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.)

IN THE INTERESTS OF ALL THINGS RECYCLABLE (3)
GEOUL SOKEURO
(INTO THE MIRROR)

Though Haute Tension director Alexandre Aja has implied that his upcoming Mirrors is more re-imagining than remake, it still found its origins in Kim Sung-ho’s Geoul Sokeuro, so I figured why not make the return trip to the haunted (and awkwardly-named) Dreampia Department Store, and its multitude of mirrors which hide a frightening and fatal secret.

Looking back…

It’s been awhile since I last saw Geoul Sokeuro (Into The Mirror), and I’d somehow managed to forget what a fascinating hybrid it is, succeeding in taking several elements that sometimes prove to be disparate and contrary in other lesser films, and making them work hand-in-hand. Here, you’ll find the supernatural co-mingling with the psychological, while some corporate double-dealing is going on, all of these aspects functioning within what is ostensibly a police procedural.

Wu Yeong-min (Yu Ji-tae) is a former police officer who, following a fatal on-duty shooting incident, is now Security Chief for the about-to-re-open Dreampia Department Store. It’s a made-up post for Yeong-min, a disgruntled courtesy from his uncle, Jeong Il-seong (the ubiquitous Gi Ju-bong), who owns Dreampia.
But just as the young man is a troubled sort, so is his current place of employment. A fire, some injuries, a death; all of this a year past, yet cause for a picket line from family members seeking just compensation.
Now, what seems to be an apparent suicide of a Dreampia employee threatens the planned grand re-opening, though Officer Heo Hyeon-su (Sorum’s Kim Myeong-min) suspects otherwise. And while we, the audience, also know it wasn’t suicide—this is the effective opening sequence of the film—we also know it isn’t as simple as the suspected serial killer.

Writer/director Kim Sung-ho takes this fairly straight-forward set-up, peoples it with borderline stock characters (the troubled, disgraced cop; the greedy businessman), and then proceeds to take the narrative down some rather interesting avenues. With a script stuffed to the brim with fascinating notions, and which remains constantly aware of the thematic and narrative possibilities of its central image, Kim assembles a movie that is decidedly and defiantly not in the vengeful, long-haired contortionist ghost School of Asian Horror.
Kim is also cognizant of the visual possibilities, so, given that the film delves into the nature of mirrors and reflections, we have a whole lot of symmetrical shots and doubling, with a load of sleight-of-hand, computer-assisted mirror trickery, and naturally, twins.

What’s also interesting about Geoul Sokeuro, I feel, is that it’s arguably a tad too cerebral to be as scary as, say, a Ringu or a Ju-on, that it is, perhaps, far more interested in constructing a sense of mystery than scaring the living daylights out of its audience.
Though that may very well be the case, what does stick after a viewing of the film, is the disturbing nature of mirrors, of just exactly who—and what—is reflected there. For my money, that’s a far more potent legacy than some transitory jump scares.
Admittedly, the nearly two-hour running time, coupled with its purposeful pace, may make Geoul Sokeuro seem longish and slow to some, but as I pointed out, this isn’t your average Asian horror film.
So if you’re open to something different from the scene, Geoul Sokeuro has got all of that going for it, and it’s got a climactic death scene which is not only thematically apropos, it’s also worthy of Argento.
What else do I need to say?

Since then…

Yu Ji-tae has been in a number of movies since Geoul Sokeuro, though most film geeks will recognize him from Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy and Chinjeolhan Geumjassi (Sympathy For Lady Vengeance).
Meanwhile, Kim Sung-ho went on to direct a segment in the omnibus film Nunbushin Haru (One Shining Day). Commissioned for the 60th anniversary of Korea’s liberation, Numbushin Haru’s narratives dealt indirectly with the relationship between Korea and Japan.

Looking forward…

In a ShockTillYouDrop.com interview, Alexandre Aja said this of his upcoming remake/reimagining: “I think we all have a special relationship [with] mirrors. The idea was to really find a way to make a movie that will change a way of watching yourself in the mirror and try to do something scary. I wanted to do something that falls in line with The Shining—that's my favorite movie ever. For me, when New Regency came to me with the concept of Mirrors, I felt like I could try to explore something in the vein of The Shining. Greg [Levasseur] and I decided to start from scratch and not connect with the original Korean movie. I think we have something really scary."
He also went on to say that his initial director’s cut was "very graphic" and "takes the shocking gore and violence of survival horror and applies that to the supernatural thriller. I'm happy with the movie we made and in our genre you have to be tough and not make compromises. A lot of times you're asked to pare back and trim down the gore, but I'm fighting to keep it in—to make the movie I want to see as a core audience member."

