reVIEW (51) SCREAM 2

reVIEW (51)

SCREAM 2

... and with a brand new Scream just around the corner, here’s the other zombie I wanted to resurrect…

Go, zombie, go!

Shamble across the Interwebz!

“Let’s face it, Sidney. These days, you gotta have a sequel!”

-- Stu (from Scream)

The menacing drone of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Red Right Hand” plays over the opening credits of a film called Stab.

Yes, Stab--the film based on the novel The Hillsboro Murders, written by the Antichrist of tabloid TV, Gale Weathers.

With an audience of howling gorehounds in white masks and black cloaks, the sneak preview of Stab (presented in “Stab-O-Vision,” naturally) serves as the opening sequence of Scream 2, an opening that is both a sobering indictment of how fanatical some gorehounds can get about their horror movies, and a brilliant follow-up to Scream’s taut opening; we even get to see Heather Graham (a long way from Twin Peaks, she is) do Drew Barrymore’s Casey Becker, in a great Psycho homage.

Slamming us with a coda that is a chilling example of what Scream 2’s “freaky Tarantino film student,” Mickey (Timothy Olyphant), terms “life imitating art imitating life,” the sequence drags us bodily into the second chapter in Kevin Williamson’s envisioned trilogy, a stunning continuation of the first film, many of its plot elements and surprises logical ramifications of events that occurred in the original.

“It’s starting again, Randy.”

-- Sidney

Two years after the bloodbath at Stu’s house in Scream’s climax, Sidney (Neve Campbell, back for a second round) and fellow Woodsboro massacre survivor Randy (Jamie Kennedy) have gone on to university, where they are pursuing a “pseudo-quasi-happy existence,” trying to put the past behind them. A past that refuses to go away, as not only has Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) written a book about Woodsboro, but a film has been made from that novel.

Then there’s Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber), falsely accused by Sidney for the murder of her mother (as seen in Scream), still trying to clear his reputation by getting on the tube to tell his story.

With Stab’s opening just around the corner, all these media prods set the stage for the renewed mayhem; as an Omega Beta Zeta sister puts it so succinctly, “It’s that movie, Stab. It’s bringing out the crazies.”

“If there is some freaked-out psycho trying to follow in Billy Loomis’ footsteps, you probably already know him. Or her. Or them. They’re probably already in your life. They get off on that.”

-- Dewey

The sly intelligence and self-referential wit evidenced in Scream is still here in the sequel, proving that Williamson’s skill at writing a nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat horror film that is also a statement on the genre and the medium, was not a one-off fluke.

From the broad thematic (and cinematographic) nods to Psycho (and, to a certain extent, Psycho II) to the particular--and peculiar--workings of the Scream universe (what could just have very well been a throw-away line from the first film crystallizes into “reality” as we see Tori Spelling essay Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott in Stab; it’s just too bad we don’t get to see David Schwimmer’s Dewey), Williamson displays firm control of plot and character, taking the survivors from the original and bringing them two years forward, each of them displaying scars--both physical and psychological--from the events in Woodsboro.

And given the strong sense of continuity between the first two chapters of the Scream trilogy, my mentioning Psycho may be very appropriate, since, the way I see it, after all the trauma the survivors of Scream 2 go through, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Scream 3 opens with said survivors running a motel just off the highway, dressing up in masks and cloaks and murdering unsuspecting secretaries on the lam.

“So it’s our job to observe the rules of the sequel. Number one: the body count is always bigger. Number two: the death scenes are always much more elaborate. More blood. More gore. Carnage candy. Your core audience just expects it.”

-- Randy

Though the death scenes here are not necessarily any gorier than those in the original, what are certainly more elaborate this time around are the set pieces leading up to those deaths; the chases, the thrills, the suspense. In an astoundingly nerve-wracking sequence, Williamson actually outdoes the “potential slasher victim trapped in the back of a cop car” scenario in I Know What You Did Last Summer with the one in Scream 2.

Williamson and director Wes Craven also utilize the Windsor College setting to its utmost, wringing all they can out of the “college campus as stalking ground” milieu.

Just as Scream played with the slasher setting archetype of the small town terrorized by the mad killer (as established in Halloween and done to death in many a subsequent film, such as The Prowler and My Bloody Valentine), Scream 2 trods the well-worn footpaths of such slasher fare as Graduation Day and Final Exam.

True to form though, Williamson takes it that one, smart step further. The script is so cognizant of its setting that the environment is exploited for all its thrill-worthy potential.

At one point, Kennedy, David Arquette, and Cox share a particularly intense scene set on the sprawling campus lawn in broad daylight, and in another (in what I like to think of as the film’s T.S. Eliot “Who is the third” moment), Campbell does a great turn in a slightly surreal dress rehearsal where Sidney plays the doomed prophetess Cassandra amidst a masked Greek chorus.

