STRANGELY likable morsel of slasher-Pirandello that it is, Scream 4 asks more questions about what everything means than a high school sophomore. Sidney (“Novocain Neve” Campbell) is back in Woodsboro with a memoir to flog. It’s the 10th anniversary of the Ghostface murders, and at the bookstore, Sidney runs into fellow stalkee Gale (Courtney Cox), whose rival account of the murders has been adapted into the Stab film franchise. There have been seven movies so far, including “the one about time travel.”
Gale is in a literary rut, and she’s feeling a certain strain in her marriage with the town’s soft-headed sheriff (the ever-hapless David Arquette). Amid the doomed teens, there seems to be a newly minted surviving virgin: Emma Roberts as Sidney’s cousin Jill.
The film was shot in Ann Arbor, Mich., and the surroundings couldn’t look more scrubbed and recession-proof if director Wes Craven had time-traveled back to the Ike-era MGM lot. The 71-year-old Craven’s confidence carries the movie; he serves up a chain of startling pop-ups and knife-ups, spaced out with enough breathing room that that the audience can jump without feeling frazzled.
The Scream world resembles an Agatha Christie plot. The victims die less with horror than with embarrassment at having being fooled or found out. This franchise long ago wore out its scariness, if it ever had any. Craven seems OK with that, too. The town’s teens, showing up for a Stab marathon at an old barn, crow and cheer. These movies-within-movies seem to have all the primal terror of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Scream 4 embraces the decay of serious-as-cancer horror films that actually scared people and celebrates their transformation into idly watched entertainment: bad attitudeflattering wallpaper. Still, Craven’s game of “Stab the Chump” becomes interesting. Once the stage is cleared of the minor characters, the pain-free, even theoretical, violence suddenly starts to hurt—as it really should. By the end, Craven starts supplying what the movie had denied—that a murder film isn’t about witty bending of narrative reality but about what makes any crime story worth following: the motivation, the opportunity. It seemed at first that Scream 4 was jump-starting an old franchise that had said everything it was going to say 10 years ago. Surprise: It turns into something more like a crime of cinephiliac passion.
R; 111 min.
