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Scream. Again. Hit mute button

“New decade, new rules,” the cop says in Scream 4, and I go, “Aha!”Wasn’t that the advertising tagline for Scream 3, released in 2000?
Film Review Scream 4
Courteney Cox is shown in a scene from the horror film "Scream 4."

Scream 4

2 stars (out of 4)

Rated: 14A

“New decade, new rules,” the cop says in Scream 4, and I go, “Aha!”

Wasn’t that the advertising tagline for Scream 3, released in 2000?

Turns out I’m wrong. It really is the tagline for Scream 4, the slasher franchise sequel that was never supposed to happen, but now has. Unfortunately.

The cop is parroting the movie’s own ad copy. To quote another character: “How meta can you get?”

Very meta, as this self-referential series has proven for 15 years, since horrormeister Wes Craven and satiric scripter Kevin Williamson first teamed to reinvent the slasher flick.

The original Scream succeeded in spades, as a send-up that also shocked. It sliced-and-diced the genre’s clichés — never say “I’ll be right back” — while vaunting killer Ghostface into the horror pantheon.

The law of diminishing returns began to kick in with Scream 2 in 1997, as Ghostface’s motives became increasingly ridiculous. By Scream 3, billed as the series capper, it was hard to agree with the real tagline: “The most terrifying scream is always the last.”

Now comes Scream 4, which hits the mute button on a once-great notion. The sardonic laughs are mostly gone in this wheezing cash cow and the cries don’t resonate.

The greatest shocks are the ones facing the now middle-aged stars when they look in the mirror.

Craven is back, Williamson too (he sat out Scream 3) and so are stalwart survivors Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette.

Seriously missing is any sense of purpose or forward momentum. What’s a snake to do when it has already swallowed its own tail?

Fifteen years after student murders first shocked bucolic burg Woodsboro, perpetual Ghostface prey Sidney Prescott (Campbell) returns to town to promote her self-help memoir, Out of Darkness.

Her arrival coincides with another set of gruesome murders. The ever-grudgeful Ghostface is now stalking Sidney’s cousin Jill (Emma Roberts), her friends Olivia (Marielle Jaffe) and Kirby (Hayden Panettiere), and other sliceable youth.

Old rivalries and tensions wearily resume. TV newshound Gale (Cox) is now an ex-journalist but still a bitch. Her whipped hubby Sheriff Dewey (Arquette) is still acting like Barney Fife. Poor Sidney is still being chased, both by a killer and by her dark memories.

The cast members all take turns acting like red herrings. The film-within-a-film Stab is spinning its squeals, and Gale’s cash-in books have reached an enervating six volumes.

Ghostface has acquired even more superhuman powers, turning up like magic and killing with greater bloody vigour than before, a nod to the increased fascination with gore since 1996.

But Scream 4 doesn’t have the nerve to up the ante, even on the comedy side. The endangered teens are spotted watching Shaun of the Dead, a zombie satire that is considerably fresher than Scream’s meta-riffs.

New rules? None that I can see, and there’s your problem right there.

If Craven and Williamson are serious about a Scream 5 and Scream 6 — and it appears they are — they need to kill off Ghostface and do a spiritual resurrection that will allow Sidney to be pursued into her dotage, even as the cash registers ring ever fainter.

Petrer Howell is a syndicated movie critic for The T oronto Star.