There’s No Such Thing As Safe Sex With A Werewolf

Year: 2005

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, Joshua Jackson

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

There’s a reason Wes Craven took a six year break from feature filmmaking after 2005. Two of his films came out that year. One was the excellent airborne thriller Red Eye. The other was Cursed, a Kevin Williamson-penned werewolf thriller. On paper, it’s a match made in Heaven. The duo had previously collaborated on the massively successful Scream trilogy, which reinvented the slasher genre. Why not do the same thing with Craven’s first foray into werewolf mythology?

There was just one little thing in the way… The Weinstein Company. What should have been a nice and easy teenybopper shoot grotesquely stretched into a two and a half year nightmare of reshooting, rewriting, recasting, and general meddlesome nonsense that twisted the film into a wholly unrecognizable form. It started off as a normal movie, but ended up a misshapen monster.

I suppose the real werewolf is the movie itself.

In Cursed, Ellie Myers (Christina Ricci) is a late night talk show producer who takes care of her high school-aged brother Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg, already Social Networking it up) after their parents died. She is dating Jake (Joshua Jackson), a lothario who is opening a horror-themed club (because Kevin Williamson), and who has been pulling away as of late, much to her chagrin. After Ellie and Jimmy get into a car accident, they witness a young woman (Shannon Elizabeth) being mauled by a giant wolf, and both of them get scratched in the process.

Over the next two days, during the full moon, they begin to exhibit increasingly wolfish tendencies. Ellie is freaked out by her sudden aggression and attraction to blood, but Jimmy has a great time Teen Wolfing it up with his heightened sexual charisma a (AKA flat-ironed hair. This was 2005, after all) and newfound athletic prowess. But a werewolf keeps attacking people around town. Is it one of them? The original wolf that cursed them? Or somebody else entirely?

You know how it is in Hollywood. Every waiter you get is either an aspiring actor or a werewolf.

Although it’s almost impossible to discern a film in the finished product of Cursed, there is a 100-minute block of images and sound in front of us, so let’s talk about it.

The two year delay didn’t help much, but even in 2003 Cursed would have felt way too 90’s. Kevin Williamson’s particular brand of postmodern winking worked in 1996, but sarcasm’s lease hath all too short a date. Cursed is chock full of weird rock band cameos (go Bowling for Soup!), movie references, and too-polished teenspeak, stuff which was getting unfashionable by the time the millennium rolled around, but in the post-Saw period was downright humiliating.

And I hate to say it, but the script just isn’t very good. Obviously, it has been cobbled together from about 19 different drafts, which would explain the jumbled structure, the jerry-rigged romance between Ricci and Jackson, and the two finales in a row that proudly contradict each other. But the script is putrid all the way down to the dialogue, and there just ain’t no excuse for that.

Most of the teen scenes are preoccupied with exuberant homophobia, culminating in this mid-wrestling match gem: “You know the best thing about being a fairy? Getting to fly,” which is deeply offensive on both a personal and a syntactical level. Cursed is packed with this kind of anemic quippage (my personal favorite being “You’re playing games with us… Well, play this!”), finally exhausting Williamson’s seemingly endless reserves of arch wit. It’s telling that he too would retreat from motion pictures for over half a decade following Cursed’s release.

It seems like this film really was… cursed.

Pretty much everything in Cursed is underwhelming, but it’s difficult to pinpoint a central problem within the infinite vicious cycle of blame. The actors are subpar (especially the bland Ricci and Portia de Rossi, who is hideously miscast as an ominous fortune teller) because their characters were crumbling beneath them as the script was cannibalized by the writer, who was working with a harried director, who was being squashed under the pressure of producers, who didn’t like the script, and on and on and on. It’s an unsolvable Sphinx riddle. At this point, it would have been better if it hadn’t gotten a release at all.

