Scream 4

I liked the more technically bloody and visually better murders and the shocking revelation of the killers at the end – you have to give this franchise that, for the fourth time the viewer has no idea who it is until the end of the film. What's a bit of a downer, though, is the somewhat impersonal approach, where the 1st and 2nd parts were much better in terms of characters, here they are typical boilerplate skeletons without personality, and the behaviour of the victims is a bit ridiculous at times. All in all, though, another decent entry in a cult franchise. And now to number five, I'm looking forward to it like a little kid and expecting a five-star, bloody carnage. (17/01/2022)

It's entertaining, even for the fourth time, even though I'm not a huge fan of this crazy franchise. Wes Craven plays the same notes over and over again, but technically, he does it well, he can make fun of himself and combines it with good references to tons of movies trying who knows what, but not entertaining. The cast isn’t impressive either, so we are basically where we were some years years ago. A solid dose of fun purely for a single viewing. I really couldn't find a deeper meaning or any other reason to watch this film again. (20/12/2011)

0% fear, 100% playful (sub)genre tongue in cheek. If Craven and Williamson hadn’t missed the European train, or else if they had had the courage to work with it, this could have been better. Much better, if they had left out the superfluous “alternative ending". They aren’t resuscitating the American teenager slasher with this, they are simply proving that it is long since dead and can’t be approached otherwise than by making a comedy. (14/04/2011)

Hayden Panettiere and her Hitchcock-Lady hairstyle is the highlight of the film for me. :-) This juicy slasher tops the previous installments by increasing the body count as well as the number of jokes and film references (both in the dialogue and in the form of posters on the walls). Too bad it came out eleven years after the third Scream and thus serves only as a nostalgic reminder of the famous franchise. The tastes of today’s horror audience have evolved since then. (08/05/2011)

There's a lot of things to highlight here (again, the supremely evocative and increasingly gory murders, the perfectly working old/new casting, or the very imaginative pop culture references), but I honestly appreciated the topical commentary on the online environment the most. "Depravity has become the new norm" is an almost painful statement about the ideological emptiness of our times. I wouldn't have expected a now classic 90's horror film to get this good an update, providing a satirical look at today's (post-factual) society in addition to being entertaining again. Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven have pulled it off in a way they certainly have nothing to be ashamed of. They may not have generated the mass response of the latter half of the 90s, nor have they spawned a new phenomenon, but as a nostalgic close to the franchise, Scream 4 works reliably well. (27/10/2020)