Scream 4 Review

Movie: Scream 4
By: Maniac E
Date: April 17, 2011

Scream back or not, here it is.

After 11 years there comes a sequel to a series that seemed to have lost its ways. Scream is one of the teen slasher movies from the 90s that started a new beginning in horror movies. In 1996 Scream became a number one movie in the box offices. After Scream more followed starting in 1997 with a sequel. In 2000 the third movie of this franchise emerged and pretty much made sure the series wouldn't continue. Until 2011 that is.

11 years later

It starts off with Sidney Prescott returning to her hometown “Woodsboro”. Yes, the town where it all started. Sidney came back to promote her new book that just got out. Gale and Dewey are married and are living the life the way they like it. As so it seems. After a few days some killings take place again in Woodsboro. It’s up to Dewey to find out who is the new killer in town and all hell breaks loose. A group of high school teenagers are getting into “Stab” and made their own annual fest to celebrate the franchise. With this story plot Wes Craven tries to re-do a lot that has been done already in the series. But he shows he still has some tricks up his sleeve with this one.

The movie tries to find a good mix between being funny and scary at the same time. Craven always wanted a tension filled movie. With this in mind he wanted to do some extra putting in a few characters that have a comedy background. It works but doesn’t lift the movie to any extra levels. They really tried hard to make everything seem right. The acting could have been far worse and most of them nailed their roles. But in the end it still feels a bit empty like they should have done more with characters such as Robbie, he walks around documenting his entire school year. He has a live webcam broadcasting to a website but in the end it never gets shown or anything. Charlie and Robbie have made this fest surrounding Stab but you never really get sucked into what they do. It all feels a bit shallow to me. But they did act good for the series standards, don’t get me wrong. Craven tried pulling the Scream series into the new millennium.

Back in the day that Scream came out everyone was impressed by what it delivered. People were really into Ghostface. Merchandise popping up all around us and everybody had a Ghostface mask laying around. I think most people have forgotten where Ghostface stands for no matter who the killer is. This movie sticks and plays by the original rules set out by Scream 1. The whole old cast came back together to make this and this is what makes it fun to watch. It really is a homage to the earlier fans that loved the series back in the day. Craven did a good job delivering us a broad audience based horror slasher story again.

But to me it did come short in a lot of aspects. The movie doesn’t do anything new, a lot of the killings feel the same way as before. Maybe this is done on purpose, I don’t know, to me it felt like a rehearsal almost. There was some nice stabbing action shots but again nothing we haven’t seen before or done better for that matter. This movie is for the masses so don’t expect anything but Hollywood gore in it. But in case of violence this one is the most violent one so far. The deaths are drawn out longer than in the other films, with some being particular more nasty.

In the end the movie is fun to watch and you can easily put it after the first movie. It has solid acting and was nice to see the old Ghostface pop up again. This movie is made for fans of the original but makes sure the new audience gets into it as well. I would have liked it if it done something more new other than giving us what already has been done. It stands above the other 2 sequels that’s for sure but it comes nowhere near the original. If you are a Scream fan add another 0.5 star to it.

BLURAY REVIEW

Image quality

Image quality is certainly of good quality, close ups look great, environments are nicely detailed and black is really black. And in a case of Scream you need to have it pitch black. All presented on 1080/24p and MPEG-4 AVC coding.

Sound

DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1-track (16bit/48kHz) is of great quality and makes it worth to crank up the volume for that extra scare effect. Dialogs sound full of depth and never fall out of place.

Extras

This time E1 entertainment put in the full package. You can find the following features available on the blu-ray disc: Gag Reel, Making of, Deleted and extended scenes, Alternative opening and ending. Just a downside on this is that all the extras are in 1080p/i resolution.

Overall

Great disc with the sound and picture to go with it. After the 111minutes of feature film there is another 30 or so minutes to spend on the extra’s which are decent enough to watch. Just too bad of the 1080p/i on the extras.

E1 Entertainment