SCREAM 4 (otherwise known as SCRE4M)  Rated MA15+ ****SPOILER FREE!****

Okay, I can maybe – just maybe – be accused of being a bit of an elitist snob, when it comes to film. I don’t spend much time in multiplexes, let’s put it that way. I’m really excited about Lars Von Trier’s new film. I have every David Lynch dvd you can buy. I thought the original Funny Games was better than the remake. I thought Rabbit Hole should have won every Oscar for everything. I’m like that. Feel free to sigh “wanker” under your breath, if you must. But, unlike many of my pretentious film wanker friends, I do have an inkling, somewhere inside, for the occasional venture into those hideous cinema centers for something – gulp – mainstream. But it’s a certain kind of rubbish that gets me there. It can be rubbish, as long as it’s clever rubbish. Then, it actually does become a kind of art. I think Basic Instinct is art. I adore Tim Burton – most of the time (let’s all forget Alice, shall we?). I think Romi & Michelle’s High School Reunion is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. And I will tell crowds of intellectual wankers that the Scream movies – every one of them – are god damned cool. “It’s actually really clever. And fun. But clever. And scary!” I don’t have too many big words to use – though I’ll happily put it in a postmodern context, if that is required – but I love them. And so, this week, while an invite to the Scream 4 preview screening wouldn’t have excited too many of the city’s “serious reviewers”, I, for one, was pretty psyched.

Now, only a couple of hours fresh from the experience, one of the first people in the world to finally witness it, I’m… well… feeling guilty about the morning I completely wasted by revelling in the excitement, watching youtube trailers, reading Wes Craven’s exclusive blogs on MTV. He told me – he told all of us – that he had come back for a reason. Even Campbell this week went out into pressland to shoot down the very concept of sequels – a strange thing to say, on one hand (in retrospect, it’s too unfathomably hypocritical for me to ever respect her – ever – again), but naturally all designed to assure us then that she had indeed come back to this particular sequel because it was just so freakin’ good. How was this most iconic of horror franchises going to resurrect itself, over a decade later, in a different world?

I ask this, because I’m quite sure it was the governing question that drove the board meetings that ultimately are responsible for Scream 4. I’m not sure if there aren’t a bunch of copywriters and market analysts somewhere who should maybe have been credited for… you know… basically constructing a hunk of crap with the sole function of making mula. It’s that stale. It’s that fake. It’s that deathly unfunny, deathly unclever, and, most of all, deathly unfrightening. And, despite what Wes spent all week assuring us on MTV, it’s not only lacking in originality, but entirely built on mirrors – formulas – ideas – of every other Scream. It’s the same film, with the volume turned down. Oh, except for spoon-feeding tacked-on monologues where we have the film’s hollow “messages” shoved down our throats with slightly more velocity than the actual stabbing. Something about how young people today use iPhones, and film themselves at parties, and have blogs, and, like, are destroying themselves to be, like, famous and shit. Or something. Well, that’s what it says – almost literally – in one of the more painfully scripted moments placed so wrongly in the film’s climax. But, truth be told, it’s all pretty painful.

Is Wes just too old? I couldn’t help but ponder this, after seeing Scream 4. And if so, what happened to him? Is his creativity gone? Or has this guy just got to a point where he’ll sell out to whatever suit came up with the idea of repackaging Scream as a blockbuster cross-demographic sensation (pulling in older audiences on nostalgia, and getting a new audience who haven’t experienced its originality) because he needs to buy a bigger house or whatever? Wes Craven is a talented man. He’s really smart. He’s actually incredibly creative. I respect him. But does this guy actually believe the rubbish he’s saying in interviews about this film? Because if he does, then… well… oh dear. His twilight ‘aint quite at the caliber of his midday sun, if you know what I mean.

