Scream 4
🇵🇱 Steve G 🐝

Review by 🇵🇱 Steve G 🐝

Scream 4

2011
★

To be honest, Scream 4 was on to a loser even before I had settled down to watch it after me and a couple of friends had decided to round off a day of re-enacting regular events from our university days last year by going to watch what we suspected would be a crap film.

After all, earlier that day, we had walked past Bez having a tantrum about a parking ticket he just got. Scream 4 had no chance. In fact, Stanley Kubrick could have risen from the grave, popped into our screen, announced that he actually had finished that Napoleon film after all, and told us that we were the only ones that he was going to screen it for, and it still wouldn't be enough. Sorry, Stan. I just saw Bez having an eppy over a parking ticket. I'm good, thanks.

It probably didn't matter a great deal anyway because Scream 4 was crap anyway. I was never a big fan of the original nor its sequels. I was not impressed by the supposedly clever-clever ironic self-referencing stuff and none of them were funny nor scary enough to come close to rising above 'mildly entertaining' to 'pretty boring'. So I wasn't exactly massively hyped about seeing a fourth instalment.

Nothing about it suggested to me that it was anything more than Wes Craven gathering up some cash for a new house. Tired, dull and overly complicated with its ridiculous film within a film within a TV broadcast within an internet streaming story (I think that's what it was about anyway), it hands out a few bitchy one-liners to the generally underrated Courteney Cox but that's about it. STAR IN SOMETHING GOOD, COURTENEY.

Actually, no, I tell a lie. Hayden Panettiere. Once you get past her bizarre hairstyle (had her hairdresser been poked in both eyes really hard or something?) she turns in a quality of performance that not only surprised me because I wasn't aware that she was this capable, but also because this was hardly the film that you expected such a decent effort to be put into. It was quite the eye opener.

If only Emma Roberts, in an absolutely laughable display, especially in the last 20 minutes, had taken some time to check out Panettiere's performance. Maybe she wouldn't have embarrassed herself so badly here. Poor Marley Shelton sleepwalks through the film looking utterly bored, David Arquette once again manages to pull off his trademark 'confused but likeable' effort, and Mary McDonnell pops in, looks horrified, and promptly pops out.

Clearly Craven doesn't care any more. But surely he could have made it less apparent?

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