New Decade. New Rules.

A lot of the talk surrounding Scream 4 has centered on how scripters Kevin Williamson, Ehren Kruger and director Wes Craven managed to cope with the challenge of adapting to a world that's changed so much since 2000's Scream 3. Some have complained that, despite its creator's efforts to incorporate such modern staples as the internet, webcams, smart phones and reality TV, that Scream 4 is still mired in the '90s.

What I haven't seen anyone remark on, though, is that Scream 4 lags almost a decade behind another slasher franchise that already made strides to change with the millennium.

In 2002, Halloween: Resurrection was the first slasher film to embrace the internet culture, reality TV, and the advances in video technology. Producer Moustapha Akkad was surely spurred by the then-recent phenomenon of The Blair Witch Project (1999) to make the latest Michael Myers outing into something that spoke to the current vogue for the found footage genre as well as the burgeoning appetite for reality TV. Clearly, just a simple stalk and slash picture wouldn't cut it with young audiences anymore. And just for good measure, rapper Busta Rhymes was brought in to lend the movie some street cred.

The Resurrection screenplay by Larry Brand and Sean Hood follows six college students who have been chosen to participate in an Internet reality show called Dangertainment masterminded by entrepreneur Freddie Harris (Rhymes) and his assistant Nora Winston (Tyra Banks). The students are sent into the long-shuttered boyhood home of Michael Myers, each equipped with a personal mini-cam that broadcasts their every move to the web. Their task as they spend Halloween night in the Myers' house is to look for clues for why Michael decided to go with "stabbing" as a career choice.

Sara Moyer (Bianca Kajlich) is the film's resident good girl (following slasher movie protocol, she has an irrepressible, smart-talking BFF - Battlestar Galactica's Katee Scakhoff as Jen Danzing) and it's her internet friendship with high school student Myles Barton (Ryan Merriman) that will prove to be a lifeline when the real Michael Myers returns home to put the danger in Dangertainment. Smitten with Sara, even though they've only communicated through e-mails, Myles ducks out of a bustling Halloween party to find a private room in which to follow Dangertainment's broadcast. Before long, the rest of the party decides to join him.

When it becomes clear that the mayhem they're watching is not staged and that Sara and her "co-stars" are lined up for a slaughter, Myles uses the advantage of the cameras set up throughout the Myers' home to feed Sara via her phone the information that she needs to survive.

Brand and Hood's screenplay pulls more than a few boneheaded moves that director Rick Rosenthal (encoring from 1981's Halloween II) was apparently ok with. Killing off Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode in film's pre-title sequence set in a psychiatric hospital was likely exactly what Curtis wanted in order to end her obligation to the series but it's not ok that her plan to destroy Michael should involve setting up a rooftop booby trap that's so goofy it'd be laughed out of a Scooby-Doo episode. I mean, Laurie has Michael step into a rope noose which, when Laurie springs her trap, has him dangling in the air - upside down, no less! Ooooo!!

I don't know...maybe it's because Laurie's been kicking back in a mental hospital for a few years that this half-assed scheme seems like an effective way to dispose of Michael once and for all. I mean, hanging upside down does make the blood rush to a person's head and, as anyone will tell you, that's not pleasant. Assumedly, once Michael was at her mercy, Laurie planned to cut the rope or whatever and send Michael plummeting several stories to the ground. Would that hurt more than getting shot multiple times? Or more than being set on fire from head to toe? Because neither of those things were able to quite stop Michael previously, as Laurie ought to know. I mean, Michael fell off a second story balcony after Dr. Loomis emptied a full round of ammo in his chest and after that he just got up and walked away. Did Laurie forget that? Maybe her reasoning was that Michael isn't as young as he used to be so being dropped on his head from thirty, forty feet might do more damage than it would've before.

Honestly, though, even if Brand, Hood, and Rosenthal were all dumb enough to think this is how Laurie Strode should exit the series, you'd think that Curtis would've argued for something better - something that didn't make Laurie look completely moronic. Or maybe, God help us, this was the improved version. If this is what ended up being shot, I can only imagine what ideas were rejected along the way.

Besides having its most honored cast member go out like a fool, Rosenthal and co. allow the clownish Rhymes, while dressed to impersonate Michael, to verbally berate the real Michael (as Freddie believes it to be his cameraman in disguise). Did no one involved think that Halloween fans might be insulted by this? The error of having a C-list rapper get away with treating Michael like a punk is compounded when Freddie later unleashes a flurry of kung-fu moves on Michael and, again, survives to tell the tale. Is it any wonder that Resurrection is regarded as the worst in the Halloween series?

