MOVIE REVIEW: So obnoxious you could ‘Scream’

Critics like to throw around terms like “postmodern,” “deconstructionist,” “satirical” and even “entertaining” to describe the movie “Scream,” but “Scream” was always anything but. It was smug and, like practically anything produced in the ’90s, slathered with a heavy dollop of cheap irony. “Scream” didn’t reinvent the slasher genre — it only made it more facile. What’s the point of making your characters aware of the cliches that surround them when they still blindly adhere to them? And stuffing your movie with references to other movies doesn’t make it smart, it makes it “Epic Movie.” “Scream” was never as clever as it considered itself to be, but that didn’t stop it from becoming popular, nor did it stop it from spawning three sequels each more numbingly self-aware than the last. “Scream 4” marks the series at its most obnoxious. It isn’t because the film is unnecessary, it’s because “Scream 4” realizes it’s unnecessary and is only too happy to keep reminding audiences about its pointlessness.

In what has to count as a first for this series, “Scream 4” opens with a sequence that is legitimately clever. Without giving too much away, it’s a self-reflexive bit that is unpredictable as well as amusing and comments on the original film in a gently vicious way. Unfortunately, once this moment ends, it’s business as usual, and “Scream 4” quickly conforms to its audience’s expectations. After writing a popular self-help tome, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), one of the few surviving characters in the “Scream” series, makes a brief stop in her hometown of Woodsboro in order to promote the book. But on the eve of her return, old Ghostface starts killing off the teenaged cast. As a side note, Kevin Williamson returned to scripting duties on “Scream 4” and although he was never very good at crafting believable dialogue, he’s really terrible here. At 46, he now only has the vaguest grasp of what the teens of today are actually like. In Williamson’s world, all teenage girls dish about the latest episode of “Top Chef,” proudly display “Suspiria” on their DVD shelves and speak in an irritating combination of techno jargon and movie references.

At any rate, Sidney and her niece (Emma Roberts) are Ghostface’s prime targets, and to say anymore would spoil it for those who might actually want to see this. So please enjoy these spoilers from “Hop” instead: Somebody eats a jellybean that came out of a cartoon rabbit’s ass, and then Easter is saved.

For those who dislike the “Scream” series, “Scream 4” is definitely not going to change your mind. Yet again the characters are not recognizably human, they’re just human-shaped vessels created solely for the purposes of dying or sarcastically barking out film trivia. And speaking of film trivia, “Scream 4” is filled with it. In fact it’s pretty much what passes for wit in this movie. The film references are ever-present and suffocating. Why just have a cop get stabbed in the forehead when you can have a cop named Anthony Perkins who mumbles out a “Die Hard” reference after he gets stabbed in the forehead. And hey, people love it when characters stare into the camera and rattle off the titles of every horror movie remake from the last 10 years, right? That’s irri-tainment!

Yet even those who enjoy the “Scream” series will be disappointed by “Scream 4” because it doesn’t take the series in a new or interesting direction. Although quick moving, “Scream 4” is indistinguishable from the slasher movies it looks down on, and by the time the unlikely final twist has been revealed, the film has long since ran out of steam. But the worst aspect about “Scream 4” is that its existence only means that “Scary Movie 5” isn’t that far behind. Are you happy now, “Scream 4”?

Rating: W W