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Okay, so I made those last two reveals up, but they would not have been out of place if they had been in the actual film. Whilst there’s a certain sense of fun to opening Scream 4 with not one fake out but a whole series of them, inadvertently turning it into the horror film equivalent of the Pre-Taped Call-In Show sketch from Mr. Show, there’s also an air of smug self-satisfaction to it that is really off-putting. It’s clear that Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson were keenly aware of the criticisms that would be leveled at Scream 4, so they go out of their way to have the characters in these fake outs describe the flaws aloud, allowing them to get ahead of the critics. The problem with that is it only works if the rest of the work subverts those expectations, in the process rendering the criticisms moot. What actually happens is that Scream 4 plays into every single one of the criticisms in the worst way; the post-modernism feels stale and forced, the new characters feel under-developed so their deaths become increasingly meaningless, and many of the elements feel like rehashes of previous films in the series. Rather than acting as a clever comment on the nature of sequels and remakes it just acts as a handy catch-all that allows Craven and Williamson to be lazy and derivative by saying, “Oh, but it’s meant to be lazy and derivative because it’s a commentary on lazy and derivative sequels.” So, following that logic, the next time you plan to commit a felony of some sort, make sure you tell everyone around you about it in excruciating detail, claim that it’s an exercise in post-modernism, and then the law won’t be able to touch you.

There are more important things in life than horror movies, you know

We’re going to jump straight into spoiler territory here, so if you haven’t seen Scream 4, which I assume is most of you based on the box office, I doubt you’ll care that much about it being ruined, so read on. After 90-something minutes of introducing us to a host of bright new faces and killing most of them off (including, most tragically, the luminous Alison Brie as a representative from Sidney’s publisher), the film settles down to the business of revealing who the killer is from the selection of identikit teenagers who haven’t been sliced up but good yet. Turns out that it was Sidney’s cousin, played by Emma Roberts, and her gawky horror film-obsessed friend, played by Rory “The Weakest Culkin” Culkin, and they have re-staged killings from Sidney’s past in order to orchestrate a situation in which they can become famous as survivors of the very murders they committed, much as Sidney became famous after surviving the events of Scream. It’s a kind of clever satire of celebrity culture and the cult that surrounds survivors of harrowing events, but it’s sort of undermined by the fact that Rory Culkin’s character reveals his true nature by killing Hayden Panettiere’s character right after she tells him that she has a thing for him. Now, I’m willing to forgive certain problems with the plotting of the Scream films because they take place in a heightened version of our reality, but to suggest that someone would kill Hayden Panettiere because it fits into their master plan, rather than to keep up the pretense for a little while longer and sleep with her? Even if they had set it in space they could not have found a way to make the film seem less plausible.

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