All that being true, it must be said that while nothing in Cursed could really be called good, it’s not quite so rotten as I’m making it sound. Sure, it’s a wretched, hybridized monstrosity, but during the bulk of its run time it’s merely mediocre rather than actively terrible. Craven manages to milk some suspense out of several sequences, especially in the initial wolf attack, which features a jump scare that is the single most effective scene in the film. His stalk sequences see him pulling a lot of old tricks out of his toolbag (scraping claws a la Freddy Krueger, things subtly going wrong in an increasingly dream logic manner), but there’s a reason they were put in there in the first place: They work.

Cursed also features a terrific entry in the Craven/Williamson canon of loony killer reveals when the werewolf turns out to be [SPOILERS Judy Greer], who gives the best performance in the film once outed as a psychopath, final proving that there was something comedic lodged in the script that could actually click when a performer got a crack at it. This scene also provides the second best moment of the film, some werewolf body shaming that is deliciously over-the-top and lampoons the Hollywood lifestyle at a level the movie had been feebly attempting to reach for an hour and change.

The only thing that never ever works in Cursed is the werewolf itself, which feels like a pretty big oversight. While the original effects were provided by FX genius Rick Baker, who pulled off An American Werewolf in London without anything remotely resembling the technology of 2003. Yet for some unfathomable reason he was yanked from the project and replaced by KNB, whose work would be plastered over with crappy CGI. To be fair, the computer work here is a smidge better than a lot of recent lazy CGI (here’s lookin’ at you, The Hobbit), but the werewolf looks far too much like Bobo the Bear to be menacing.

Seriously, they could be brothers.

With that, let’s leave Cursed to rot in peace. It’s a pitiful creation that doesn’t deserve all the stellar people who worked on it. It’s not the worst film of Craven’s filmography, but it’s the one where his creativity and humanity are least apparent, which is far more damning than simply being crappy.

TL;DR: Cursed is an endlessly fiddled-with film that wouldn’t have been good in its original form.
Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 1150

Die Hydrogen Monoxide

Year: 1988

Director: Steve Miner

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Josh Hartnett, Adam Arkin

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Let’s not pull any punches here. Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later is the single most asinine title ever inflicted upon an innocent horror movie. The core concept makes sense (this – the seventh film in the franchise – was released twenty years after the original and brings back many of its characters and themes), but the execution is downright execrable. This film has nothing to do with water, and the needlessly hip, hopelessly confusing title is just another outgrowth of the pop postmodern horror flicks that sprouted like kudzu in the years following the success of Scream.

Yes, we’ve finally reached that fabled genre-savvy period of the late 90’s, where slashers could be slashers and teens could be overwritten. While I’m on the subject, let’s take a moment to appreciate how much the Halloween franchise adheres directly to the historical development of the genre as a whole. It’s uncanny, really. The whole thing is like a road map of the dominant trends of each era. Halloween exemplifies the proto-slashers of the 70s, Halloween II the gory killfests of 1981, Halloween 4 the quasi-supernatural bent of the post-Nightmare period, Halloween 5 the soul-sucking crappiness of 1989, and Halloween 6 the bleak desperation of franchise filmmaking in the early 90’s. Then it would move on into the no-man’s land of the early 2000’s slashers and stand at the forefront of the remake boom, but that’s a story for another time.

Halloween H20 upholds the tradition, providing a textbook example of the self-reflexive slasher. Normally this wouldn’t bode well, considering that it’s in the company of mediocre films like I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend, but the film was assigned a dream team of slasher bruisers, including many veterans of Scream itself. Along with the guidance of Screamsmith Kevin Williamson (who isn’t credited with the script, but according to the hot Hollywood gos, probably should be), we have Scream editor and composer Patrick Lussier and Marco Beltrami, as well as Friday the 13th Part 2 director Steve Miner. The cherry on top, naturally, is the return of reigning Scream Queen Jamie Lee of House Curtis.

Long may she kick ass.

