Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) has returned to her home town near a decade after the original massacre that she survived. She’s back for the first of many stops on her book tour. However someone out there feels the need to reimagine the Ghostface Killer massacre all over again and we have a new slew of teens to watch out for as blades go stabbing all over the place.

Wes Craven has directed every film of the Scream franchise, the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Hills Have Eyes as well as slightly less beloved Red Eye. He’s a name well known among the horror fanboys and will forever be lauded for his groundbreaking work and be forgiven for flops that he did.

Scream 4 is the latest in the Scream franchise where Craven once again unearths a property that was once brilliant fun and has been slowly trudged through the mud just for the sake of the dollar value attached. Here however I believe that Craven has finally come good again.

Scream is a film that its entire purpose is to comment on the horror/slasher genre and make us laugh while at the same time deliver some really tightly put together action sequences where the “ghostface killer” is running after the big breasted girl. Even the initial film was filled with characters who are all overly knowledgeable of all the slasher movie tropes that got characters killed and what allowed them to survive. It mocked it while at the same time placed the film in a reality that made it eerily real.

You’ve all sat there watching these slasher movies shouting at the screen for the girl not to go in that room and then she does and she dies. This is what Scream did that other films didn’t, it acknowledged the fact that those things happen and made the kills all fresh all over again.

Does Scream 4 do that for a franchise that needed to die in the mid-90s? I think it does. While it still has a lot of the problems that any high school slasher movie has it remains fun enough that it doesn’t make itself a complete useless chapter in the Sidney Prescott book. While I would’ve preferred for Craven and his writers to avoid the whole use of the original trilogy characters – Sidney, Gale (Courtney Cox) and Dewey (David Arquette) – it didn’t detract too much from the fun of the film.

The film opens with a five or so minute misdirection where Craven gets all his social commentary about how horror movies of today aren’t scary anymore out of the way, and while I found the moment fun I’m happy that he didn’t stretch that out into a full thematic arc for the whole two hours. This way he makes his point then gets on with the show without making me have to tell him that he’s making the very same mistake that current horror films make today. That is, being all about the body parts and not about actually scaring me.

So I’m going to chalk this one in the positive side of the tally for Wes Craven and hope that he leaves this franchise alone forever. While I don’t hold Craven in any personal high regard I’d hate to have to put him on the same level as a George A. Romero who just can’t leave a franchise alone and do something different.

IMDB says 7.6/10
Rotten Tomatoes 58%
I say 6.5/10