Screams within Screens within SCREAM 4

O Courtney Cox, you were my favorite Friend, but now with lip all Howardly and skin glowing like a radioactive-luminous mask, and your Gail Weathers character still yoked to David Arquette's perma-wincing sheriff Dewey, yours truly is a SCREAM 4 for the Munch. Just as the ghostface killa mask is frozen in a 'Scream' so your once gorgeous face is now frozen in a world you never made, and which you haunt in a shadow state like that other memorable Munch painting, Madonna.

The rest of the original cast is also back, with changes reflecting the relatively longer stretch since the last installment. Sidney's a glum memoirist, Gail a struggling fiction writer stay-at-home wife to Dewey the sheriff, whose bewildered, pleading look lets you know he can't even find his cell phone yet remains determined to do all the decision-making for the community with no help from his shrewd wife. He's the sheriff! Yet in a way he's almost an accessory to the crime through his sheer idiocy. Upping the ante of hot mess women in Dewey's wife lurks a cute but also clueless deputy with DSM-IV-darkened teeth. This woman is so asking for death she doesn't even think to unsnap her gun out of its holster as she's stalking a mass murderer whom she knows in the next room!

"I love incompetent sheriffs!"

The last time a sheriff and deputy were this outmaneuvered was in Monogram's 1944 classic, VOODOO MAN (above, my praise here). As happens there and in SCREAM 4, the characters eventually learn to not even bother calling the cops, who would likely just shoot them by mistake. Still, since Dewey's refusal to accept any help even from his far more competent wife endangers everyone in town, it can't even be called well-meaning! Just lazy scripting.

But that's just annoying logic issues, what marks SCREAM 4 as the logical extension of the first three: media desensitizing, is in full swing. Obsessively watched by the local townsfolk on their iPhones or sMartPadZ, the film-within-a-film about the events in the last film/s, Stab, has led to an inexhaustible slew of sequels in which to provide a refracted meta chorus to the ongoing events, locking the future and the past in an endless trope lasso. Thank God, for this refraction is all the film has going for it, a post-modern edge used like a knife, for like few others Craven understands that self-reflexivity heightens scariness rather than detracts from it. And in that sense the films get scarier as the self-referential sequels accrue. The first SCREAM had just itself  to bounce off of in relation to other horror films, namely the 80s slasher cycle; SCREAM 2 was centered around the premiere of a film-within-the-film based on events from the first film, called Stab; 3 brought the cast to Hollywood for the making of the Stab sequel. Now that we've come back from a needed break for SCREAM 4, we find the Stab sequels have continued unchecked on direct-to-video and are up to SCREAM 7, and everyone is watching them on youtube, even while they're being stalked and stabbed in 'real' life. And now the 'ghostface' voice is actually available (within the film's diegesis) as an iPhone app, so now you never know if it's the 'real' killer and not a prank.

Focus, please.... focus

It's all meta only in the way that the characters say the word meta and pretend to be empowered even as they tastelessly prank call each other mere hours after learning their friends have been gutted. In this, strangely, they are less like slasher characters and more like the eloi in The Time Machine. No one thinks about arming themselves with a gun or a knife, or staying indoors at night, or not answering the door when the person on the other side refuses to identify themselves, or yelling for help, or calling the cops, or looking in closets in advance of dropping their guard and popping on earbuds. The film would have benefited from someone who doesn't wait before she is the final girl to pull one of the ever-present butcher knives from out its tasteful wooden counter top knife block, or gouge her assailant's eyes when being strangled instead of just overacting with the bugged-out eyes and the gasping.

Another saving grace is the metatextual terror of aging going on across the original cast, all now long in the tooth, in one way or another. And the real killer's voice sounds less scary and more just old--a Stuntman Mike from beyond the grave--hackneyed from the ax of over-familiarity. More could have been made of him sounding older, ala Hamlet's father's ghost or Charlie on Charlie's Angels. We never see ANY old people in the film so G-face's voice becomes--even though we know the voice isn't 'his' but some phone app--the film's sole representation of age and decay, and therefore more sad than scary. Meanwhile there's this smearing the lens with Vaseline and deep color washing that makes all the girl's faces glow in a CGI airbrushed blur. It can only be some stipulation in the Cox contract--she wants to be filmed in layers of digital airbrushing, therefore all the girls must do likewise--but it works since no one knows the difference between movie, anime, digital, analog, and real life anymore; the color-style gloss underwrites a miraculous disconnect that helps actors and characters hide from their own aging or sense of self-preservation. They even cheer bloody movies based on their own future deaths, like a man cheerfully devouring his own foot and working his way along the digestive ouroboros centipede until all that's left is a desert snifter of credits and end theme crunk.

The only one who sees past it all is the mighty Sidney (Neve Campbell, au natural) who, like all chastened lovers in films finds herself on a book tour for her self-help memoir. With her self-serious pout and moistened eyes she's well-aware that the only one who survives these events is the one who takes them super seriously, but even she doesn't bother to employ standard dirty fighting tricks until all of her friends are dead. The rest of the cast lives only for their death scenes and have all the survival instincts of Yvette Mimieux and company when la morlocks come calling. Suspense is ratcheted to a point but once these kids are stabbed and bubbling blood out their mouths there's no longer pain or tragedy --they become merely actors game for a throe, even tossing off bon mots before their death rattles.

The sad thing about survival is this: If you're lucky you get old. If... you're lucky! And that's a very sad, sad joke. In Hollywood it's double the pain. And is it perhaps better for your legend's longevity to not get this lucky. Marlene Dietrich and Garbo both retreated into exile to spare their fans the shocking Baby Jane-in-the-mirror moment.. Marilyn Monroe perhaps knew that if she took her life at least her fans would have what they always wanted--an immortal Aphrodite for the icon-stellation--and she could finally get some real sleep far from the flashbulb stings of gossip arrows.

The alternative to death or hermitage is not always good: Hollywood is cruel to those over 30, like that game of 'carousel' in LOGAN'S RUN! Man, is SCREAM 4 really science fiction? Imagining a future where screens and streaming have so overtaken us that we don't even have to worry about a Japanese ghost girl getting us through the screen like THE RING because we're already inside, hoping just to get as much face time with the camera as we can before we get stabbed, and to have the bloodiest, best death scene, because in the simulacrum life is measured not in heartbeats but in hit counts (I'm paraphrasing the killer here, though shan't reveal its name). 

In the end, that ducky overbite on Ms. Cox and the Streisand-ish Vaseline fog over all spells out that mummification on the altar of the image is the answer. It's pretty squirmy when Cox makes wry references to her hit sitcom, COUGAR TOWN, by coming on to nerdy film geeks but it's nothing new in Hollywood, just a scary look at the pyramid inversal created by the web, that great arbiter of eloi equality. The nerds were never meant to have this much power, or get hit on by this kind of weird, desperate onabotulinumtoxin A Mrs. Robinson. They don't know how to handle it. But handle it they shall for suddenly they run the world, like a box cutter battering ram right through the screen, with a ripping sound.