Wes Craven grudgingly updates horror plot for a wired audience

Making "Scream 4" for a tech-drenched generation posed obvious problems for Wes Craven, who likes to start his "Screams" with a doomed blonde answering a telephone.

In 2011, what teenage girl has a landline?

What self-respecting serial killer sends texts?

It raises the uncinematic prospect of a lonely girl in an empty house, receiving text message from a taunting killer. (RU alone? OMG, UR! LOL.)

Doesn't have the same . . . ring to it.

Craven and writer Kevin Williamson know they're updating the franchise for kids who will watch it two months from now on a mobile device, and so they make a few wedged-in references to digital-age innovations.

A teen walks around with a webcam attached to his head, creating a live Internet feed that Craven mostly ignores. "Scream 4" gives lip service to the idea that DIY technology could make any killer his own Craven, but the idea languishes.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that Neve Campbell is back, and she looks fantastic. What a quandary for ambitious actresses - it seems that not being in very many movies is the way to achieve natural ageless beauty.

Campbell doesn't look a day older than she did in the original "Scream," when she first played Sidney Prescott, a young woman pursued by killers who use the "rules" established by slasher movies to stalk and kill their victims. "Scream 4" updates the franchise's meta-posture (there are even jokes about the prefix "meta") with an amusing prologue that offs a few celebrity actresses while flipping through the post-"Scream" horror catalog ("Saw," "Hostel") and constructing a few movie-within-a-movie fake-outs.

It's fun for a few minutes until the movie begins in earnest - Sidney returns to her hometown on the 10th anniversary of the killings, touting a book about her recovery, and saying she has no ill will toward the former friend (Courteney Cox) who fictionalized her story for profit.

Cox reprises her role, as does husband David Arquette, still the sheriff, and the three of them are as unsurprised as we are when somebody uses the anniversary of the killings to launch a new spree. Soon gut-stabbed teens are dropping everywhere ("S4" plays like a grisly comedy, not a horror movie).

Who's doing the killing? An afterthought. The real villain of the piece is the digital age, which Craven intuitively mistrusts, and is right to do so. The relentless digital blob will eventually pirate, copy, reduce, stream, and otherwise diminish motion pictures.

Craven knows what's stalking and killing his art form, and he knows he's the blonde on the phone.