Scream 4 (2011)

Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is back in Woodsboro, to promote her new self-help book, on the anniversary of the original Woodsboro murders... and surprise, surprise it all starts up again.

Our other old favourites are back as well Deputy - now Sheriff - Dewey (David Arquette) and wife Gale (Courtney Cox), who is feeling at loose end as she struggles with the life of a sedentary fiction writer.

The new 'Ghostface' killer in town is trying to 'remake' the original Scream (or in the context of the movie, Stab) and while it does have some interesting - some heavy-handed - things to say about the changing face of horror movies, celebrity culture etc there's no escaping the feeling that maybe all concerned should stop flogging this horse. I think it's long dead.

At the start of the movie there are suggestions of marital strife between Dewey and Gale, but this never really develops and while, in a roundabout way, this might be a motive for his new deputy Judy Hicks (Marley Shelton) - who has an obvious crush on him and was a student with Sidney - to be Ghostface, this emotional sub-plot kinda trails off.

There's the usual shocks and twists, celebrity cameos and hot young things for the chopping block (particularly pleasant to see Heroes' Hayden Panettiere as sexy horror fan Kirby, even with an unflattering hairdo) and at least fifty percent of the game is trying to guess the identity of the killer.

It may claim "new decade, new rules" but series creator Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven still won't take that final step and create their own rules - possibly, once and for all, killing off the indestructible Sidney.

Scream 4 is (perhaps overly) self-aware and post-modern, but also a solid, fun slasher movie in its own right, with a clever ending that doesn't quite capture the genius and originality of the first film in the franchise.

Unbreakable (2000)

Upfront, I have to lay my cards on the table and confess that I am not a big fan of the works of M. Night Shyamalan.

Sixth Sense was very good, but rather a one-trick pony signalling the writer/director's obsession with trying to be the new Hitchcock, rather than develop a unique style of his own. Signs was one of the most ridiculous films I'd ever seen and The Village wasn't much better (I never bothered with the Lady In The Water).

I think he puts too much emphasis on the "twist" rather than the story that leads to the twist. It's like he's saying "look how clever I am" and challenging his audience to second guess him, so you spend the entire film trying to guess the twist and not concentrating on the story.

Thankfully, Unbreakable isn't like that. I understand it was originally intended as the first part of a trilogy, but poor box office meant the studio put the kibosh on any sequels (perhaps people were just looking for a rehash of Sixth Sense!)

While still obviously Hitchcockian, Unbreakable does feature a kind of twist in the final scene but it is more akin to a standard plot revelation and therefore isn't all that the film is about.

Viewed in 2007 the film is almost a dry run, a pilot episode, for Heroes with its tale of an ordinary Joe (Bruce Willis as security guard David Dunn), who survives a train wreck and slowly - thanks to pestering from a strange art gallery owner and comic book obsessive Elijah Price (Samuel L Jackson) - begins to realise that he has "superpowers".

Certainly the best written of Shymalan's portfolio - the scene where David, having rescued some children from a murderer, silently reveals his "secret identity" to his son is incredible - yet the ending still seems slightly rushed, although on reflection it's growing on me.

The parallels between Dunn's developing realisation of his destiny and his troubled personal life are a particular gem - he can't find satisfaction in the latter until he accepts the former, however insane it sounds in a real world context.

The comic book nut, and budding storyteller, in me would like to see Shymalan and Willis revisit the story of David Dunn at some stage, let us know what happened in the "next issue", as it were.