On the plus side, the notion of a group of viewers able to look on as Michael stalks his victims and being able to instantly advise Michael's prey on the best avenues for escape is a fitting high-tech analogy for the way that horror audiences have been shouting advice to the screen for decades. Unfortunately, constantly cutting back and forth from the Myers house to the group of kids at the party disrupts any chance for building suspense.

The one thing I do dig about Resurrection is Brad Loree as Michael Myers. Slasher fans tend to talk a lot about the different actors who have played Jason over the years but for some reason the different Michaels aren't discussed so much but I think that Loree was the best of the bunch since Nick Castle. He had the right body language and they designed one of the best masks for him. It's a shame that Rob Zombie cast Tyler Mane as Michael for his reboot as Loree was terrific.

As terrible as Resurrection is, though, as it was the last "official" Halloween sequel I can't help but have some affection for it. For all its missteps, I thought it left the series in an interesting place. Laurie was gone and the Myers house had been burned to the ground. How the next film would've continued without those familiar elements to lean on had me intrigued but Rob Zombie's 2007 remake put a quick end to that.

Some would say that's just as well. I say that while the later-day Halloween sequels were mostly awful and not looking to improve, Zombie's remake and sequel replaced them with something just as bad, if not worse. Moustapha Akkad's son Malek, who had been producing the Halloween sequels with his dad since 1995's The Curse of Michael Myers, took on the responsibility of shepherding the series after Moustapha was tragically killed (along with his daughter) in a 2005 terrorist bombing in Amman Jordan but while Zombie's name was able to gave the series a commercial shot in the arm, I have to imagine that Moustapha would never have signed off on it.

The one thing Moustapha understood about the series and Michael Myers was that you couldn't lose the boogeyman element. Once you turned Michael into just a psycho, you didn't have much. Rhymes' describes Michael as a "killer shark in baggy ass overalls" and I prefer that succinct take on the character to Zombie's efforts to portray him as the product of a crappy upbringing.

Unfortunately, what Moustapha didn't understand was that the series didn't need to jump on the latest technology or trends. Incorporating webcams and high tech in such a clumsy, pandering way only made Resurrection appear more out of touch. That's the same boat that Scream 4 finds itself in now. Thankfully, Scream 4 isn't anywhere near the unholy debacle that Resurrection was. And for those who think Scream 4 needed to embrace cutting edge tech more than it did, Resurrection proved almost ten years ago that the only cutting edge that should ever matter in a slasher film is a sharp blade.

Something To Scream 4

The Ghostface disguise that each of the killers have worn in the Scream films was sold in the original Scream under the brand name of "Father Death" but in Scream 4, the invisible killer waiting in the wings is Father Time. Facing a string of psychopaths is no picnic but the simple passing of the years can be awfully arduous in and of itself.

The surviving cast members of the series - Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette - are all back, reprising their signature roles. Ten years after the events of the last film, Deputy Dewey is now Sheriff Dewey and Gale Weathers is now Gale Weathers-Riley. Sidney herself is now an author, having penned the tale of how she overcame her past in a book titled Out of the Darkness. As part of her publicity tour for the book, Sidney is making a stop in her old hometown of Woodsboro on the occasion of the anniversary of the Woodsboro massacre.

As usual, where Sidney goes, tragedy follows. Timed with Sidney's arrival in Woodsboro, two young girls are murdered and Sidney's niece Jill (Emma Roberts) receives taunting phone calls from a new Ghostface killer. Dewey is tasked with heading the investigation into this new murder spree while a frustrated Gale, unhappy with her retirement from journalism, is eager to spring back into action.

Surrounding Jill are her circle of friends, a group as young as Sidney and her friends were back in the original Scream. There's Jill's Billy Loomis-esque ex-boyfriend Trevor Sheldon (Nico Tortorella), her far-too-hot-for-high school friend Olivia Morris (Marielle Jaffe), her acerbic, movie buff pal Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere), and the founders of Woodboro High's cinema club, Robbie Mercer (Erik Knudsen) and Charlie Walker (Rory Culkin). Which of these characters will be hacked to pieces and which ones will hang around for awhile as potential suspects? Or, to put it in proper slasher movie terms: "who will survive and what will be left of them?"

