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By Andrew Watson · April 18, 2011
Writing a parody or a spoof always seems a like a great idea. The jokes seem easy to write, you can mock a scene, a character, a real life person, and everything seems so natural. But in the middle to this process you realize something is not quite right, the script isn’t working. You add more jokes, come up with another clever scene involving the age old ‘creepy janitor’, yet it still doesn’t work. It’s only when the film appears on the big screen that you understand what the problem is: the jokes are actually harming your screenplay.
Say you’re writing an action spoof and want to mock a cliché that all action villains are eastern European. You create a character that is so stereotypically German, with obviously evil intentions and then proceed to come up with some jokes to mock him with. In order to mock that cliché however, you’ve created your own clichéd character. Audiences will pick up on this, and if you don’t add to that character with anything new and simply point out that he is a stereotype, they will get bored. It’s a one-note joke. Your film has now become a minefield, where you constantly have to balance original ideas and clichés. Quite often, it is the former that is sacrificed.
Scream 4 (or Scre4m as the marketing posters so cleverly advertise) fails to navigate this minefield, and loses its plot to smug self-satire. While the opening is decent enough, the middle is a flabby and dull affair, with a boring debate on “remakes,” which is the main in-joke it offers to the audience. The opening begins with a series of film within films in which the various pretty girls bemoan the latest trend in torture porn while being *shock* stabbed by the friend sitting next to them. It’s quite clever, but it’s overly long, leaving less time to develop the plot or the characters.
All of the young and hip characters reference twitter and Facebook and YouTube, but at the expense of any real character development, causing a lot less emotional investment in the scenes where they meet their demise. It all feels a little bit tacked on, in an attempt to make it clear that this is a new movie that’s up to date but without saying anything new about these technologies. Scream 4 could have made an interesting horror film about young kids and how the next generation communicate with each other. Instead, they just mention in passing about killings ‘on the net’. It’s disappointing.
This is not to say that Scream 4 never has interesting or inventive moments. Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) is one of the few new characters that have any charisma, which adds to her and Charlie’s (Rory Culkin, yes, he’s related) pop quiz from hell, which delivers much needed tension. Although it’s pulp and over the top, I quite enjoyed the twist-a-thon ending, which I was not expecting and so deserves some kudos on the writing front. These were the kinds of moments that reminded me that this is Wes Craven directing, the same man who has defined the genre over the last 30 years.
Dewey (David Arquette) and Gale ‘s (Courtney Cox) relationship serve as a fun bit of comic relief between all the grim killing, as Gale clashes with David’s fellow officer in a fit of jealously. She keeps the film afloat while the slasher-fodder plod along. The film does do a good job of being quite funny in places, with some excellent one-liners throughout, even if it’s a bit smug.
Ultimately however, Scream 4 falls into the trap of being worse than the films it’s trying to mock. It’s funny and watchable, but never manages to really stray beyond being unremarkable and forgettable. This is a crime that most spoofs commit too often. What doesn’t help is that it’s Scream 4, the fourth installment in a franchise (which it has a smug little joke about, despite the fact it is probably much worse than a lot of the returning sequels). If they had taken some of these ideas and placed them in an entirely new spoof, they might have had a much better film. Maybe it's time the Scream mask should be put back in the cupboard, so the franchise… would just die, already!