I don’t even believe I am going to review this one, but in the spirit of Halloween here it goes: Scream 4 is an effort to be campy and funny; but instead is stupid with very few laughs.
The movie is everything a scary movie should not be and the franchise should have quit with Scream3, which came out eleven years ago; as a matter of fact, the franchise should have stopped after Scream 1. The movie is loaded with gratuitous violence. In the first five minutes there are about ten knifings, and that is even before anyone knows what is going on. By the time the movie is over, I would approximate about a thousand people have been laid out by the butcher knife wielding Ghostface. (By the way, Ghostface has to be most idiot ghoul that has ever appeared in horror flicks. He looks like a dead man snoring.) Anyway, the original core cast has reassembled (Neve Campell, Courtney Cox, David Arquette) are back in Woodsboro where Sidney (Neve Campbell) is in town to promote her book which describes her account of the original massacre in 1996. Guess what happens next? Ghostface makes an anniversary appearance by slaughtering people all over town. Brilliant. The movie has a special twist though: this is a movie, within a movie, within another movie. Brilliant.
I am not going any farther with this because it does not warrant any more of my time. How is it that Hitchcock made a movie (Physco) that had only one subtle stabbing, but was one thousand times scarier than this nonsense? Writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven need to find something else to do. Billiards anyone?