Saturday 16 April 2011

The unexpected is the new cliche

Scream 4 or Scre4m or Scre Four Em (2011)
Chosen by me as I like to go to the cinema a lot and it has Alison Brie in it.


Well if the unexpected is the new cliche Scream 4 has nothing to worry about as there is nothing unexpected in this film what-so-ever.
It moans about sequels and remakes of horror films marginalising character development to just parade non-entities on screen and kill them. And then does exactly that. No one here is a fully formed character, everyone is simply designed as a red herring. It doesn't really matter who pulls that mask off at the end and reveals themself - it's as arbitrary as some of the victims (the killers' plot really makes no sense). It half heartedly tries to put forth the idea that even some of the original cast could be our Ghostface this time but Scream is not exactly known for it's braveness in storytelling (it must have the highest retention rate of it's core cast for any horror series, one of the killers even exasperates that Sydney is like Michael Myers and just won't die) and it knows it.
Despite everyone in town being a potential Ghostface it's still incredibly obvious which way the film is going to go (some of the other red herrings have much better reasons to be killing but still), a supposedly main character seems sidelined for much of the film which should be a very good indication of their malefic intentions.
It's a fairly slick vehicle to see pretty young things killed off but little more. The remake gags don't offer a huge amount more than the sequel jokes did back with Scream 2 but also is underdeveloped enough to make the killers' bizarre plan not nearly clever enough as a concept.

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