It is Wes who has announced his film to be a cutting commentary on the tech generation. I actually agree with him, in the vague, overall sentiment echoed in the film – that this contemporary mindset is breeding a generation of inept monsters. But it is so completely shallow in how it is presented and explored in the film, it simply feels like an old timer, beholding a new world he doesn’t quite grasp, and barking, “Goodness, these kids today! They’re all connected to the interwhatever, and looking at their phones all day, and downloading those app things, and filming everything they do! What’s the world coming to?!” And yeah, okay, sure. What is the world coming to? But this film doesn’t in any way ask that question beyond that image of the barking old man turning his nose up, as any generation does, at the one below him – this film doesn’t actually “get it”. It sees it. Yes, the kids are walking around glued to their screens. But it doesn’t get it. So, really, it has nothing to say. And yet, the film spends so much effort trying to say it. You almost wanna shout “Oh, stop thinking you’re clever, and at least scare us with knives for a couple of hours!” And that’s not something I say lightly.

As for the “plot”… well… let’s not call it a plot. I don’t think Scream 4 has a plot. It has a bunch of old movies – mostly, its own – stuck together and kind of “rebranded”. And because the plotline sees a new killer copying the original murders (just as Sydney arrives back in Woodsboro – on the anniversary of the original murders – for her book signing tour!), this means… you guessed it… the film literally uses the same concepts as the murders of the first film. The film even has the audacity to point this out, itself – thinking it’s being clever to do so, no less – but all the Cleverness™ in the world can’t mask for how lazy this is. Or how unthrilling it is, to go see a supposedly new innovation, and be hit with such a level of rehash. By the end, the film’s cleverness finally admits the truth – a bigger revelation than the absurd twist ending (don’t spend too much time trying to figure it out, okay? It really doesn’t even matter, and makes almost no sense) – that, when it’s all said and done, Scream 4 isn’t a “sequel”… it’s a kind of remake. It’s a remake having sex with a sequel. Does that, at least, qualify as New™?! I guess so. If only the one original thing the film can be credited for didn’t seem to simply be a way to be lazy. This film feels like it took five minutes to make. It probably met a week long deadline to write. I imagine around 80% of it was phoned in. Or maybe it was done via email. You know how it is these days, it’s all on the computer, it’s like nobody even interacts anymore. Wes will happily tell you that, after all.

Somewhat ironically, the very generation it’s supposedly criticising don’t mind if a film doesn’t have a plot – in fact, they increasingly prefer films not to. They don’t relate to their world through narrative (like those old timers did). They pay for a two hour hit of visceral, ultimately nihilistic, stimulation. But this is going to be the final nail on Scream 4′s coffin. This, truth be told, is the reason for the secrecy behind it, and the restraint placed against preview audiences. The thing is, marketing groups can paste these sorts of films together, thinking they’re on a winning formula. But, once the thing has actually been made, they’re not dumb. They see it, and they know what is going to happen. And they know what will happen to this. That’s why they went so hellbent on the hype. That hype will pull in mammoth opening crowds, because nothing has been allowed to spoil the anticipation – it’s been left up to their marketing department (all anyone knows of this is commercial – we’ve only been informed by ads). But the reality, after that first week or so, will set in. It may find a cult audience within its own fanboy scene, where the level of sycophantic consumption (though, ironically, they all talk about Scream, without even a hint of irony, as a brilliant swipe at “consumerism”) is high enough to completely blind them to the film’s actual quality. But I suspect it won’t get much broader than that, past the first week of eager crowds. Granted, a film today only has to pull off those big openings to economically warrant a sequel (even Tron – which I really didn’t mind, but seemed to be in a minority group in that reaction – is getting another one); but this is not the mammoth hit many were thinking this might be, and certainly not in the long run.

