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 (14)
HALLOWEEN II

If memory serves me right, aside from The Empire Strikes Back, Halloween II was one of the first sequels that I anticipated with relish (another being Friday the 13th Part II). And with the promise of a bigger budget than the original, well, this was bound to be cool, wasn’t it?

Taking a cue from James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein, Halloween II starts at the point where the original ends.
Beginning with the killer climax from the first film, we watch as Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) saves Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) from the relentless Michael Myers, emptying his revolver into the silent killer, then the sequel’s opening segues into some new bits (Michael falls into the front yard, instead of the back, as in the original). Loomis then discovers his quarry is still up and about, and has a neighbour call the police before running off into the night in hot pursuit.
That opening still gets me after more than two decades. Of course, much of the credit for that goes to John Carpenter’s masterfully directed Halloween climax, but it’s a crackerjack way to open up the second chapter of this franchise, by essentially making it a seamless whole with the first film.
Working from a script by Halloween co-writers Carpenter and Debra Hill, Rick Rosenthal takes the director’s chair this time out, as we follow Laurie (who is brought to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital) and Loomis (who continues to search the town’s streets for Michael) over the course of the night, till the dawn of the following day.

What is most conspicuous in this sequel is the absence of that air of dread and pervading sense of time and place (Halloween in small-town America) that so characterized Halloween. Instead, what we have here is a very conscious upping of the on-screen violence. Whereas the original was a practically bloodless outing, in Halloween II, we actually see blood spatter and pool on the floor. We even see scalpels and hypodermic needles contact victims’ bodies. Nothing compared to the Tom Savini killshots in such classic slasher fare as Friday the 13th, The Prowler, or The Burning, mind you, but compared to Halloween, this was a bloodbath!

Sadly though, much of the running time seems to be a bad excuse to show some on-screen kills. One has to wonder why Michael dilly-dallies after he gets to the hospital so he can off nurses and security guards and ambulance drivers, instead of just heading straight for Laurie’s room. I mean, the woman does spend practically the entire film in a hospital gown, doped up on sedatives. How difficult would it have been to just ice her within his first few minutes in the hospital? Instead, he takes his sweet-a$$ time, so that when he finally does get to her room, her spider-sense kicks in, and she’s ready for him. (One of those inexplicable moments in film where the protagonist just senses the baddie coming and acts accordingly. And note that this occurs just as she’s in some sort of coma-like state, apparently a bad reaction to her medication.)

Yes, the film does strive for some sort of realism (characters fall unconscious due to sedatives and concussions; Dr. Loomis is ordered to leave Haddonfield for fear of some public relations disaster), but none of this really helps the film’s dodgy pacing. It’s only when the film is about two-thirds over that Michael actually makes an attempt on Laurie’s life, and the narrative rediscovers itself. Before this point, Halloween II is basically standard slasher fare as the audience watches “characters” (a.k.a. dead meat walking) dropping like flies.
Meanwhile, the Empire reveal regarding Michael and Laurie’s connection is telegraphed a tad early in the proceedings courtesy of a blinding nightmare sequence, effectively blunting whatever shock value they were aiming for.
And all this leads up to a rather limp climax that comes nowhere near the one from the original. Not only do we discover Laurie is a crack shot as she puts a bullet in each of Michael’s eyes(!), but we also have to wonder why Michael, now blinded, just doesn’t lumber forward and stick a scalpel in his tormentors, instead of swinging his weapon about like a right drunken git.

What will largely get you to the end of this film is the need to know how the evening turns out; if Laurie once again manages to get out alive; if Loomis finally catches Michael. And this need to know how things turn out will largely be rooted in the time the first film took to let us know who these characters are.
That sense in Halloween, of being compelled to sit through the entire film because of the dread of what’s just around the corner, is never realized here. In trying to compete on a playing field that had changed significantly in the three years since Halloween, the sequel adopts a different tone, but in the process, ends up being just like most of the other slasher films that had emerged in the wake of Halloween’s success.
At times, Halloween II seems like a rip-off of a rip-off, as if it were trying to be a slasher film (killshots and all), but still somehow dialing down the gore because it was trying to emulate the suspense of the first Halloween (which really had nothing to do with on-screen gore).
Ironic, that Carpenter and company found themselves having to play by the rules of a burgeoning genre that they kick-started in the first place, a genre that was already going down a different road from the path Carpenter walked in Halloween in the first place.
Seeing an arrowhead burst out of Kevin Bacon’s neck and Betsy Palmer losing her head to a machete in slow-motion were cool, yes, but those kills—and others like them—were forging the paradigm that would hold all the way to the slasher genre’s first death (at the hands of sequelitis).

Of course, those are all sentiments of the me of today. The me of 1981, who first saw Halloween II, was a young gorehound who enjoyed the film, but wished they’d gotten Tom Savini to work his bloody magick.
It’s a testament to what Carpenter achieved in Halloween, and the bits of Halloween II that actually work, that the film still holds up to a viewing over a quarter of a century later. (Unlike, say, The Prowler, which I saw again a couple of years back, and realized with horror that a film I watched over and over again on Beta, was really just stretches of tedium and sophomoric acting between still excellent make-up effects by Tom Savini. Even then, the film geek in me was far stronger than the gorehound, as I never just fast-forwarded to the elaborate killshots, but insisted on watching the film in its entirety. Sure, I’d rewind and run through the effects shots a couple of times, to try to figure out how Savini pulled it off—at the time, I dreamed of being a special effects guy—but then I’d settle back and continue watching the damned thing, all the way through to the end credits.)

Despite its flaws, there is still enough of the original Halloween in the sequel’s DNA to make it an okay watch, even today. In hindsight though, it’s frustrating that it couldn’t stand up on a par with Carpenter’s original, or it could have been a great double-feature, watching both back-to-back.
Instead, doing that, you end up with a 3-hour film that has a brilliant first half, then kind of wobbles and unravels over its final half.
Still, on its own, Halloween II is certainly a sight better than many other slasher sequels, including some of the later Halloween installments. (It also has the best Halloween scene Nancy Loomis ever did: on an ambulance gurney, dead.)

Parting shot: Among the luckless hospital employees who are subjected to Michael’s unwanted attention are Ana Alicia, who would go on to primetime soap opera vixenhood on Falcon Crest, and Lance Guest, who would go on to play video games and fight in an interstellar war in The Last Starfighter.

Parting shot 2: Halloween II was Rick Rosenthal’s feature film debut. Since then, he’s worked mostly in television, directing episodes from a whole string of series, including The Practice, Wasteland, Strong Medicine, and Smallville.
Recently, he directed two episodes of the excellent-but-cancelled Reunion, as well as episodes of The Dresden Files, Angela’s Eyes, and Veronica Mars. He also helmed the pilot episode for the upcoming Flash Gordon series.
Amidst all his TV work (including the lamentable TV movie The Birds II: Land’s End, for which he took the credit “Alan Smithee”), Rosenthal returned to the Halloween franchise in 2002, for Halloween: Resurrection.

(Halloween II OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

Again, thanx to J&R Travel Agency, for arranging my return trip to Haddonfield.