens the mystery surrounding who the new Ghostface(s) might be.As good as the actors above are, my favorite newcomers this time around are Hayden Panettiere as Kirby Reed and Emma Roberts as dney's coun, Jill. Kirby's character has a surpringly gnificant part in a film known for cutting roles as much as posble. Perhaps even more than Charlie or Robbie, she seems like a new riff on the character of Randy Meeks from the original trilogy, albeit female, saser and far more fashionable. She is not in love with dney the way Randy was, but it was dney who inspired Kirby's love of horror films. She also clearly has extenve knowledge of horror movie trivia, which she attempts to employ to ensure the survival of herself and her friends. Also like Randy, she is not completely rattled when Ghostface gets her on the phone, instead thinking she can beat him at his own game. Remember how well that turned out for Randy? It works out about as well for Kirby. I found myself really rooting for and caring about Kirby and I conder her to be both a well-developed original creation in her own right and a heartfelt tribute to Randy Meeks.For her part, Jill seems rather pasve for much of the film, yet she shows flashes of anger whenever her ex-boyfriend Trevor (Nico Tortorella) comes around. It turns out there is a damn good reason for Jill's seeming pasvity in certain key scenes and once that reason stands revealed, both the character and the actress playing her really come into their own. A while back, I wrote another somewhat controveral article in which I spoke at length about my fondness for the performance of Emma Roberts in this film, so I won't repeat myself here. Suffice to say, the intenty and commitment to her character that Roberts displayed is reason enough all by itself to make Scream 4 my favorite of the Scream sequels. Not to be outdone, the 3 returning stars deliver strong performances as well, particularly Neve Campbell. dney Prescott seems at once stronger and more beaten down than ever before. She has managed to build a new life for herself as a best-selling author and when Ghostface disrupts that new life, she is perhaps more ready than ever to fight back. She's always gotten in a few good blows against every Ghostface to ever make an attempt on her life but she's never had moves quite like this before. In one pivotal scene which crackles with tenon, dney flips Ghostface over her head and down a flight of stairs before bowling him over in the hallway with a swift kick right to the face. However, her quick reflexes and willingness to give as good as she gets don't do much to ease dney's obvious feelings of frustration and helplessness. The first time Ghostface telephones dney in Scream 4, she answers with a defeated, regned "What?" that contains more real emotion and genuine acting talent than entire monologues delivered by many actors in other horror films. Scream 4 is more off-the-wall than the previous installments, in some ways. For the most part, this is a good thing, as in the opening scene, which is more elaborate and playful than the previous ones have been, yet ultimately still ends in grisly tragedy. Contrarily, Scream 4 also goes to a somewhat darker place than the previous films. The motive of the killer(s) this time around is more cynical, detached and cutting than we have seen from this franchise before - and that is really
saying something. Unfortunately, the motive also seemed a bit more believable to me this time around. I adore the other Scream films but the actions and mental states of the previous killers sometimes seem like a bit of a stretch to me when I really scrutinize them. Not so this time around. I call it "unfortunate" that Ghostface's motive seems real in Scream 4 because I'd rather not believe that society has gotten to a place where some people might actually commit murder if they thought it would earn them easy fame and a life free of having to work a normal, nine-to-five job. Sadly, when Ghostface belts out lines such as "You don't have to accomplish anything, you just have to have fucked up shit happen to you," and "I don't need friends, I need fans," it doesn't seem like quite as much of a stretch anymore to imagine a real person feeling that way. This sense of regretable authenticity made Scream 4 genuinely disturbing to me.Despite the tribulations this movie endured and their debatable effect on the finished film, Scream 4 is still the scariest and most hardcore of the 3 sequels in the franchise. It displays a willingness to push the envelope in almost every way posble that succeeds far more often than it fails and restores an unpredictability to the series which started seeping out of it somewhere around the end of Scream 2. I even thought there was a chance that dney, Dewey or Gale might actually get killed this time around, which I didn't conder to be much of a posbility during my first viewing of Scream 3. In my view, Scream 4 often gets far less credit than it deserves, but the fact that it has become something of an underdog only makes me love it that much more. Stay tuned for my next installment!
ImmortalSidneyP
Saturday 6/09/2012 at 04:03 AM | 93550
