"Scream" Again?

The Scream series has been an easy target for horror fans for some time now.  They're relatively bloodless, and always feature a cast of vapid, disposable "teens", so it's not difficult to understand why.  But personally, I thought the first film was great.  It was metatextual, before that concept was completely played out, and is one of the only horror/comedies that is both genuinely funny and scary.  The ending was epic, and superbly choreographed.  And nobody saw it coming, because horror was dead.  D-E-A-D.  It was just a nothing little slasher film, put out long after the glory days of the genre, and it made a couple bucks in it's opening weekend.  Then the next weekend, it made more money.  A true word of mouth film, this revitalized the genre, for better or worse.  I think that when most horror fans bitch about Scream, they're really just bitching about the waves of imitators to follow.

And then there were the sequels.  Scream didn't need a sequel, but I'm never one to begrudge a producer making money, and thematically it made sense. . .  Slasher films have sequels, right?  And for what Scream 2 was, it was decently made.  They threw in some interesting visual elements, like Sidney in a ballet troupe performing Electra.  I think there were missed opportunities for a more fluid connection to the original film (I remember hashing out the climax of the first film.  "So, since the one killer was in the bedroom, and the other was at the car; who was the third one coming up the stairs?"  Or something along those lines.  Haven't seen any of these films in over a decade), but as slapdash sequels go, it delivered the goods.  The third film?  The less said, the better.  Let's just say that Ehren Kruger is no Kevin Williamson, and that the third film just beat to death thematic elements that were pretty well covered in the first two (Like a film being made in the film, etc).  I've seen worse,  but ultimately I don't remember much of the movie, which isn't a good sign.

Cut to 2010.  In six months, we'll have a new Scream movie in theaters.  Who is the audience for this?  I feel like the horror community has moved on, and the target audience would've been way too young when the originals came out.  Someone who was a baby when the first film was released would be old enough to play the killer by now!  Even more baffling is that it's a sequel and not a remake.  I'm not necessarily advocating remakes, but as long as we're pointlessly remaking critically acclaimed vampire movies a year after their release, why not a fair-to-middling slasher franchise a decade later?

From what I've heard, the production sounds like a complete mess.  Cast members coming and going, script changes left and right (By both Williamson and Kruger).  Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.  And while I again don't fault people for wanting to make money, this is just a blatant cash grab.  How could this movie possibly be good?  We have no emotional investment in it.  The returning characters are just meta archetypes who apparently cannot be killed (Though I'll guessing they'll bump at least one of them off to "raise the stakes"), and a masked killer who changes identity with every film.  Oh, and the new batch of pseudo-teens.  Whee.

Ghostface really does feel like a ghost.  He (or she)'s a piece of nostalgia from a bygone era;  one that no one's really nostalgic about.