by Sam Juliano
The commercial sequel Black Phone 2 rates a 2 of 5 with me. The original was far but I can only blame myself for allowing the abducting by my sons to see it.
Jamie Uhler’s HORROR FEST 2025 continues with a review of SCREAM 4:
Scream 4 (W. Craven… 2011) slasher
I recall when Scream 5 (or, just Scream [2022] as it’s titled, apparently working as part soft reboot meets quasi sequel) arrived 3 years ago there was a rush online to post your Scream rankings, an activity that did more to alert me to the fact that I’d left the franchise after 2000’s Scream 3. I had barely a faint recollection of this one appearing, as an odd duck sandwiched 11 years before and after 3 and 5 on either side respectively. I’d had enough fun with 2 and 3 as a teen ending high school and then entering college, the perfect age to get into a slasher franchise that had a touch of money and panache, complete with actual decent, working actors and a director/writer team well known to horror fans. But I was more or less done from there, I don’t have much recollection of either, a sense in my mind that they didn’t do much for me (and I never revisited them). This is all a lengthly buildup to why I was entertained enough with this 2011 edition, but also why I’d never produced a smidge of effort to see the thing. The magic of Scream (1996) was the meta-nature of it all, its hyper aware 90’s irony towards the whole enterprise of the slasher that had, as of 1996, thoroughly been gutted and left for dead in a wooden area outside Crystal Lake. Revisiting Scream (1996) a year or two ago in this October Horror month, I was also struck by it being an actual by the bones good slasher, all meta-nature of it aside, its kills just sort of rock. Scream 4 works much the same way—at one point the movie club horror know-it-alls actually point out that killings are beginning to work in the exact same way as the original films were laid out. But, while working as a carbon copy, it fails to realize my second point of the original; the kills here are more graphic in a ‘real’ way, using quotes because they’re very fake movie real. So, it’s easiest to judge Scream 4 in this way, it’s just purposefully aping a better movie, a movie made in a genre where iconic or fun kills are much of the point, thus making Scream 4, and whatever loose entertainment if offered, largely a dull thud (plus, it’s also much, much too long). I wouldn’t say it’s bad, I think fans of the franchise will find enough to like, I just saw it largely as a a piece of fluff. In the end, the very idea the original set to spoof—tired, endless film in franchises of slasher Horror—it’s more than become in the end (and it wastes much more money than your average fourth installment in these things do).
Wishing everyone a wonderful week!
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