Scream 4 (SCRE4M)

I am a huge fan of the original Scream trilogy. At the time of the first films release it perfectly captured the mood of the horror scene (which is ironic, because it's countless copycats would ruin horror for the next 10 years as we got buried under a deluge of 'I still know what urban legend you did at cherry falls') so I was keen to see what the original writer (albeit with 'tweeks' from the writer of the third, and poorest, entry) would do with horror c2011.
Oddly, despite 7 years of Saw and Hostel movies, torture porn gets completely ignored,  and the focus here is remakes and (to a lesser extent) unnecessary sequels. That said, I suppose this approach makes more sense, the original trilogy were about the phases that a single franchise can go through (stand alone film, sequel, concluding chapter of a trilogy) and a change in genre would weaken that, the next phase for a single franchise is indeed a remake or unnecessary sequel.

And so, after a brilliant series of fake starts, this entry sees Sidney coming home to Woodsborough just in time to get caught up in the middle of a 'real life' remake, as a copycat is committing murders in much the same style as the original Woodsborough killings.  The 'rules' of a remake (explained this time by the high school film geeks, standing in for Randy) are that the kills will be more extreme, and the rules will be ignored or inverted in order to keep the audience on its toes.

The movie certainly lives up to its own rules; things are continually set up, only to go nowhere or be subverted, and this entry is certainly the bloodiest; I don't recall ever seeing intestines in a Scream movie before. It's also by far the most self referential of the bunch - they've even managed to squeeze in a joke about how 'meta' the whole affair is!

But it's far from perfect; it's the shortest of the series, yet still manages to drag for much of it's running time dispite having the biggest cast, and it features 2 climaxes, the second of which it could desperately have done without. Near the end of the film, there's a close up of the killer and the film fades to black; I got genuinely excited that they'd gone for a left field ending, which would have actually made up for the padding (not to mention the killer's outright daft motive), but then the film keeps going into its silliest segment, and that good will is lost.

All in all it's about as strong (or weak) as the third film, nowhere near as good as the first 2.