Well I guess it was inevitable. After more than a decade ghostface is back terrorizing Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and all her horny post-post high school friends. Although I've become completely numb (maybe even accepting) of all the sequelizing being done by Hollywood over the past few years, I really have to question the decision to continue a franchise that took a dive Greg Louganis would be proud of at the beginning of the millennium and hasn't exactly had its apologists clamoring for its return.
That being said, I do understand Wes Craven needs a career boost (which has been necessary for awhile and is even more dire, now that My Soul to Take has received such a critical and commercial pounding that even Michael Berryman's's face feels sorry for it), and all three of the previous films earned more than triple their respective budgets. For better or worse, Scream really did change the landscape of horror (and it's a pretty great movie, to boot. No seriously, it is. If it were released on Blu-Ray right now, I'd snag it). I seem to be the only person who didn't hate the second film (in fact I like it quite a bit, even with Jerry O'Connell's strange mid-movie musical number). Scream 3, though, is Hepatitis C wrapped in H1N1. Not only did the movie spark a downward spiral that Craven hasn't yet recovered from (although Red Eye is a lot of fun), it's incredibly sterile and a slog to sit through.
I've watched the trailer for Scream 4 (note: I will never, ever refer to this movie as Scr4m - that's Mark Pezzula's The Everything Film Blog guarantee), and can't really muster anything but a want to watch the first film. It's actually kind of cool to see these characters together again, but I have a feeling that's only because it conjures a certain sense of nostalgia in me. Scream was an important turning point not only in the canon of mainstream horror, but also in my personal film viewing experience.
The trailer predictably signals that the film will attack horror movies from a 2010 perspective, and hints that all sorts of meta things will happen throughout its running time. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, of course, but after almost a decade and a half of hundreds of self-aware horror films highlighting the tropes and cliches of the genre, it'd be nice if the franchise that kick-started that whole trend took the idea and got it drunk and high in the parking lot of Dairy Queen for a little bit, only to drop it off at its parents house hours later, leaving Mr. and Mrs. Scream to wonder why their son is acting the way he is, but enjoying every minute of his odd and out of character behavior.
And who knows, maybe it will do just that. Scream 4 is still six months away from release, and it could turn out to be the same reinvention of the horror genre that the first film was. Check out the trailer at Trailer Addicts.
One last thing: anyone else think they spot Anna Faris at 1:03?
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