Scream 4 is this week's most ridiculous trailer
It's been fifteen years since Scream came along and changed the whole horror movie paradigm with its self-awareness, satirizing the cliches of a genre then in the throes of death by indifference and employing them as plot devices, in the process pretty much single-handedly breathing life back into it. It was a brilliantly postmodern move at a time when mass media was just starting to embrace postmodern irony, and it went on to become a touchstone of almost everything that followed. Now, Scream 4 brings its own legacy full circle, creating a feedback loop of self-reference that almost blows your mind until you realize it's dumb as hell.
Not that this trailer is devoid of irony, the first and most obvious irony being that a movie that redefined its genre is now being once again swallowed and begrudgingly crapped out yet again by the Hollywood machine for its umpteenth sequel, and is the very definition of the cliches it once mocked -- not that it's unaware of that. This time, Scream knows that Scream changed the game, so it's amending the its rules to reflect the change that it created, a conceit helpfully explained in detail to us by two guys who know a lot about horror movies like Scream. So basically, it's the movie version of the killer influencing the real killer who will later go on to become the movie version of the killer who influences himself -- craaaaaazy, right? It's a god damn hall of mirrors in this trailer.
Except it really isn't. It's the same movie with a couple of the cliches updated in yet another tiresome attempt to cash in on the success of the original that will be enjoyed only by people too young to remember the original, many of whom were not even alive when it came out. But hey, it brought back a bunch of actors nobody's cared about for ten years or so, right? At least Drew Barrymore had better things to do.
Write Comment
Email to Friend
Print Article