Of course, there’s the nasty little wrinkle of Laurie Strode having been killed off in Part 4, but that’s nothing a little ignoring the last three sequels can’t solve. H20 is a direct continuation of Halloween II: Keri Tate (Jamie Lee Curtis) is the headmistress of a prestigious Southern California boarding school, but she has a secret. Back in 1978, her brother (yeah, that’s still a thing) Michael Myers (Chris Durand) killed a lot of her friends, then vanished in a hospital explosion, presumed dead. After that she faked her death and changed her name, living constantly under the fear that Michael will return once more.

This paranoia has led to some glam alcoholism (there’s nothing like shotgunning chardonnay in a chic cream sweater) and damaged her relationships with her son John (Josh Hartnett) and her boyfriend, guidance counselor Will Brennan (Adam Arkin). On Halloween night 1998 (helpfully proclaimed by a condescending title card that reads “October 31st – Halloween”), John ditches out on a school field trip in a rebellion against his overprotective mother, throwing a party with some Meat friends. He, his girlfriend Molly (Michelle Williams), and their horny mates Sarah (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe) and Charlie (Adam Hann-Byrd) sneak into the school building for some illicit merriment.

Of course, a little thing like an exploding hospital can’t stop Michael Myers, and he shows up to wreak havoc once more, though he must have lost his mask at some point over the years and had to make do with a Sideshow Bob wig.

You’d think it wouldn’t be too hard to replicate the original mold, but you would be wrong.

The thing about Halloween H20 is that there’s a character named Brennan, and I only allow my namesake to be used by good films (for the record, there’s a Dr. Brennan in The Exorcist). Ergo, Halloween H20 turns out to be the best sequel of the entire franchise, in a close race with 4. Some might argue that bringing Jamie Lee Curtis back pretty much earns the movie a free pass, but some probably haven’t seen Halloween: Resurrection.

Halloween H20 is short and sweet. It gets in, does its job, and books the hell out of there, and I greatly admire it for that. The story it tells is simple and taut. A trauma victim must survive one more trial to wipe her slate clean and get her life back on track. It’s surprisingly poignant, and the return of characters we actually give a flying hoot about bumps up the scare factor something fierce.

Obviously, H20 couldn’t dream of matching the elemental terror of the original. Steve Miner is a competent workhorse at best, not a Carpenter-esque auteur. But after a couple dozen years in the business, you learn how to stage a scene, and he certainly horses his work. Scenes like the opening kill, where the police are called to one house while the murder occurs next door, are genuinely thrilling. It’s the first actually tense Halloween in a decade. In the later scenes especially, the film uses parallels with the original film to crate expectations and repeatedly thwart them.

It is in these moments that Halloween H20 truly works as a self-referential piece. There are several not so subtle nods to other films (like Curtis’ actual mother Janet Leigh being cast as her assistant whose every line is a veiled Psycho reference), but the canny Williamson humor doesn’t quite strike up a meaningful relationship with the narrative. In the Scream films, the characters are aware that they’re living out a horror film, hence the references, but when our H20 teens pop on a DVD of Scream 2, it’s only a leering pat on the back. Their knowledge of horror doesn’t influence events in any way. Most of the humor is totally acceptable and amusing (especially LL Cool J as a security guard/budding romance novelist), but a lot of it just sort of aimlessly drifts across the screen like an errant balloon at a Fourth of July picnic.

One day I’m going to gather up all these magnificent similes and write the great American novel.

While we’re on the complain train, I have one last grievance to air, which is again the fault of one Kevin Williamson. He certainly does adore writings teens who speak like overly trendy mini Rhodes scholars, and the non-Strode kiddos are irritating as balls. Or, as K-Dubs would say, more painful than Titus Andronicus’ tongue piercing. Sarah especially is a one woman quip machine, with a groan-worthy line constantly at the ready for any situation (“Inconsiderate, party of one!”). This archetype is what really dates this movie, even more so than Josh Hartnett’s haircut, which looks like it was chewed into shape by a rabid dog.

