scream 4

I really liked the original scream.

As I'm sure everyone knows, the clever thing about scream 1 was the meta-textual stuff.  Or to put it another way it constantly referred to classic slasher films, yet was a slasher film in and of itself.  In particular it played with the idea that many of the victims were slasher fans and new all about such films as Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street.

It was very well done - it didn't step too far over the line of reasonable-ness, yet it had plenty of fun with the format too.  It managed to work as a story as well as a slasher film and a meditation on both.

Screams 2 and 3 were less good.  They were written by the same guy and tried to bring in the types of things that happen in sequels (the second was almost unrelated, but the third brought it back to the origin, for example).  It also got even more met textual in that in the Scream universe the events of the first film spawned a film series called "stab" (a film-within-a-film).

Those sequels were okay - the trouble with any sequel of course is that people who come to them are doing so because they enjoyed the first film, so the temptation is to give them basically the same thing, but of course then they know what to expect.  While the plots weren't exactly predictable and "the same" the basic idea - the meta-textual thing - had to be the same, so it made them fairly predictable.

Scream 4 essentially tries to do what Scream did, but this time including the idea of self-referencing and meta-textuality.  In other words if Scream was "what would happen if a slasher film happened in real life?" then Scream 4 is "what would happen if a slasher film happened in real life if a slasher film had already happened in real life and been absorbed into the milieu?"

You probably see the problem - certainly I think the problem I had writing that paragraph (and I therefore assume you had reading it) hints at the underlying difficulties.  It's become too complicated.  It's meta-text of meta-text.  It's like a self-parody of a self-parody: it could be brilliant or (as here) it could just feel like it's derivative with too many bells and whistles added on.

Don't get me wrong - there are still some good killings and thrills, it's just that you can get those in any good slasher film.  The bits that made Scream stand out when double-heaped end up making this film feel overly complicated.