This is mostly because, for all its appealing to its original fans, it still needs the new generation to succeed. And that new generation won’t take to Scream 4. They’ll find it dull, even kinda silly. They’ll think there’s “too much talking” (I already heard one of the younger audience members tonight conclude just this, as the credits rolled). They’ve clearly put more blood in this one – to try to appease those blood-hungry youngsters who have been desensitised to the horribly graphic torture scenes of the past decade – but the blood won’t cut it. And stabbing?! Meh. That’s boring. Someone gets stabbed, some blood squirts out – sometimes, quite a lot – but that’s it. They fall down, they stop moving. Over. These kids are used to the most horrific scenes, where victims are not stabbed a couple of times in ten seconds, but forced to endure endless moments of spectacular agonies, and all before their young eyes. I don’t in any way agree with torture porn and its influence on this genre, but the facts are the facts. This film does not work as a horror movie to the torture porn generation – and no amount of catty, “clever” post-modern references are going to change that. To these kids, Scream 4 is for pussies. As it is, there’s only really one killing sequence every 25 minutes or so – the first hour goes by with very little actually happening. It opens with the expected, and then? It turns into a bizarre – unfunny – comedy-come-parody (wrongly thinking it’s being satire). And the kids aren’t down with that. They don’t get anything its referencing, anyway. We saw this happen with Tron (which aimed to hit a similar cross-demo, and failed completely).

In short, they won’t in any way understand its generational cynicism (in fact, many will be perplexed by its paper-thin under-depiction of their technological lives), very few will get the film’s cultural references to itself, and hardly any of them will be very scared. They want the volume at 11. They want it hard and fast. This doesn’t give them that. They will walk out, then, having been given nothing. They’ll jump on twitter, on facebook, they’ll text their friends. They’ll tell them what a bore Scream 4 is. It will be murdered by the very thing it says is murdering a society. That’s a fascinating kind of phenomenon, in a way – but not in the “clever” way it intended.

That leaves the older audiences – the ones who, like me, were there for the original. Okay, so they have the characters they love, and, yes, they get lots of screentime to spend with those characters. But that screentime is empty, often embarrassing. The cast seem to be ashamed to be there. You can’t particularly blame them. And so, the nostalgia is all very well – again, it will pull big opening crowds off this – but the fact is that they won’t get what they’re paying for, either. Unlike the youngsters, they’ll at least be susceptible to the scares – silent house walks near open windows, men in capes, knives, these things can scare the crap out of them – but it pales in comparison to those unbearably tense moments in the original films. As it is, they speed by at lightning pace; while the final death count is quite high, not only are there not many actual scare sequences (around these killings), they’re mostly over in about two minutes (the count is partly so high because, this time, the killer rips through some murders in flashes – groups – without those thrillingly suspenseful – and often quite long – lead-up scenes). The violin sets in, there’s a quick walk in the shadows, then bam! Everything you think is going to happen does; then, it’s over, and back to… well…. empty, embarrassing dialogue and hollow statements about kids on iPhones.

So conscious of itself is Scream 4, in its intention to be a horror movie that lives partly away from the horror, it seems to rush the horror there is, just to fit in more “plot”. Except, it isn’t a very good plot, nothing much happens, and the comedy borders on tv slapstick sitcom. I laughed once – once – at the very end, in a line every bit as stand-out as it was intended. Yet, its punchline, “don’t fuck with the original”, was, once you gave it any thought, yet another brutal irony for this film. Sure. Don’t fuck with an original. But surely, the solution to that is to leave the original alone and not repeat it, half assed, either? If only the film had’ve listened to its own self-important wisdom.

Promises, promises. Scream 4 gave them to so many. But it has short changed us all. Let’s hope that boardroom doesn’t green-light a phone conference to pitch another. But with that opener weekend I’ll be stunned if it doesn’t pull off (you can hear those cash registers, already), I’m guessing this won’t be the last we see of Ghostface. That’s not that exciting, now. Let us never forget his wonderful origins. But let us accept that it is, I’m sorry to say, over.  As elitist as this sounds – so be it (and if you know what I mean, you’ll know exactly what I mean) – but this is a lowest common denominator film. C’mon, you know what I’m saying. And there’s plenty of those around, after all. There are plenty who flock to them. But Scream?! Scream somehow crossed over – it was never high art, but it was better than that. Was.

It is with a sorry heart that I inform you that the battle between oldschool slasher horror and contemporary torture porn has been waged. Gen Y won. And that, at least, is frightening.

*listen to Aaron’s live radio chat from Celluloid Dreams (2SERFM) below….