But lo and behold, H20 leaps those hurdles like it was born to do it. The most irritating parts are hardly onscreen longer than you can say “ixnay on the ipsquay.” This is a movie that has Laurie Goddamn Strode in it, and she isn’t about to let no pockmarked whippets ruin it for her. Jamie Lee Curtis is just as subtle and illuminating as ever, bringing her natural charm to the far meatier role of a Girl Next Door gone sour. She’s a vodka-pickled, snarling survivor with a plastic smile that’s all bared teeth and hard edges. Her performance really picks up on the nuances of a genuinely good girl closed off to the world, and it reinforces the strong emotional throughline that the film boasts.

A little loopy but always fun, a little gritty but always exciting, H20 is a massively entertaining entry in the franchise. Coming hot on the heels of the atrocious Parts 5 and 6, this was a much-needed breath of fair to allow me to regroup and keep on plowing full steam ahead. On to 2002 and the film that completely undermines this one’s climax! Hooray!

Killer: Michael Myers (Chris Durand)

Final Girl: Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis)

Best Kill: Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets an ice skate buried in his face.

Sign of the Times: John’s shirt is about fifteen sizes too big for him.

Scariest Moment: Charlie drops a corkscrew in the garbage disposal and reaches in to get it.

Weirdest Moment: Another Halloween tradition this film follows is that the local kids go trick or treating absurdly early. They can be seen wandering the streets at the explicitly mentioned time of 1 PM.

Champion Dialogue: “I’d rather have my eyes pierced.”

Body Count: 6; not counting Michael Myers (whose head is chopped off), who always seems to find his way back home.

1. Jimmy is stabbed in the face with an ice skate.
2. Allegre is stabbed in the back.
3. Nurse Chambers has her throat slit.
4. Charlie has his throat slashed.
5. Sarah is stabbed to death.
6. Mr. Brennan is stabbed in the back.

TL;DR: Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later is a brilliant rejuvenation of the franchise through the lens of the post-Scream era.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1547
Reviews In This Series
Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)
Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace, 1982)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Little, 1988)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard, 1989)
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Chappelle, 1995)
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (Miner, 1998)
Halloween: Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002)
Halloween (Zombie, 2007)
Halloween II (Zombie, 2009)
Halloween (Green, 2018)

Halloween Kills (Green, 2021)

Fright Flashback: Teen Adaptations

Welcome back to Fright Flashback, where every week until the end of summer we will visit an older horror film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to an upcoming new release. This week we are anticipating Paper Towns, this summer's hipsterbait John Green adaptation  In celebration, we'll be revisiting I Know What You Did Last Summer, the 1997 Kevin Williamson slasher based on the 1973 suspense novel by Lois Duncan.

Year: 1997

Director: Jim Gillespie

Cast: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze, Jr.

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

You and I have spent so much time poring over slasher dreck from the 80’s, it’s easy to forget that there’s actually been a great deal of cinema history between 1989 and now. I know, right? So between the recent reignition of my Scream marathon and this Fright Flashback entry, I’d like to give you a quick crash course on what it meant to be a horror flick in the late 90’s.

Once 1989 hit and the slasher market crashed for god, horror was in a tough place. Direct-to-video dreck like the Leprechaun sequels were still sticking to the bottom of the genre’s shoe, but true classics like Candyman were few and far between. Then Scream went and changed everything in 1996. All of a sudden, horror was marketable again. All you needed was a cadre of teen stars in tight tops, a handful of self-knowing jokes, and – if he was available, and he was – Kevin Williamson. The floodgates opened, sending films like Scream 2, Halloween H20, Urban Legend, and The Faculty spinning out into the market.

At the forefront of this trend was a little film called I Know What You Did Last Summer, based on a slasher script that was penned by Williamson before Scream but snapped up like a prize piece of sushi following that film’s success.

And buoyed to box office dynamite by Jennifer Love Hewitt’s ample cleavage.

IKWYDLS tells the tale of a group of graduating seniors in Southport, North Carolina. Barry Cox (Ryan Phillippe) is a privileged dick, as either of those names might have proven to you; Helen Shivers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is his beauty queen girlfriend with dreams of stardom; Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) is her best friend, a down-to-earth (Final Girl), straight-laced Final Girl), straight-A student (Final Girl); and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze, Jr.), is her boyfriend, who is less privileged than the rest of them, which means that his perfectly bleached tank tops are an inch looser than Barry’s.

