reVIEW (50) SCREAM

 

reVIEW (50)

SCREAM

With the impending release of Scream (the fifth installment and the first without the late, great Wes Craven at the helm), I figured I should resurrect a couple of corpses and let them do the zombie shuffle across the Interwebz, so… here’s one…
 
[The review below existed in a former published life--and in an altered form--in the year 1997, under the identity of “Hitting the Right Pitch.”]
 
“What’s the point [of watching scary movies]? They’re all the same. Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can’t act, who’s always running up the stairs when she should be going out the front door. It’s insulting.”
-- Sidney
 
In 1977, former literature professor Wes Craven--who had already helmed 1972’s lurid Last House on the Left--directed the aridly vicious The Hills Have Eyes, cementing his reputation as a creator of gritty and uncompromising horror films.
A year later, on the last night of October, Michael Myers haunted the streets of Haddonfield in a blood-drenched homecoming that would spawn a whole sub-genre within the horror field, and would make the careers of director John Carpenter and actress Jamie Lee Curtis.
It would be six years later, in 1984, that Craven’s path would intersect with the trajectory of the slasher film genre, when he ended up creating a horror icon: A Nightmare on Elm Street’s “bastard son of a hundred maniacs,” Freddy Krueger--an icon that would later lose all of its potency to the insidious disease, sequelitis.
Flash forward a dozen years, and Craven once again plunges into the slasher genre with a little scary movie called Scream.
 
“See, the police are always off-track with this sh!t. If they watch Prom Night, they’d save time. There’s a formula to it! A very simple formula! Everybody’s a suspect!”
-- Randy
 
From its intense opening sequence which features a wicked ‘90’s take on When A Stranger Calls, coupled with a game all horror hounds would both love and dread to play (watch out for the trick question), Craven makes it clear he’s out for blood.
The 13-minute sequence is so taut and solidly crafted, it makes far better viewing than any number of random full-length slasher entries you might name.
It also utilizes a device hardly seen in the 36 years since 1960’s Psycho (though Chuck Russell’s remake of The Blob, and Craven’s own original Nightmare actually, also used it to good effect).
With that brilliant sequence, we are rushed headlong into what can perhaps be best described as a postmodern slasher film that could very well have been the final word on the genre.
 
“You should never say ‘Who’s there?’ Don’t you watch scary movies?! It’s a death wish. You might as well just come out here to investigate the strange noise or something.”
-- Ghostface
 
It will be remembered that Craven first attempted to do the postmodern meta thing with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, where Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, and Craven himself, all appeared in a tale that presented them struggling against the evil they had created on the screen, now bursting through into the “real world.”
John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness would also explore similar terrain.
However you may feel about either title though, I think it’s fair to say that Scream hits just the right (meta) pitch.
 
It’s a wickedly self-referential film that speaks the language of the movie buff: from the general (rated relationships and the “life is a movie but you can’t choose the genre” analogy) to the specific (the exposure of a slasher film’s conservative, puritanical heart in one of the cardinal rules of the genre: sex equals death, the virgin gets out alive--oft-discussed by the more critically-minded of us gorehounds in the nearly 20 years between Carpenter’s Halloween and Craven’s second slasher triumph).
 
In loving tribute to the very audience who had, by that point, held him in awe for decades, Craven’s Scream is a genuine joy for horror film fans, making reference to a whole slew of movies, from Terror Train to The Silence of the Lambs.
It even turns the entire “Do horror films create violent psychos?” debate on its head in one swift, clean stroke.
With the skill of a surgeon (or an anal-retentive serial killer), Craven and scriptwriter Kevin Williamson play with audience expectations, utilizing every trick they can get their hands on, including time-honoured horror movie clichés and the genre formulas we all know and love, to give us a solid slasher flick that cuts right to the bone.
 
“What movie is this from? I Spit On Your Garage?”
-- Tatum
 
Scream is a horror movie that manages to entertain, set you on edge, and study the genre it belongs to, all in one fell swoop. In doing so, it places the entire slasher genre on the hot spot.
Even Craven is not safe from himself. From the conspicuous-looking janitor to the throw-away line, “You’re starting to sound like some Wes Carpenter flick or something,” it’s clear this film also has a sense of humour.
But like all great horror movies, it’s also relentless and persistent--the Energizer bunny wearing a hockey mask, coming at us again, and again, till the bloody end; an end orchestrated to perfection with a videotape of Halloween playing as counterpoint.
 
