Name : Lisa Kennedy / Alias : Denver Post
Since Scream poured irony into the mix, it has become mighty hard to write a line of dialogue that doesn't elicit winks and nods. We all know where the mayhem's leading.

Name : David Ng / Alias : Village Voice
The Amityville Horror is a Xerox so tattered and faded that it's impossible to determine who's to blame for the overproduced mediocrity before our eyes.

Name : John Monaghan / Alias : Detroit Free Press
The latest in a long line of cheap horror film remakes that combine familiar names and stories with slash-cut editing and computer-generated effects.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
In this Amityville, the performances are bad, the special effects ho-hum, and it's not even particularly scary.

Name : Scott Foundas / Alias : Variety
Begins slavishly faithful to its low-key 1970s predecessor then sledgehammers auds with a numbing succession of shock edits and over-the-top horror effects.

Name : Bob Longino / Alias : Atlanta Journal-Constitution
There's nothing this Amityville won't beg, borrow, steal from or fabricate in trying to make your neck hairs sit up and quiver.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
This house springs so many FX shocks it plays like a theme-park ride. Result? It's not scary, just busy.

Name : Roger Ebert / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
The problem with The Amityville Horror is that, in a very real sense, there's nothing there.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Salon.com
I wasn't shocked by The Amityville Horror, or outraged by it: I felt nothing but disdain.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
A few lines get laughs, but the horror is standard fare, without a shred of innovation.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Brevity is the single best thing about it.

Name : Kevin Thomas / Alias : Los Angeles Times
The film is a terrific scare show, fast and furious, made with a lot of style and energy, packing plenty of jolts yet never lingering morbidly over horrific images.

Name : Sean Daly / Alias : Washington Post
You'll want to get out of Amityville long before the Lutzes do.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Nothing gets in the way of the rote staging, the ham-handed predictability, the feeling that you've been to this house, and yawned at these ghosts, once too often.

Name : Connie Ogle / Alias : Miami Herald
Moviegoers are more cynical now than they were in 1979, and most will laugh off the moments meant to be tense. You can't really blame them.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Shoddily made, boring and, most shockingly, without a single decent scare.

Name : Ruthe Stein / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
It retains the cheesy look of the 1979 original, pure schlock not gussied up to appear to be anything else.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Boston Globe
Not content to remake an old, mediocre horror movie, this Amityville takes its cues from current mediocre horror movies, too. This one is frightening only if you can't remember the last throwaway movie that leaned on all the same tricks.

Name : David Hiltbrand / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Despite Andrew Douglas' tightly focused direction, this is a cheap, calculated scare.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
A gory lark, a cheap-thrill-packed love poem to the history of the contemporary horror film.

Name : Roger Moore / Alias : Orlando Sentinel
The original is still creepy, but this Horror will have fans jumping in their seats and talking back to the screen.

Name : Gene Seymour / Alias : Newsday
The movie is a procession of unregenerate B-level goosing. But there's definitely a smirk beneath the muck.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
Completely cheesy and mildly enjoyable.

Name : Lisa Rose / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
The startling thing about the remake is that it's one of the better horror films to hit screens in recent months, thanks to its refusal to take itself too seriously.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
If they scare up enough business to perpetuate this sort of retread, that will be the real horror.

Name : Philip Wuntch / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Watching The Amityville Horror is about as enjoyable as attending a Halloween party hosted by people you can barely tolerate.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
In a ghost story, the narrative doesn't have to be a model of originality or coherence, but it needs to support the scares. In The Amityville Horror, the writing is so bad that it detracts from the 'boo!' moments and creepy interludes.

Name : Chuck Wilson / Alias : L.A. Weekly
Never buy a house with a basement, and while you're at it, avoid old Dutch Colonials in which the previous occupants were murdered by an eldest son possessed by demons.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
In theory, this should all be scary, but it just isn't. You giggle at the B-movie cheesiness of it.

Name : Bruce Westbrook / Alias : Houston Chronicle
Like good drive-in fare from the '70s, this is all about sensation.

Name : Jack Mathews / Alias : New York Daily News
A cut-to-order MTV hack attack. Audiences will be stunned not because they have been frightened but by how obvious and safe the whole thing is.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Low-key creepy rather than outright scary, the new Amityville marks a modest improvement over the original.

Name : Bill Muller / Alias : Arizona Republic
If star Ryan Reynolds wants to scare us, why not just lock us in a room and make us watch Van Wilder over and over? Or have girlfriend Alanis Morissette talk about her past relationships?

Name : Robert Denerstein / Alias : Denver Rocky Mountain News
The filmmakers have managed to take a mediocre movie and make it worse.

Name : Rick Groen / Alias : Globe and Mail
A sustained if wildly unco-ordinated assault on our senses (our emotions are clearly not on his battle map), complementing those feverish jump cuts with a cliche of equally stunning proportions.

Name : Kirk Honeycutt / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Shorter and punchier but nearly as hokey as the original.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Richard Roeper.com
Bloody entertaining.

Name : Laremy Legel / Alias : Film.com
A perfectly acceptable Friday night, Scream 4 delivers plenty of scares without consequences, murder without depth, and a flood of legacy laughs.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
The problem is, the movie doesn't really care if we are laughing with it or at it.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Between a diabolically funny start and a surprise climax, Scream 4 offers nothing more than a series of gory deaths that grow tiresome with repetition.

