Scream 4 tries to be everything to everybody. Wes Craven is a good enough filmmaker to make a watchable horror film and he’s teamed up with screenwriter Kevin Williamson so you have the original duo that created Scream at least trying to outdo their template.

You have the old blood (Cox, Arquette, Campbell) and new blood (Emma Roberts, Rory Culkin, Hayden Panettiere, Anna Paquin, Kristen Bell, even Mary McDonnell, and some others). For a while I would try to figure out the killer but that person would end up dead. Craven extends the premise of the killer taunting a victim on a phone by adding an iPhone app that changes your voice to Ghostface. And Ghostface isn’t a scary name. You know what’s scary: Insidious (despite its low budget) or even I Saw the Devil.

Craven introduces new technology to reflect our times, like one high school student who internet streams his life with a remote television camera mounted on his head. But there are plenty of old school touches like bobby pins in most of the actresses’ hair and filters on the lens that flare lights at night.

The coolest thing about the movie is a strange kind of nostalgia that it offers. But if tongue-in-cheek stalker movies of the 90s are old yet fond memories what does that bode for the future?

- Michael Bergeron