Scream 4

The kill count at ten minutes is five, halfway through it is seven, and overall, thirteen - not bad for an hour and forty minutes - so number four in the meta-horror series really drives the knife in for slasher fans, but even in an exercise this tongue-in-cheek - and it succeeds in being funny a number of times - it can be frustrating sitting through the idiocy on display: remember, Ghostface is a serial killer who has well and truly put a dent in the population of Woodsboro High on three previous occasions, yet in the midst of spree number four, as the body count rises, these teens hold parties, get drunk, wander outside into the dark woods, and play astonishingly tone-deaf "Ghostface" pranks on each other, making it more than a little tiresome waiting out the Scooby-Doo unmasking at the end.

★★★☆☆

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Scream VI (2023)

Just brutally violent, not scary, this sequel to 2022's "rerequel" Scream and the meta-horror series' sixth entry riffs on the idea that Scream is now a mega-franchise with the momentum to continue even without its legacy characters, so Courteney Cox's investigative reporter Gale Weathers (here, again) and other long-timers are apparently at risk of being killed off - it isn't a big point of difference, and other standard elements, like the opening set-piece, are tired, but the mystery elements of Scream VI and a neat sequence on a New York City subway train keep the bloodletting intermittently interesting.

★★★☆☆

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Scream 3 (2000)

This third instalment of the Scream series continues to inventively postmodernise the slasher flick by taking yet another step back, this time setting the gruesome events against the backdrop of a slasher flick being made within a slasher flick, so there are now lookalike actors playing the actors and movie sets of the movie sets, but boy it is a long episode and it tries so hard that all its energy goes out the window well before the movie's drawn-out conclusion.

★★☆☆☆

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Scream 2 (1997)

Opening with the original movie reimagined as a movie within a movie, this Scream sequel is certainly a more creative and more self-referential slasher flick than most, but it plays out no more cleverly than that: women are mercilessly taunted, chased, terrified and violently hacked to pieces while men benefit from sudden random death, so while generous critics say this movie (and the series) cleverly subverts the slasher genre, it really only pretends to be clever while mirroring and perpetuating slasher tropes.

★★☆☆☆

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