Name : Gary Dowell / Alias : Dallas Morning News
Though director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson don't quite generate the lightning-in-a-bottle energy that made their first Scream movie a hit, they manage to awaken a 15-year-old slasher franchise that has been dormant for a decade.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Retaining all the elements introduced in the 1996 original - gut-clenching tension, sharp whodunit plotting, self-aware humor and a sympathetic core cast - it advances the story to a new-media era.

Name : Nathan Rabin / Alias : AV Club
Fifteen years in, the series now looks more than ever like a Mobius strip that reflects on itself in a perpetual loop. But meta-arbitrary is still arbitrary.

Name : David Germain / Alias : Associated Press
Honestly, it's not an unwelcome thing to watch the return of Neve Campbell as the slasher victim who wouldn't die, Courtney Cox as the tabloid hack in bloodlust for a story and David Arquette as the bumbling Barney Fife of fright-flick cops.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
Relying on obvious cliches doesn't seem ironic anymore, just easy. And though there are several genuine jolts, poor pacing leaves too much time between the silliness and scares.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
You'll watch it to see a horror movie that has a sense of humor about itself. For "Scream" franchise fans, or for those who like their horror not too horrific, that's enough.

Name : Michael Nordine / Alias : L.A. Weekly
Stachura turns everything up to 11 almost from the outset, and all escalation from there feels overwrought.

Name : Nick Pinkerton / Alias : Village Voice
The unengaged and overlong fourth Scream plops its self-awareness on a new generation, who must endure a late-'90s flashback that's aged as well as the Nu-metal songbook.

Name : Rick Groen / Alias : Globe and Mail
Not even the smug irony endures - it's hard to congratulate yourself for being in on a stale joke.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
The sardonic laughs are mostly gone in this wheezing cash cow and the cries don't resonate. The greatest shocks are the ones facing the now middle-aged main actors when they look into the mirror.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
It's almost really cool, without quite being really cool.

Name : Roger Ebert / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
The actors do what they can in a film that doesn't care about human insights. The characters are almost preternatural in their detachment; if you were embedded in events like these, wouldn't you be paralyzed with panic?

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
"Scream 4" finds a way to live up to its gory past while it carves out new terrors in new ways (new media helps).

Name : Mike Hale / Alias : New York Times
Like its predecessors, "Scream 4" replaces the values of storytelling and suspense with the value of being in on the joke. Unfortunately, in the 11 years since "Scream 3," the joke has gotten pretty old.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Scream's brand of horror, which lampooned the slasher genre while simultaneously embracing it, was fun and breezy in 1996. In 2011, it's about as fresh as the whiff of something stale and rank from a crypt.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
"Scream 4" is a strange concoction, clever and self-knowing in the extreme and yet operating in primal ways that bypass wit. Something about it feels very modern.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
There is some fun here, but ultimately it's more self-satisfied than anything else.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
The film very quickly, and tediously, becomes more of the same old and Craven thing - self-referential film buff gags accompanied by a clockwork killing spree that seriously reduces the population of a small town.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The filmmakers' subtext - at least in the movie's first quarter - seems to acknowledge that you can't top the original. And they didn't.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
"Scream" always made fun of itself even as it was frightening us - and that hasn't changed a bit.

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Boston Globe
Craven no longer appears to be directing a cast of characters. Collectively, they're a knife block.

Name : Kevin C. Johnson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
It's funny and scary at the same time, and fans will "Scream" with approval.

Name : Lisa Schwarzbaum / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It's a giddy reminder of everything that made Scream such a fresh scream in the first place.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
On its own terms, Scre4m is pretty good.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
The "Scream 4" (I refuse to write it the other way anymore) drinking game: Take a slug every time someone on-screen remarks how meta it all is.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
This is quite effective as horror filmmaking and more pungent than anything [Craven's] done in a while.

Name : Dennis Harvey / Alias : Variety
Overblown, overlong and overstuffed with genre self-referentialism, yet undercooked in terms of credibility, worthwhile new characters and memorable scares, it's not the razor-sharp reboot fans were hoping for.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
Against all odds, Scream 4 proves that sometimes you can go home again.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
For genre geeks, this can be fun - although nothing in Scream 4 is quite as clever as the filmmakers seem to think it is.

Name : Keith Uhlich / Alias : Time Out
It's a professionally polished package - cinematographer Peter Deming frames the carnage beautifully in widescreen - but don't go in expecting scares so much as laughs.

Name : Glenn Kenny / Alias : MSN Movies
It's not a disgrace - indeed, it's not bad if you like that sort of thing - while not particularly good, and yet it's one of the better horror films I've seen in a long time.

Name : Lisa Kennedy / Alias : Denver Post
Compared with so many of the rebooted slasher flicks, Scream 4 remains a cut above. No, that is not an intended pun.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
Scream 4 is a total hoot. Assuming you can find the humor in knife stabbings.

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
Craven guides us expertly down a series of blind, bloody alleys, a journey that's more pleasurable than frustrating. On account of his steady hand, the last act is as good as could be expected: skillfully conceived and entertaining in its preposterousness.