Sounds promising.
And given that I’m a big fan of most everything in Haute Tension, except for that needless climactic plot flip, and I felt that Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes remake lacked the unbearably taut thrills of his previous outing, I’m still in the market for that Aja film that will completely and utterly kick my a$$.
Here’s hoping Mirrors will be it. (And if it isn’t, there’s always his next project, his remake of Joe Dante’s Piranha…)
Aja’s Mirrors stars Kiefer Sutherland, Amy Smart, and Jason Flemyng.

(Geoul Sokeuro OS courtesy of film.gildia.pl; Into The Mirror DVD cover art [2-disc UK release] courtesy of amazon.co.uk.)

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.)

VACANCY
(Review)

As if to pay homage to the granddaddy of all “loony in a motel” films, Vacancy opens* with what can be viewed as the 21st-century descendant of the Saul Bass-designed title sequence from Hitchcock’s Psycho, a sequence which coolly segues into the license plate of the car of Amy (Kate Beckinsale) and David Fox (Luke Wilson), a couple under the strain of an impending divorce.
It’s late, they’re lost, and the car’s beginning to look like it could be trouble. After apparently getting some help from a mechanic (Ethan Embry, goofy stoner Mark from Empire Records and the Jennifer Love Hewitt-yearning Preston from Can’t Hardly Wait), the Foxes eventually end up at the Pinewood Motel, overseen by its weirdo manager, Mason (Frank Whaley, fantastic in Keith Gordon’s A Midnight Clear and Thomas Carter’s Swing Kids).
They’re forced to spend the night at the ratty Honeymoon Suite, and when David can’t find anything on TV, he sticks in a VHS tape.
That’s when the fun starts.

Much as Eli Roth’s Hostel did, Vacancy uses the idea of torture and violence as a commercial venture as the springboard for its plot, and succeeds in giving its audience a tense and engaging thriller.
This is doubly interesting to me, as the film’s central idea is also a reflection on the fact that this kind of horror film (alternately called “torture porn”—from a phrase coined by New York Magazine’s David Edelstein—or my personal preference, “gorno”) is proving very profitable for Hollywood.
If the baddies of Hostel and Vacancy can make a quick buck off the misery and torture of hapless innocents, than why can’t Hollywood rip off audiences the world over with shrill screams and fake blood?
For any of you out there though who may take offense at anything called “torture porn,” let me assure you, Vacancy’s on-screen gore quotient is minimal in the extreme. There is violence of course, but not the sort of splatter movie violence where we see dismemberment and eye gouging and disemboweling. Vacancy is more thriller than gorno, and it’s a taut little bugger too.

What makes Vacancy even more effective is the fact that you become embroiled in this sullen, largely toxic relationship between husband and wife, played effectively by Beckinsale and Wilson. You feel the tension and the regret that this couple share, and you sense the spectre of the love that was once there.
You sympathize with them so much, that when the fit hits the shan, it’s actually a relief that they don’t devolve into hysterical recrimination. (After all, isn’t the fact that your lives are in danger far more important than anything else?)
It’s also a relief to see Beckinsale in something other than body-hugging black leather making out with Ben from Felicity, so if just for that, Amy Fox is a singular triumph.

If Vacancy has a weakness though, it can arguably be found in an ending that both soft pedals what came just before it, and perhaps in striving for realism (no protracted “psycho gets up after being stabbed/shot/mortally wounded to relentlessly stalk his victim” sequence here), director Nimrod Antal (Kontroll) and writer Mark L. Smith wind up crafting a climax that feels somewhat truncated.
That last shot had a feeling of: What?! That’s it?
Still, all in all, the ride getting to that final shot is worth it.
And if you’re not gonna give me much more than a good story about people in extreme, life-threatening situations (ie. no social or political commentary amidst the grue), then I’d much rather see an effective, if somewhat flawed, thriller than scene after scene of pointless blood and gore.

* It’s a savvy title sequence that’s one of the most interesting I’ve seen this year. (And that one sheet just slays, too.)

Parting shot: I love the conflation “gorno” (gore + porno), as it has that sleazy vibe to it, and a majority of the sub-genre’s titles strike me as violence for violence’s sake.
Don’t get me wrong, I love me a good horror film. Always have, always will.
But once you’ve seen Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, seeing other films of extreme violence (or, Heaven help me, seeing remakes of these classic films of extreme violence) just seems rather pointless, if they have nothing much more in their celluloid beyond the gore and grue.
Unless the point is to make a ton of money on a relatively low budget, which seems to be the case a lot of the time.
Now, when the film is a Hostel or a Saw, then I get it, and these are two of the films that give gorno its good name.
But when it’s a Turistas, or a Saw sequel, or a Texas Chainsaw remake (or prequel), or a Hills Have Eyes remake (or sequel remake), then these are the sort of films that give gorno its bad name.
And as you can see from the above sampling, they outnumber the goodies, believe me.

(Vacancy OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com.)