Life is hard below the MTV poverty line.

The friends spent the night partying at the beach after the annual Fourth of July celebration and during the drunken ride home they accidentally hit someone. After some frantic arguing – Julie wants to call 911 because Final Girl – they decide to dump the body into the ocean and take this secret to their graves. It turns out that that won’t be too difficult, because the very next summer a psycho in a rain slicker brandishing a hook begins threatening them with notes that read “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and bumping them off one by one. During the year, Julie and her friends have become estranged, but now they must work together to solve the mystery and discover the identity of the murderer… before it’s too late.

Spoiler alert! It’s stupid.

If we’re speaking to the film’s raison detre: namely, delivering prepackaged babes straining at the seams of their crop tops before safely kicking the bucket so that blood drips pretty from their pouty Dawson’s Creek 3-episode-arc lips, IKWYDLS is a sterling success. As a bona fide slasher whodunit flick, however, it does have its flaws. Against all odds.

Having been written before Scream, the film largely lacks the arch-ironic spin that characterized most of the slashers of this period. That isn’t necessarily a liability, but it does leave it ill-equipped to process the layers of urban legend that penetrate the central story or engage with it at any level other than face value. Not to be outdone, that exact goal would be fulfilled by the Jared Leto slasher Urban Legend the very next year, but IKWDLS wastes too much potential on an underexplored premise that leaves it stuck with a killer who looks alarmingly like the Gorton’s fisherman.

I know what you breaded last summer.

On top of its generally thinner screenplay, the core mystery is insipid gruel, hopelessly extending the run time with its watery trivialities. When the film takes a break from terrorizing its teens to let Julie put on her Nancy Drew knickers and galumph around sleuthing in backwater townships, the pacing grinds to a screeching halt. Although these scenes introduce us to Anne Heche, who delivers the most nuanced, dependable performance of the lot, the plot they serve is an uninterested, nonsensical slog. And I do realize it’s difficult to provide decent motivations for the sorts of body counts we’re used to looking at in slasher flicks, but SPOILERS [isn’t it more satisfying to get revenge for your murder if you’re actually been… you know, murdered? It seems a bit beside the point if you’ve actually been alive the whole time. Water under the bridge and all that.]

And of course, existing as it does smack dab in the middle of the Teen Soap slasher trend, the actual horror in this horror film is remarkably tame. The stalk sequences aren’t particularly well thought-out (run perpendicular to the car chasing you, Ryan Phillippe! Did that shower you just took fog your brain up as well?), the killer obviously attended the Jason TakesManhattan School of Teleportation, and there’s nothing particularly gory worth mentioning beyond the first kill. There are a handful of surprisingly nifty jump scares, but mostly the film is content to be blandly functional.

It’s so hard to stay friends after high school.

But it ain’t all bad. Though admittedly not all of this may be on purpose, IKWYDLS can still be a pretty fun teen romp when it wants to be. 90’s garbage punk blares on the soundtrack, Jennifer Love Hewitt’s breasts enormous breasts threaten to swallow every gaudy necklace she wears, Ryan Phillippe’s shirts get bigger with every passing scene like he’s the Incredible Shrinking Man, and Kevin Williamson’s arch dialogue reminds you of just how smart you and your friends thought you were in high school.

And, hey. It’s trying. There’s only one truly memorable shot (the killer viewed upside down from a victim’s perspective) amid the generically slick cinematography, but somebody obviously fought to include it. And the idea of Freddie Prinze, Jr. in abject poverty might be laughable but the idea of class disparity isn’t just a throwaway line. It’s about as sincere as an Oscar acceptance speech begging for world peace, but at least it’s trying to open a dialogue. In a slasher movie! You gotta have a little respect for the sheer mad audacity.