Even Sidney’s identification with Cassandra--who is doomed to live out a future she is intimately familiar with, because she can convince no one of its impending reality--is a stroke of genius on Williamson’s part. At one point in the film, Sidney laments, “I knew this was going to happen”; the police stations and reporters are now a painfully familiar sight for poor Ms. Prescott.

“Wow. That was intense.”

-- Cotton

Crackling with an air of tense expectancy and boasting a climax that has some last-minute mind screws and plot curveballs, Scream 2 is an expertly executed film that highlights not only the fascination of the movie-going masses with violence, but also the omnipresence of the media in our lives.

It is a film that once again proves that, 1) Wes Craven is alive and well and still quite capable of eliciting the scares, 2) it doesn’t hurt for horror to have a brain, and 3) Kevin Williamson is a brilliant writer with a deep respect for the genre and a great sense of humour.

Described by one critic as “a fascinating piece of work for a post-media society,” Scream 2 is a film that holds a mirror up to itself, the horror genre, and the audience, all in one graceful, knowing gesture (the audience being a microcosm of society at large); a film that gives you pause for reflection, as you’re running scared silly for your life.

“You do realize that if we were in a Scream movie, you'd be the prime suspect...”

-- Mark Gatela to me

[The above review existed in a former published life, and in slightly altered form, in the year 1997, under the identity of “Scream and Scream Again.”]

(Scream 2 OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

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.)

VIKAREN
(THE SUBSTITUTE)
(Review)

Ole Bornedal first came to my notice with his 1994 thriller, Nattevagten, which I heard good things about back then, and which he then remade three years later as the English-language Nightwatch, with Ewan McGregor, Josh Brolin, and Patricia Arquette.
Having missed the original, I made it a point to check out the redux, and found it to be an interesting, but flawed effort. It felt compromised, which happens quite often with English-language remakes, even if the original’s helmer is still in place.
After 1997, Bornedal fell off my radar, till he screeched quite forcibly back with 2007’s Vikaren (The Substitute). Following a bunch of students who suddenly discover their teacher is an alien, Vikaren sounded, at first blush, like Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty.
So here I was, with a film that not only brought my attention back to Bornedal, but also potentially felt like a vindication of the “my teacher is an evil alien” idea, which was largely squandered by The Faculty (a double disappointment, since it was a tantalizing team-up between Rodriguez and screenwriter Kevin Williamson).


Vikaren is perhaps most interesting in that Bornedal (with co-writer Henrik Prip, who also plays inept school psychologist Claus) chooses a tone which successfully mixes horror, black comedy, and bizarre humour, to produce an entertaining hybrid that’s miles better than The Faculty, and yes, is indeed a vindication of the “my teacher is an evil alien” idea.
Said evil alien is one Ulla Harms (Paprika Steen), who goes down as one of the most gonzo, politically incorrect, apparently hormonal substitute teachers in film history. A significant portion of the film’s humour stems from Steen’s performance, as she essays this inhuman entity who’s heretofore only known violence, but has arrived on Earth in order to learn about love.
Yes. Love.
But, being an evil alien, Ulla naturally just goes about things the wrong way, almost instantly alerting her students to her otherness, and ultimately uniting these misfits long enough to take her extraterrestrial a$ on.

Another refreshing tack Vikaren takes is to have a bunch of young kids (as opposed to horny teenagers) as our protagonists. Trapped in a world of mostly clueless and ineffectual adults, who never listen when he really needs them to, Carl (then-newcomer Jonas Wandschneider) not only has to deal with a recent family tragedy, but also bring his classmates—some of whom don’t particularly like the “weird” kid—together to stop the alien’s insidious plans.
And while the film buckles in certain portions of its tail end (sudden leaps in logic and editing; a missed opportunity to highlight the class as a cohesive, empathetic unit), it’s still very much a wild and welcome ride that’s not quite like anything out there that comes readily to mind.
It’s oddball, yes, but it isn’t really the horror-comedy of titles like Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead or Christopher Smith’s Severance.
Actually, this feels closer to David Lynch territory. Sort of.


What must also not go unmentioned is the fact that, since the protagonists are essayed by child actors, the performances aren’t uniformly laudable.
There are some rough patches here, but nothing that can be considered a major stumbling block.
After all, Vikaren is all clearly in good fun.
Though I expected it to be more deadly serious than it turned out to be, Vikaren is nonetheless a title to be checked out.
At the very least, it’s loads better than The Faculty. (Yes, even without Famke.)

Parting shot: Almost as if to make The Faculty link even more overt, Vikaren also employs Faculty composer (and frequent Wes Craven collaborator) Marco Beltrami.


