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But I have a bone to pick with that ending, which our own Edwin Davies expounded upon a bit here and, which, I’d like to piggy back off of.

I’ll agree that Scream 4 missed out on utter greatness by resolving itself with two finishes.

Whoa! Before I get going here, may I remind you that you’re a fool to think I’d be doing this without revealing any spoilers.

Anyway, I’ll agree that Scream 4 missed out on utter greatness by resolving itself with two resolutions. There was the shock and awe ending - the holy sh*#tf@&%k! finale that had me applauding its guts for going out with not only murdering Sidney Prescott - effing Sidney Prescott!! - but, all the way, grooming an evil child who killed many, many others to fulfill a misguided attempt at merely appearing as a victim - and the totally contrived ending that happened right after, which had Sidney Prescott of course awaking from her slumber, zapping her dear cousin with a couple of defibrillators and, rather cinematically, departing her enemy’s feeble last breaths with: “Don’t fuck with the original” (with threatening tone).

At first, and I’ll be honest here, at first I was relieved that Sidney was still with us, because a possible Scream 5 - Scream 4 only earned $38 million domestically - would, right now, seem like it was missing something. I mean, even though Sidney was regulated to the supporting cast in Scream 4, Neve Campbell’s commitment to the cast of a Scream movie has, up to this point anyway, been mandatory.

On top of that, there’s the authority of guys like Kevin Williamson himself who, having been a part of the franchise in some capacity since Scream’s inception, says: “Fuck the new generation and their misconceived notions of instant gratification and acting out the role of [fill in the blank] in the company of strangers” by allowing an opportunity for the heroine of Screams 1 through 3 to, you know, pown the totally new girl struttin’ into Woodsboro.

Having Sidney off her cousin, Jill, in the film’s closing credits is like the franchise demanding a sort of obligatory worship from Generation Z. You know: “You were hardly an infant when the first Scream came out; what do you know about horror movies?!”

But as I thought about it more, I realized where I’d swung wrong: The way Scream 4 ended itself is a totally sucky way for Scream 4 to end itself. Sidney Prescott recouping from the dead just doesn’t feel right - as much as I’d like Kevin Willliamson to shove it in Generation Z’s faces.

Having Jill surprisingly succeed over her victims, in much the way Jigsaw did in the original Saw, would have left many a mouths open as audiences filed out of the theater. (That people of Generation Z can do anything, so long as they put their minds to it. Even murdering, and with ease, the heroine of a trilogy. Yet where does that leave you, once officers arrive to clean up the muck?)

That sort of dark surprise would have elevated Scream 4 to something greater than third sequel to an awesome film. It would have, as it tried to imply, advanced Scream to a new generation of viewers - not just us fogies - by maintaining relevance more than a decade after its last release.

I mean, where do you go after a secret torturer - who fought hard to be that torturer! - overcomes the hero to become the victim? I don’t know that the genre has touched that yet.

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