Almost as great as the original
This film fucking rocks, and yet it has been unjustly treated from Day 1.
Craven and Williamson returned after an 11 year break to make the ultimate reboot (after the rather stale and bloodless Scream 3 which wasn’t written by Williamson)
The new cast are phenomenal, including the ridiculously sexy and charming Hayden Panettiere. The kills are gorier and more graphic than before, the self-aware commentary on horror tropes is as strong as ever (cleverly moving with the times, ripping into ‘torture porn’), the jokes land (apart from ‘fuck Bruce Willis’) and Craven is on top form manipulating the audience in a symphonic rollercoaster of suspense, humour and scares.
Sid, Dewey and Gale return on top form (pity about Cox’s plastic surgery but it’s mild compared to what she turned into), they take a back seat as the new flesh get sliced and diced, but returning to the fore for the who-will-they-kill-off? finale.
What really makes this one special, though, is the incredibly prescient observations it makes about the deranging effects of social media. ‘I don’t need friends, I need fans!’ shrieks the psychotic Jill. The film is 15 years old and it feels even more relevant in today’s sick OnlyFans world.
It even predicted Woke with lines like ‘in order to survive a horror movie you pretty much have to be gay’ (notice how the terrible impostor ‘Scream’ films 5 and 6 were drowning in woke, yet utterly lacked the self-awareness to call out their own blatant woke ‘rules’, instead trying to distract the audience with tedious blather about ‘requels’ spouted by their new black lesbian Randy 🤦🏻♂️)
Scream 4 is the final Scream film. The series died with Craven. Unfortunately audiences and critics were too fucking retarded to realise how great it was and the film underperformed, which meant the true 5 and 6 never got made. Morons.
Now, though, after the series turned to shit with the fake 5 and 6, people are returning to Scre4m and realising how awesome it is (I rank it just behind the first as the second best in the series). Its reputation will only improve as time goes by.