Of the core teen cast, only Sarah Michelle Gellar turns in a performance worth truly commending (Love Hewitt seems to be attempting to blink her lines in Morse code and I’m fairly certainly Prinze, Jr. forgot to take out his retainer before shooting), forming some genuine chemistry with her castmates, but they all make for a believable bunch when it comes down to brass tacks. At least they all seem to appropriate age within a reliable margin of error, which is more than I can say for even the best of the 80’s slashers.

At the end of the day, I won’t be popping this flick into my DVD player every time summer rolls around. It’s not eminently rewatchable, like even the worst of its Scream brethren. But every now and again, it’s a decent frothy 90’s delicacy, as long as you can survive the fiddly mystery bits. Watch it at a party so you won’t feel embarrassed taking over it.

Body Count: 5

1. Max is hooked in the chin.
2. Barry is slashed to death with a hook.
3. Policeman is hooked in the gut. 
4. Elsa has her throat slashed with a hook.
5. Helen is slashed to death with a hook. 

TL;DR: I Know What You Did Last Summer is empty-headed, but benign.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1378
Reviews In This Series
I Know What You Did Last Summer (Gillespie, 1997)
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (Cannon, 1998)

Redial

Year: 1997

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette

Run Time: 2 hours

MPAA Rating: R

Alright, let's do this thing. I've been sitting on this post since I watched Scream 2 with Sergio and my family in late 2013. Considering that the film is a great sequel to one of my favorite horror movies, it shouldn't have been too hard to knock out of the park, but guess what? I had to look for jobs. And then I got one, which is not any more conducive to blog writing.

But here we are now and I've settled into a routine and found some time to really get down to business. With the beginning of the semester looming on the horizon, I decided I really should clear my slate once and for all and write up the two reviews I have been lagging behind on. So get ready for some extreme review action with power grip!

Sidebar: I would buy a Neve Campbell action figure.

So Scream happened. Upon its release in 1996, horror culture lit up like a lightning rod. Wes Craven was back in the game, as was the by then defunct slasher format, this time with a postmodern twist. Screenwriter Kevin Williamson catapulted to stardom (he would return flailing to Earth with a dull thud a few short years later, but that's a story for another time) and Hollywood was reeling in the profits.

Hot on the heels of their massive success, Dimension Films quickly commissioned a sequel, to be released a mere 51 weeks later. That might seem unimpressive to people who aren't in the film business, but let me tell you that's like demanding a mother to give birth to a fully grown child in three months. The fact that the film turned out as well as it did is largely due to what must have been some impressive contractual wrangling.

Through some unholy pact with the devil, they managed to get Craven and Williamson to sign on again, as well as stars David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and Jamie Kennedy. And composer Marco Beltrami, whose tremendous influence on the films is rarely appreciated.

While there was little to no buzz during the production of the original film (And why would there be? Nobody had any idea of the massive asteroidal impact it would have on pop culture), Scream 2 had the fan mags flying off the shelves like they were in a Ghostbusters movie and eventually the shooting script was leaked onto the Internet (which was barely even a thing at this point, but people were already learning how to use it to explore new frontiers of douchebaggery). 

Frantic rewrites and constant shifts in the killer's identity during production to avoid another leaked ending left the crew staggering. So when people complain about the final reveal of who is behind the Ghostface mask this time around (which I'll talk about more later in a spoiler-marked zone), just let them know that society didn't earn the original ending. We ruined it for ourselves. Like petulant children. So there.

At this point, I'm surprised it didn't turn out to be Fat Albert under there.

Thanks to Drew Berrymore's career-reviving turn as Casey Becker, every hot young thing in town was clambering to be the next opening victim, but the honor this time around was bestowed on a pre-Will Jada Pinkett and Omar Epps as Maureen and Phil, two college students attending the premiere of the movie Stab, which is a parody of Scream, but in this universe is based on "The Woodsboro Murders," the book Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) wrote about her experiences in the previous film.

This meta addition to the franchise is one of many, as Scream 2 more thoroughly explores the concepts of not only characters that are aware that they're in a movie, but are aware that somebody is trying to make a sequel and possibly turn it into a franchise. Just as clever and intelligent as the first, this all makes a lot more sense if you're actually watching it, I promise. 