“Only virgins can outsmart the killer in the big chase scene in the end. Don’t you know the rules?”
-- Randy

As I mentioned earlier, Scream could very well have been the final word on the slasher genre.
But its box office success would prove to be a siren song Hollywood was loathe to resist.
Which, in the final analysis, was still a very good thing, as Scream 2 (reView post to follow soon) proved to be a crackerjack sequel.
And while I was ultimately disappointed by Scream 3 (Williamson did not write the screenplay), the 11-years-after Scream 4 (with Williamson back on scripting duties) turned out to be a curious title for me.
I didn’t much care for it back in 2011 when it was released. But I went back to it just last year as a refresher and was pleasantly surprised to discover a newfound appreciation for it.
Whereas my initial reaction was that it was an ultimately pointless retread, it turns out my reconsidered opinion is now that 4 is a slyly wicked subversion of the “Let’s introduce the new generation to replace the OG characters” type of reboot, where
 
[SPOILER!!!]
 
some of the very characters you fully expect to have the torch handed over to reveal themselves to be the ones under the Ghostface mask.
Bravo, Craven and crew.
 
And now, we have the 11-more-years-after Scream to look forward to…
Hopefully, it does Mr. Craven proud.
 
(Scream OS & UK quad courtesy of impawards.com.)

reVIEW (29)
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

It’s been a while since I was last on Elm Street, so when the chance came for a return visit, I took it without hesitation.
I first walked down it in 1984, via the magic of Betamax, knowing this was something new from the man who’d given me The Hills Have Eyes and Deadly Blessing, so I was stoked.
Wes Craven did not disappoint then, and here, now, 23 years later, A Nightmare On Elm Street to a large extent, still holds up as an exercise in scares and chills.

With this film, Craven introduced all of horror geekdom to Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), child murderer come back from the dead, to haunt the dreams of the children of Elm Street. Freddy, of course, would go on to join Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees to form the Slasher Trinity, all three graduating to Horror Icon status over the course of money-making sequel after money-making sequel.
In Craven’s original Nightmare, Freddy is a darker, more sinister bogeyman, and would gradually transform over the franchise’s length, into the wisecracking death-dealing jokester most know him as, whose puns and one-liners were probably more dangerous than his razor-blade fingers.
Here though, at the very beginning—and in keeping in tone with the film—Freddy isn’t very big on laughs, and this first Nightmare is all the better for it.

From the opening sequence of Freddy assembling his killer glove, through the Last Girl fake, all the way up to that final shot of poor, boozy Marge (Ronee Blakley) going—ha ha—through the front door, A Nightmare On Elm Street is an effectively creepy little number, with a number of scenes and images that permanently seared themselves into my fevered and impressionable horror geek brain. (That singular image of Amanda Wyss’ Tina standing in her bloodied body bag in the school hall still pops to mind whenever I encounter certain lines of Hamlet.)
And of course, given the subsequent career trajectory of one of the film’s young stars, A Nightmare On Elm Street is notable (particularly to the mainstream movie-going audience) as having these three words in its opening credits sequence: “Introducing Johnny Depp.”

As much as I love Craven’s first Nightmare though, I cannot deny it does have a number of warts, among them, some bad performances. Mr. “Introducing Johnny Depp,” in fact, as young Glen Lantz, is one of the few actors that manage to rise above bad in Nightmare. The rest of his young co-stars display questionable acting prowess.
And perhaps most alarmingly, the bad acting isn’t just confined to the youngsters, as even the aforementioned Blakley (who plays alky mother to Nightmare lead Heather Langenkamp) is a train wreck.
This might not have been so great a sin, except for the fact that the pivotal revelation of who Freddy Krueger really is and what the parents of Elm Street did to him so long ago, comes to us (and daughter Nancy) through the bleary “acting” of Blakley. This could have—and should have—been a great scene. Instead, it feels obligatory, more a plot necessity than the gut-wrenching moment of epiphany it must have been on paper.
There’s also the synth score which gets vaguely ridiculous in certain patches, and “Nightmare” by 213, which plays over the end titles is so bad, I’d managed to wipe it entirely from memory till just a few moments ago, when hearing it once more filled me with an entirely different kind of horror.

