De’Arbreya Lee
Staff Writer
Fifteen years after the release of Scream, director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson come together again, to continue the saga with Scream 4, which was released April 15.
On its opening day, Scream 4 made $8,241,236 and $18,692,090 in weekend sales. To date, the film has grossed $31.0 million according to boxofficemojo.com.
The movie ranked number two in the nation, just behind the movie Rio but dropped several days after its release. Although these numbers are pretty good, the previous Scream films saw better numbers in past years.
According to the-numbers.com, Scream, the first of the film series, pulled in a worldwide gross of $173,046,663. During the first weekend release of its sequel, Scream 2, a strong fan base from the first film greatly increased the sequels numbers by $32,926,342.
The release of Scream 3 didn’t receive as much praise in the U.S., grossing less in box office sales than the films before it. Scream 3 only generated a total of $89,138,076, which was slightly lower than that of Scream 2, but it ultimately pulled in a U.S. gross of $101,363,301.
The film’s cast consists of familiar faces of the Scream series such as Neve Campbell (The Craft), Courteney Cox (T.V. series Friends), and David Arquette (Eight Legged Freaks) along with new faces like Emma Roberts (Nancy Drew) and Hayden Panettiere (T.V. series Heros).
Scream four picks up 10 years after main character Sidney Prescott’s (Campbell) returns to her hometown of fictional Woodsboro, Calif. to release her book, “Out of the Darkness” and just in time for the town’s 15th anniversary of the Woodsboro massacres. Just when the people of the town thought that the ghost face killer and the horror of his presence were a thing of the past, the bodies of teenagers begin to surface.
Sherriff Dwight “Dewey” Riley (Arquette) and now retired, well established reporter and author Gale Weathers-Riley (Cox) have to prove, once again, that they still have what it takes to chase the killer.
High school teen, Jill Roberts (Roberts) and her friends, fearing that her cousin, Sidney’s arrival to town may be the very cause of their own misfortunes, try their best to stir away from Sidney while the rest of the town embraces her presence.
Set in a time when technology has greatly surpassed those available during Sidney’s first encounter with Ghostface, the teenagers of this time who have kept up with the history of the Woodsboro murders, along with the Stab horror series that followed, feel as if they are one step ahead of the killer.
The teens and the veterans in the horror story later find that their knowledge of the horror films is the very thing that further twists them into confusion as technological advances play to the ghost face killer’s advantage.
Gale’s diehard reporter mentality, Dewey’s and Sidney’s overcoming of the past combined seem to be the perfect recipe to ending the town’s curse, but in new times, the tables turn.
As the lives of the original characters are placed in severe danger and new characters are put under suspicion, it makes the “slasher” film predictable in some ways, as assumed for a horror film, but its loyalty to mystery gives it the right to be called a good film.
The movie website rottentomatoes.com, shares posts from many movie critics, from audience viewers to top critics from TIME magazine to the Denver Post.
Some top critics like Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicles, Gary Dowell of the Dallas Morning News and Claudia Puig of USA Today share opposing views about the film and its content.
“‘Scream 4’ is a strange concoction, clever and self-knowing in the extreme and yet operating in primal ways that bypass wit. Something about it feels very modern,” said LaSalle.
While LaSalle seems to have enjoyed the film, Puig feels otherwise.
“The filmmakers’ subtext – at least in the movie’s first quarter – seems to acknowledge that you can’t top the original, and they didn’t,” said Puig.
Although Dallas Morning News writer Gary Dowell is in agreement with Puig’s belief of Scream 4 not topping the original, Dowell does add that the film has been reawakened.
“Though director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson don’t quite generate the lightning-in-a-bottle energy that made their first Scream movie a hit, they manage to awaken a 15-year-old slasher franchise that has been dormant for a decade,” said Dowell.
The film is rated R with a running time of one-hour and 50 minutes. Despite the opinions of others, I felt that the movie was time and money well spent, so check it out for yourself and if you haven’t seen the first three films, dust off the VHS and recap on the story line before you hit the theaters.
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