Wednesday, April 13, 2011

More meta than ever in Scream 4 which is almost as much as fun

Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and Ghostface are back in a dizzyingly self-aware fourth entry to the horror franchise

Wes Craven totally gave at the office, when it comes to reinventing the horror genre. He's done it three times -- with the drive-in classics "The Hills Have Eyes" and "Last House on the Left" in the '70s, with the original "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchise in the '80s (and wasn't he smart to avoid the abysmal 2010 reboot?) and with the "Scream" trilogy in the '90s. Asking him to do it all over again, at age 71, in a movie that's a sequel to a sequel to a sequel and that's an exercise in not just postmodern nostalgia but nostalgia for postmodernism, well, that's just asking too much. I mean, isn't it?

The fact that Craven almost pulls it off in "Scream 4," a movie that's somewhat entertaining, occasionally scary and only sporadically migraine-inducing in its level of Jesuitical, self-referential cleverness is -- OK, no, not miraculous. That's a cliché. It's almost really cool, without quite being really cool. If you viewed the laffs and thrills of the original "Scream" series through a delighted scrim of adolescent self-awareness, then "Scream 4" will probably provide an enjoyable return visit to Woodsboro High, whose student body metastatically feeds on horror movies (thereby justifying all the clueless culture-trolls' concerns about their pernicious effects).

If, like me, you were not merely old enough to shave during the first round of "Scream" but old enough to date divorced people, then "Scream 4" is pretty much a minor diversion. Thing is, you can't push postmodern horror any further than Craven has pushed it already; the characters in "Scream 2" and "Scream 3" were as conscious of horror-movie conventions (and their reverses, twists and turns) as you can get, and Craven's 1994 "New Nightmare" capped the Freddy series triumphantly by melting the boundaries between fiction and reality and having Craven, Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, studio head Bob Shaye appear as "themselves."

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