What do you get when you cross poor dialogue, an overdone plotline and C-list actors with a mask? A disaster known as Scream 4.

Horror film director Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street) parodies his own genre with the Scream series, a once clever concept ruined by repetition.

The film opens with two typical, attractive teenage girls lounging around. One of the girls (Shenae Grimes, Degrassi: The Next Generation) has a creepy “Facebook stalker” on her hands but instead of cutting off communication from the stalker, she continues to chat with him for sheer amusement. Obviously, the stalker comes to her house wearing the “ghost face” mask and kills them both. To the audience’s surprise, this is not the beginning of Scream 4, but the opening scene for Stab 6, thus beginning a funny yet redundant sequence of movies within movies that continues for the first 10 minutes.

Like all the other movies in the Scream franchise, the film is centered around uncovering the murderer behind the ghost face mask.

Viewers who have not seen previous Scream movies are at a slight disadvantage with the fast-paced script.

As soon as protagonist Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell, Scream) returns to her hometown of Woodsboro, MD, the killings begin. This is clearly not a coincidence.
Craven does a semi-successful job of mocking the horror movie genre from this point with the notorious “rules for survival” which is essentially a list of the classic horror flick set-ups such as the phrase “I’ll be right back,” a clear opening for what is about to be a bloody massacre. While this is true, sometimes it is difficult to distinguish when it is appropriate to laugh and when a scene is supposed to be serious.

Many events that occur in this film are farfetched and trigger the “Oh, come on!” response, making it difficult to get sucked into the story. There are several moments that fail to build suspense because of the predictability set up by clear hints in the dialogue.

The film attempts to appeal to fans of gore by making the kills innovative but still brutal with the ever-present technology theme. Unlike other Scream movies, the murderer in Scream 4 videotapes the creative killings as a form of art. Similarly, Gale (Courtney Cox, Cougar Town) sets up a video camera to catch the murderer only to find that she herself is being watched by the murderer’s video camera. She is then stabbed in the neck and put in critical care.

The film manages to throw some decent curveballs at the audience as suspicions arise as to which characters may be the “slasher.” Viewers will be shocked and satisfied at the conclusion of this mystery, almost unrealistically so.

The chuckles and surprises along the way hardly make up for the plot holes and bland dialogue Scream 4 has to offer. Hopefully this movie marks the end of this sickeningly cheesy series.