Speaking of which, while many elements in Scream 4 call attention to the fact that this is a film of 2011 - Facebook, texting, twitter, and webcams - the change that horror fans will notice most is the increased splatter. When you see a graphic shot of a murder victim's intestines spilled onto the floor in this R-rated movie, that's when you know that this installment of the Scream saga is taking place in a much different era than the original trilogy. The original Scream was repeatedly slapped with an NC-17 but now Scream 4 - the bloodiest in the series yet - has apparently skated past the MPAA on it's way to an R with nary a single cut. That's what a decade's worth of torture-porn will do for you, I guess. Or, to paraphrase the film's tagline - new decade, new MPAA rules.

The first Scream arrived at a point in horror history when being edgier than Dr. Giggles (1992) was enough to turn the genre on its ear, now there's films like 2009's The Human Centipede to contend with. Never mind the Saw series, that's kid's stuff - in a world where horror fans can get their hands on a copy of A Serbian Film (2010) if they're so inclined, the return of the Scream franchise can't help but be more quaint than cutting edge.

But...sometimes quaint is ok. Franchises represent cinematic comfort food and there's nothing wrong with seeking that out. Yes, horror sequels can still be scary to a point but ultimately they're about recreating a ride that the audience knows and enjoys and on that count, Scream 4 does a solid job. In many ways, Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven are explicitly attempting to recreate the first Scream and while it doesn't come close to being as strong a film as the original, Scream 4 is arguably better than either of the previous sequels.

What makes Scream different from other ongoing fear franchises isn't its sense of self-awareness (that's a trait that the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series already possessed before the first Scream came into town) but that it continues the story of its protagonists rather than that of its villain. Typically slasher series would bring back the sole survivor of the previous installment only to kill them off (Alice in Friday the 13th Part 2, Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3). Occasionally, there'd be a little continuity from film to film - the character of Tommy Jarvis remained at the front of three Friday the 13th sequels in Fridays IV-VI and Andy Barclay was Chucky's nemesis in Child's Play 1-3. But yet there was never any doubt that Jason and Chucky were the real stars of those movies. With Scream, though, it's hard to imagine any sequel being successful without the involvement of Campbell, Cox, and Arquette.

As we see the old gang back together again in Scream 4, all of them inching closer to middle-age (or already there, depending on how you define "middle-age"), it occurred to me that the Scream series might be turning into horror's version of the original Star Trek movies. The ST movies featuring William Shatner and the original TV crew were all about rounding up the old Enterprise gang that fans loved and putting them through their paces, even as the aging cast members became increasingly wrinkled and slower moving. I'd get a kick out of seeing the same thing happen with Scream and - judging by Scream 4 - we're well on our way. As one character says to Sidney (I'm paraphrasing here), "let's face it - you're not the young ingenue anymore."

The extra mileage on Campbell, Cox, and Arquette gives their characters a sense of melancholy that may not be reflected so strongly in the writing but that can't help but seep through the performances - especially when they're surrounded by actors half their age.

I remember reading an interview with Sigourney Weaver at the time of Alien 3's release in which she made a remark about the character of Ripley, saying that after all she'd been through that "survival had lost its allure." That phrase came to mind for me during Scream 4 as I wondered if after fifteen plus years of facing off against one psycho after another - a series of brutal ordeals predated by the rape and murder of her mother - if Sidney Prescott should be exhausted with life altogether.

In real life, yes, anyone who's suffered the traumas that Sid has suffered would likely be - at best - suicidal. And Dewey and Gale probably wouldn't be faring so well either. But this is the movies, and more importantly, a franchise. That means these characters have to soldier on in the face of events that would leave others quivering in a corner. For a brief moment towards the end of Scream 4 it looks as though the movie might actually embrace a ballsy, bleak ending but then the film's real climax kicks in.

It's a move that's undeniably chickenshit on an artistic level but yet it's also an unavoidable affirmation that we're watching the fourth - and most likely not final - installment of a successful horror franchise. Had the movie ended at the earlier point, fans would've surely cried bullshit and let's face it - when you're making the fourth entry in a series, who the hell else are you even making it for if not for the fans?

As the credits rolled on Scream 4, though, I found it ironic to note that while the original Scream had belonged not just to its youthful cast but equally to the young generation that responded to the film's sensibilities, that this reboot of the franchise should not be interested in passing the torch to its younger players. The high school characters in this film are all but inconsequential (this is not entirely an unwelcome move, by the way - having watched the original Scream again just within the past week, it's amazing to me the difference in talent between that film's cast and the group of potted plants that populate this movie). Fifteen years ago, Scream was an upstart horror film that succeeded by leapfrogging past the staid franchises around it but Scream 4 makes it very clear that the franchise's allegiances lie firmly with the old guard and not with the new blood.