Scream 4: Spoiler Edition (or: Why Emma Roberts is Sort of Awesome and Terrible all at once)

SPOILERS Ahead! Big ones! Like, pretty much right away!

This is intended as a companion piece to my non-spoiler edition review. I tried not to repeat myself too much here, which probably explains how this turned into a rant and rave session about Emma Roberts. That or the garish poster to the right practically demanded it.

Nestled comfortably in the open space of spoiler territory, I am free to discuss Scream 4’s juiciest and most ridiculously entertaining detail: the reveal of the main killer. Actually, the reveal itself is nothing too special, so the fun is entirely attributed to the casting. When young, doe-eyed Emma Roberts (niece of megastar Julia) yanks off the Ghostface mask to explain her big plan (she wants her fifteen minutes of fame and has been harbouring a grudge against cousin and local hero Sidney for a long time), it first feels like yet another villain reveal that is designed to implicate the most innocent character in the long list of suspects. And, well, it is. We’re clearly supposed to believe that Roberts is the last person in the whole movie who could be capable of such cold-blooded murder. And it isn’t hard when you consider that one of her biggest roles to date was in the cutesy family flick
Hotel for Dogs.

But suddenly, there’s Emma Roberts swearing her head off and shooting her ex-boyfriend in the crotch. In my mind, she just went from innocent dog saviour to penis-exploding nutcase in about ten seconds of screentime. Emma then follows it up with a Fight Club-esque act of self-mutilation where she stabs herself, rams her head through a glass picture frame, and does a body slam on a glass coffee table that shatters all around her. Her body is probably 20% glass shards at this point and we haven’t even gotten to the hospital yet, where Emma goes on a secondary rampage (complete with more swearing and loads of facial lacerations!) that results in her being gunned down.

It all adds up to approximately fifteen minutes of Emma Roberts playing crazy, but it’s a fascinating chunk of silliness that benefits from the oddball casting. Up until the point where she’s revealed to be the big bad, Emma Roberts is okay at best in a simple role where she’s expected to shriek in between a handful of standard line deliveries. It’s not a particularly good performance, but it isn’t interesting or lively enough to be terrible, either. It’s simply bland. But then she goes nuts on screen and you can practically hear Wes Craven encouraging her from behind the camera with promises of a Razzie win. She goes so far over-the-top in such a short span of time that it’s almost like watching the scene on fast-forward.

Emma goes from zero to bonkers in a couple seconds and it’s hard not to get a buzz from the sheer energy with which she plays crazy. Her performance is mostly awful, but it’s sort of brilliant, too. It’s a cult classic appearance in the making and Emma Roberts couldn’t sell the whole thing more emphatically if she tried (well, she’s already trying really hard). Seeing her go for broke is ridiculously exciting and makes me wonder where she’ll go from here. This performance is so epically exaggerated that a merely mediocre follow-up will not suffice.

I’m reminded of Rebecca Gayheart, the stunning young woman who once played a role in Scream 2, but more hilariously portrayed the villain in Urban Legend (a fright flick that came out in the wake of Scream’s genre-defining success). Gayheart also made one of my favourite horror movie cameo appearances in the preposterous, awesomely awful sequel Urban Legends: Final Cut. She hasn’t gone on to do much else, though, perhaps because topping an unexpected psycho performance is tough to do? I’m really not sure why, but I hope that Emma Roberts doesn’t disappear in similar fashion, even though I’m now convinced, more than ever, that she’s a terrible actor. Well, that may be a bit unfair. She does play a murderous wacko with gusto, so I certainly appreciate her commitment.

I also appreciate that Craven finally let a woman get behind the mask again in this franchise. Of the five previous villains to don the Ghostface mask, only one was a woman and that had a lot to do with a nifty nod to the first Friday the 13th movie. Emma's character Jill may be stuck with some rather ridiculous motivation, but it's still nice to see a woman in control on the other side of the knife once again. The secondary villain (movie geek Charlie, played with a throwaway attitude by Rory Culkin) is just there to tie things back to the first movie (two killers, only one of whom can claim to be the brains of the plan) and allow some stabbing to occur when Jill is standing around playing the innocent card. Charlie’s motivation is practically non-existent and Williamson continues his trend of lazily justifying the involvement of one half of the killer team (the third movie featured a single killer, but that was the one instalment Williamson skipped out on).

Emma Roberts flashes her innocent look.

So with the Charlie reveal being more about logistics and repetition than anything else, the spotlight is thrust all the more blindingly on Emma Roberts in all her cursing, shooting, masochistic glory. The final fifteen minutes or so of Scream 4 benefit greatly from the laughably theatrical performance that Roberts delivers. It’s a preposterous piece of bad acting unleashed, but it’s so damn fun to watch that it at least allows the movie to end on something that strangely resembles a good note. Except that the good is tainted with bad in a way that is far more enjoyable than the mostly annoying villain performances that emerge in each of the Scream flicks’ final acts. There’s nothing remotely scary about Emma Roberts brandishing a knife and swearing, but at least it’s silly enough to be fun. I’ll take that over the infuriatingly irritating nonsense provided by Matthew Lillard in the first Scream movie any day (though the first chapter in this franchise still earns my vote as the best overall).

Scream 4’s big finale really takes off with the Roberts reveal and this portion of the movie is one of the main reasons that it still intrigues even if the final result registers more of a whimper than, well, you know. The beginning is delightful, too, as three sets of girls help re-enact the franchise-launching opening scene of the original. We’re treated to the movie-within-a-movie beginnings of Stab 6 and 7 before finally entering the “real” world and watching as two girls who want nothing more than to sit on the couch and watch a scary movie find that they’re now pretty much starring in a scary movie. It’s a rather ridiculous opening with a tasty whiff of originality and it seems to promise that this Scream is going to stray from the more traditional aspects of the series’ recycled narratives. But it’s really just a pleasant distraction that soon takes a backseat to an underwhelming plot that adopts the frustrations of remakes and reboots in order to say something quite obvious about the current trend.

The movie finally returns to ridiculously enjoyable territory with the Emma Roberts-is-crazy-and-full-of-glass conclusion, which stands out as a highlight of the series. Most of the kills in the movie are not particularly inventive and so the violent acts of self-destruction that Roberts and her stunt double engage in during the finale are certainly an eye-opener. The beginning and end offer so much entertainment value that it’s unfortunate the middle chunk is such a lame and uninteresting downer. The movie is stuffed with forgettable moments and easy references and it tries so hard to be both a comedy and a horror flick that it ends up failing on both accounts. But then Emma Roberts yanks the mask off and begins, well, whatever the hell you want to call what she does on screen. It is at this point that the movie officially forfeits any ability to scare. It goes straight for the comic absurdity now and Emma Roberts deserves credit for delivering a performance that is so bad and yet almost so good that it defies reason and defines this fourth chapter in the franchise. She’s a Scream queen, for sure, and whether that is worthy of praise or condemnation is a more exciting mystery than anything else this series has to offer.