(Vikaren DVD cover art courtesy of wordpress.com; images and The Substitute DVD cover art courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.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.)

reVIEW (6)
CURSED

Spurred by Wes Craven’s recent turn as a guest judge on On The Lot, I thought to resurrect this review of Cursed (a review which began life answering to the name, “Bad Moon Rising”; go ahead, you can call it that. I’m sure it won’t mind).

Saddled with such a sadly appropriate title, it’s a small wonder that Cursed actually got completed and managed to lope its way into theatres. Of course, once you get to see it, you may just wish it had been shot in the head with a silver bullet while it was still unfinished.
Brought to you by the Scream team, director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson, Cursed has had a tortured existence, laboring under its own version of the Mark of the Beast: delays, rewrites, and re-shoots.
Apparently, much like Exorcist: The Beginning, Cursed was practically re-shot in its entirety, much of the original cast (who were no longer available due to other film commitments) replaced, for the version unleashed upon us hapless movie-goers. Reportedly, one of the major changes was shifting it from an R-rating to a PG-13, effectively neutering whatever bite it may have initially had.

Ostensibly, the film is a horror thriller which purports to show us the travails of brother and sister Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg) and Ellie (Christina Ricci), who’ve both been infected by a werewolf. In actuality, it’s a flat and tiresome experience that is a definite low point for both Craven and Williamson.
Not that either is a stranger to low points, mind you. Since making an impact with the infamous The Last House on the Left in 1972, Craven‘s career has been checkered with soaring highs (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream/Scream 2) and abysmal lows (Deadly Friend). Williamson, meanwhile, exploded onto the scene with Scream, and delivered a brilliant sequel in Scream 2, but spiraled ever downwards, passing on the way to the bottom such disappointing sights as The Faculty, Dawson’s Creek, the again appropriately-titled Wasteland, and the horrific (in the worst sense of the word) Teaching Mrs. Tingle.
So… low points? These gentlemen both know low points. I suppose I was just holding out the hope that whatever elusive spark, whatever strange alchemy they managed to tap into with Scream and Scream 2, they would find a third time.
No such luck.
It’s almost as if both suddenly developed creative amnesia, and whatever they seemed to know about suspense and horror, on display so elegantly in the first two Scream installments, evaporated into thin air.

Nowhere in the entire running time of Cursed do we find even a smidgen of the taut suspense Craven and Williamson managed to pack into Scream’s now-familiar opening sequence involving Drew Barrymore, a phone, and some popcorn. What we have here is 96 minutes of ho-hum that isn’t even remotely entertaining.
And since Ellie and Jimmy need to kill the werewolf who is the source of the infection in order to return to normality, it actually gets to a point where you start praying for a RAW Smackdown with Real Actual Werewolves just slapping each other around in some mindless popcorn horror fashion, just to ease the tedium. Tragically, even that doesn’t come to pass.
Like I said. Ho-hum.

And anyone who’s seen Scream will tag Cursed’s opening for what it is: a sequence which introduces us to cannon fodder, in this case, American Pie’s Shannon Elizabeth and singer Mya, the former delivering a particularly hilarious performance as Becky, the werewolf’s first on-screen victim.
Hijacked for the miserable ride are Dawson’s Creek’s Pacey, Joshua Jackson, Smallville’s Lex, Michael Rosenbaum, Gilmore Girls’ Jess, Milo Ventimiglia, Judy Greer (Jawbreaker, The Village), and Scott Baio—playing himself (!) in an ultimately pointless subplot—presumably to pad the suspect list with a gaggle of red herrings, in a vain attempt to confuse the issue, never once fooling us as to the identity of the mystery master werewolf.
It should be noted at this point that in the process of the unmasking, there is a rupture in the film’s logic (or perhaps it was just me slipping into semi-catatonia for a few seconds, thus missing a vital plot point—though I doubt it), not that that’s such a big deal, considering logic is seemingly just as much of a rarity in Cursed as actual thrills.

The thing is, the field was wide open with werewolf films. I certainly wasn’t expecting another An American Werewolf in London, John Landis’ ultimate word in werewolf cinema, but they could have tried. They could have made some kind of positive mark. As it is, Cursed could have fallen smack dab in the middle of Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf and the seventh installment of this sad and sorry franchise, Howling: New Moon Rising, and I wouldn’t have blinked an eye.

The saddest part, I suppose, is that this terrible miscarriage masquerading as a movie was the result of the collaboration of two individuals who know the game: these aren’t neophytes here, not even sophomores. These are individuals with Masters at horror*, and yet managed to produce not a sleek, sly, and cunning beast, but a whining, mangy cur with its legs all wobbly, its tail between its legs, and its teeth all fallen out.

* Well, maybe in Williamson’s case, a Magna Cum Laude.

Parting shot: Ventimiglia has, of course, gone on to the phenomenal Heroes. (You can tell this is an old review, as I didn’t describe him as “Heroes’ Peter.”)

(Cursed OS courtesy of impawards.com.)