Still, in the final analysis, A Nightmare On Elm Street is a horror movie that works, that gets the job done, and leaves the audience with a lingering aftertaste of anxiety, which is so much more than can be said of many a horror film today.

Parting shot: The companion piece to this review—The Director’s Chair (3)—can be found in the Archive.

(A Nightmare On Elm Street DVD cover art courtesy of cduniverse.com.)

THE DIRECTOR’S CHAIR (3)
WES CRAVEN in
“MY CRAVEN 3 (SEVERAL HUNDRED MORE WORDS ABOUT WES CRAVEN)”

“Fortunately, somebody always comes along when it’s least expected and reinvents the (horror) genre. And that’s exciting to watch.”
-- Wes Craven (1990)

And that’s kind of what Craven did with Scream, which turned Hollywood back onto horror in a big way. (Even horror icons like George Romero credited Scream for making Hollywood execs start calling him again to see if he was up to anything new.)
Yes, there was some backlash from Scream (including the resurrection of the deservedly dead slasher flick, as well as the ungodly births of TV’s Dawson’s Creek, Wasteland, and the abominable Teaching Mrs. Tingle, whose only saving graces were Helen Mirren, and the Exorcist bit), but it otherwise put horror back on the bankable map, and made Craven a force to be reckoned with once again, over two decades after his unsettling and infamous debut, Last House on the Left (which has the distinction of being on Stanley Wiater’s Disturbo 13, a list of the most “balls-to-the-wall disturbing” horror films ever made).
Anyway, for what it’s worth (and this is, after all, what we’ve come here for), my Craven 3 (in no particular order)…

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): welcome the razor-fingered Bastard Son of a Hundred Maniacs, as Freddy Krueger gives us our first walking (or should that be, running?) tour of Elm Street (Wes Craven’s New Nightmare—the 7th in the Elm Street franchise—was Craven’s first, badly botched attempt at postmodern horror, which Kevin Williamson showed him how to do correctly in the Scream films)

Deadly Blessing (1981): though Craven isn’t particularly fond of this one, I still think it’s a nice little horror tale that straddles the line, making the viewer wonder whether there’s a natural explanation for all the sh!t going down, or if it really is an incubus haunting the scenic Pennsylvania Dutch countryside (it’s also got Sharon Stone in it, long before she was “Sharon Stone”)

And, two for the price of one! Scream (1996) and Scream 2 (1997): postmodern horror cinema’s finest hour(s), these are horror films for horror film fans, and display Craven’s suspense at its tautest (please disregard Scream 3, with its limp screenplay by Ehren Krueger—who likewise degraded Ringu into its slick Hollywood doppelganger; the only memorable things in Scream 3 are the cameos, and indie queen Parker Posey)

Yeah, The Hills Have Eyes is a classic, but it’s also (like Last House) pretty bleak and hard to sit through. (It’s also pretty much Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre, with a social commentary. And this is, after all, the Craven 3. Or 4, if you want to be picky, so I had to make some tough choices.)

And, just to take a peek at the cruddy end of the spectrum, Craven’s also had a bunch of clunkers, the worst quite possibly being Deadly Friend (which was such a crapfest because of studio interference). Sad, since the script was adapted from a novel by Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote the screenplay for the brilliant Jacob’s Ladder. (Though he also wrote… ulp… Ghost.)
Cursed is also a stinker, but you can read about that in the Archive.

“[Wes Craven] may need a good screenwriting collaborator, the way Billy Wilder needed collaborators I.A.L. Diamond and Charles Brackett to produce his best films.
“Craven’s masterpiece awaits; and I for one am eager to see it.”
-- Ed Gorman
“Several Hundred Words About Wes Craven” (1992)

(I think that masterpiece was Scream/Scream 2, that “good screenwriting collaborator,” Kevin Williamson, but then again, that’s just me.)

Parting shot: In recent years, Craven has been involved with The Hills Have Eyes remake and its sequel, as well as acting as one of the producers of Feast. He also co-wrote the script for the English-language remake of Pulse and contributed a great short to Paris Je T’aime.
He’s now reportedly at work on a sequel to The People Under The Stairs (as producer) and a remake of his own Shocker, which he is slated to direct.
(Reviews of A Nightmare On Elm Street, Cursed, The Hills Have Eyes II, Feast, and Paris Je T’aime can be found in the Archive.)

