Make me want to Scream

I'm still trying to figure out how I felt about Scream 4. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either. Coming out of the theater, I didn't regret getting up at 8 a.m. to catch a two buses out to the mall so I would only have to pay $5 to see it. Buttery popcorn and cherry coke for breakfast ain't no thang for me. It was more interesting than Insidious and it was better than Craven's last outing, My Soul to Take. But mostly, I thought it was really bland. Perhaps I am desensitized or jaded or cynical, but it just had very little impact on me. There were very few surprises, no real laughs and I didn't jump once. Even Insidious made me jump. And My Soul to Take made me laugh at times, although probably not for the reasons Craven might have wanted.

The Scream franchise has never held a place in my heart. It's a generational thing I guess. I grew up on Michael, Freddy, and Jason. I was raised on the cliches Scream mocks. (I had also already seen Scream's predecessor, Student Bodies waaaaaay back in the day.) And a lot of the horror cliches that are lampooned are things that came about in quicky cash-ins and sucky sequels to original movies that weren't cliched. While John Carpenter's Halloween, apparently, established the slasher film template (killer in a mask, "sluts" die, virgins live, 'I'll be right back' will be one's last words, etc.), I don't see it that way because that wasn't the films INTENT.

Side rant: Have I mentioned how much I hate that Annie and Linda are labeled "sluts" at all? Assuming "slut" refers to a woman who sleeps around, how are either of these girls sluts? They both have boyfriends. If it is just a matter of them being sexually active at all, then maybe people need to get over their madonna/whore complexes. End rant.

So the fact that the Scream films chose to beat that particular horse meant nothing to me. I was already rolling my eyes at the big-breasted girl running up the stairs instead of out the door.

Anyway, so the fact this franchise didn't really have much meaning for me may have factor into why I was mostly lukewarm on this outing. That doesn't mean there weren't aspects that were unlikeable. Most of the new kids sucked. I just didn't care as much about most of them as I did for the kids from the first movie. I liked Kirby (probably more than I liked Tatum, but that's because I don't like Rose McGowan), but the boyfriend was a stalkery douche and the film geeks were so uninteresting they shouldn't even be allowed to speak Randy's name. The endearing Dewey and Gayle from the first two films (I have blanked out all of Scream 3, except Courtney Cox's frightening bangs) are gone. Now they are bickery and cold and mismatched in a really uncomfortable way. And Marley Shelton's character was pretty pointless.

While I get what Craven was saying about people being so desperate for fame they will do anything, it just seems like old news. We have now been suffering through reality TV (in its present vein) for about 20 years (good GOD!!! I remember watching the first season of the Real World during it's original run!). And dumbass, horrible people committing murders in the hopes of being famous has been going on since John Douglas (or was it Robert Ressler?) coined the phrase 'serial killer'. Everything is being filmed all the time, huh, Wes? Well, no duh. That fact was brought home to me when we ended up with footage of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center.

I said in my comments on My Soul to Take that Craven seems a bit out of touch and I feel it shows here just as it did in that film. It's like he has had these ideas 10 years ago, but no one would listen to him until now.

Since I am finishing this post almost 5 months AFTER I originally started it, I don't really remember much about the film (which isn't much of an endorsement). I just remember being pretty bored and disappointed by Craven again.