(Wes Craven image courtesy of webwombat.com.au; A Nightmare On Elm Street, Deadly Blessing, Scream, Scream 2 OS’s courtesy of impawards.com.)

(The above is an altered version of an identically-titled article.)

AKUMU TANTEI
(NIGHTMARE DETECTIVE)
(Review)

Kagenuma (Ryuhei Matsuda; Takashi Miike’s Izo) is a suicidal man gifted (or cursed) with the power to enter people’s dreams. Keiko Kirishima (J-pop singer Hitomi) has just been transferred—at her request—from a significant position at the National Police Agency to regular law enforcement. These two individuals cross paths as Keiko’s first case involves apparent suicides carried out while the deceased was in the grip of a nightmare. The two then reluctantly join forces as it quickly becomes clear that the police have bitten off more than they can chew in their investigation.

Directed by Shinya Tsukamoto (best known for the bizarre body horror extravaganza, Tetsuo, Tsukamoto again wears a number of hats here, as he often does on his films; he co-wrote the screenplay, edited, and shared credit for cinematography; he also stars in it!), Akumu Tantei is an interesting thriller that revisits A Nightmare On Elm Street territory, as we are introduced to “0,” who, like Freddy Krueger, is a malicious entity that kills people in their sleep. This time out though, “0” targets victims who want to die in the first place (and sometimes, that suicidal tendency is entirely subconscious).
Unlike other films that depict a dream reality though, in Akumu Tantei, the dreamscape is pretty much indistinguishable from the real world (no bizarre costumes or production design here). Tsukamoto does however, portray an interesting layering of action in the dream realm, as if in piercing the veil of sleep, Kagenuma enters a potentially endless recursion of worlds; Tsukamoto suggests an infinity of cerebral Russian nestling dolls waiting inside all of our sleeping minds.
And while the plot itself is serviceable enough, and the mystery regarding “0”’s nature and identity neither entirely opaque and unsolvable, nor entirely transparent and predictable, the performances are another matter entirely.


It’s unfortunate that Matsuda does not have the acting chops to carry the weight of Kagenuma. What should be a deep and intrinsic self-loathing comes off as petty and self-involved juvenile angst. There isn’t any depth nor subtle nuance to Matsuda‘s performance, which is sad since the character of Kagenuma presents an interesting paradox in the narrative: he is one of the main protagonists and quite possibly the only one who can actually stop “0,” and yet he displays the prime characteristic of “0”’s victims—he wants to die.
And while Hitomi‘s performance is not as troublesome as Matsuda‘s, it is still not as powerful and convincing as it should be. Keiko is self-described as “socially inept,” and while Hitomi does succeed in portraying the rookie detective as if at one remove from the people around her, that distance sometimes translates into a total disconnection between the character and the audience. One never really feels the pain and isolation of Keiko.
And in one particular scene, her performance seemed so off-pitch, what I can only assume was meant to be existential revulsion played out like a self-induced orgasm.

Thus, with a pair of central performances that are as compromised as these are, the chemistry that one would expect between the two characters just doesn’t manifest. When these two fractured individuals find each other and acknowledge the bond they share, there should be some overriding emotion, a feeling that they have each found the other that can share the burden of their pain, and perhaps help heal each other’s wounds.
Instead, there is a resounding emptiness, a vacuum of emotion as Keiko professes not just her own desire to live, but her desire that Kagenuma go on living too.

Despite this significant failing on its part though, Akumu Tantei is still watchable, an interesting story of life, and death, and dreams.
Clearly not as outlandish as Tetsuo, not as arthouse-leaning as Bullet Ballet, Akumu Tantei is quite possibly Tsukamoto’s most mainstream film to date, and the one with significant franchise potential.*
If you do decide to check it out though, just don’t be surprised if you don’t feel any emotion other than a little horror and a little revulsion.
Which may not necessarily be a bad thing; as Stephen King once said, “A little revulsion is good for the soul.”

* Tsukamoto is currently in pre-production on a sequel.


Parting shot: With his cloak and disheveled hair, Kagenuma looks curiously like Neil Gaiman’s Dream, from Sandman.

(Akumu Tantei OS courtesy of cho-yaba.com; Nightmare Detective OS courtesy of moviexclusive.com; film image courtesy of twitchfilm.net.)