This element is perhaps even better than in the original Scream (although I do have one small complaint about the "copycat sequel" conceit being dropped in the second half, largely - I suspect - due to last minute rewrites), which had fun playing with genre conventions, but didn't quite utilize them to their full capacity, opting instead for more of a whodunit mystery angle. 

Anyway, Maureen and Phil bite it in a scene that is too similar to the opening of He Knows You're Alone to be unaware of its pedigree but different enough that it manages to be a completely unique (and classic) entity. Although it's somewhat disappointing that Ghostface doesn't use a phone to torment his victims in this scene, his puckish glee at dispatching them in the middle of a theater filled with people dressed in masks (to celebrate the opening of the movie) is a worthy substitute.

Is Will Smith a trade-up or a trade-down from Omar Epps? Discuss.

Moving on to the real people - Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is now a theatre major at Windsor College and she's just trying to move on from her tragedy. She's still friends with Randy (Jamie Kennedy), who happens to go to the same college because of course. Remember this is written by the guy who did Dawson's Creek.

She has a new boyfriend Derek (Jerry O'Connell), a pre-med student who's nice enough but much too bland, and a new best friend/roommate in Hallie (Elise Neal), who is notable for being a black character with a prominent role in the proceedings who survives for a massive chunk of the running time and has actual character traits. Yay! Diversity!

Upon the release of Stab, Sidney has been getting prank phone calls from Ghostface imitators, but she doesn't let it phase her. Things get worse when she learns about the deaths of Maureen and Phil, and she begins to fear the same things might be happening again after the death of a sorority girl named Cici (Sarah Michelle Gellar, who is introduced watching Nosferatu on TV and accompanied by a girlish squeal from Yours Truly).

Once the killings start up in earnest, Gale Weathers is back on the scene, sniffing up her scoop like a bloodhound. Also reappearing is Deputy Dewey (David Arquette), who just wants to make sure Sid is OK. But he mostly just scowls at Gale, who gave him a less than manly characterization in her tell-all book. But it's a thin line between love and hate and the two rekindle things as they work together to solve the mystery of the new serial murders.

However, it's also a thin line between mass murderer and boyfriend material so Sidney shuts herself off from the world, suspecting the killer to be somebody she knows. Everybody is a suspect! And the fact that Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber), the man she wrongfully accused of murder is back and threatening her in order to get an interview and fifteen minutes of fame does little to comfort her.

The fact that she's learned from her experiences in the previous movie are but one of the many reasons that Scream 2 is a great sequel. Taking characters and situations from the original and either deepening them or turning them on their heads, the film is a perfect sequel - expanding greatly on the original story but also maintaining its own unique presence as a great standalone horror comedy.

And I never ever regret any second of any film where David Arquette is onscreen.

Gale's role in the original Woodsboro killings has made her a prime target for the buzzing reporters as they try to dig into the story. A great reversal from the first film, Gale finds herself shadowed by her own annoying reporter, Debbie Salt (Laurie Metcalf), a local woman who never fails to get a rise out of her (and elicit some of the best one-liners from a character with a veritable encyclopedia of bitchy putdowns).

While the comedy and the horror are mostly separate from one another (the former apparent largely in the interactions between Randy, Dewey, and Gale and the latter in the stalking scenes with Sidney), both have their moments in the spotlight with several sidesplitting scenes in the second act and two back-to-back sharply choreographed tension-filled scares in the third. 

And although the middle of the film tends toward the draggy side, the film is bookended with a series of scenes of such caliber that it's an easy fault to ignore.

And the middle does include the tremendously trippy and great "Cassandra" sequence, a holdover from Craven's days as an English professor.

Here's where we enter spoilers territory. If you are of a mind to watch this movie on your own, skip to the picture of Portia de Rossi and her terrible eyebrows. (Yes! Lindsay Bluth is in this movie!)

So. The killers. We had to come to that eventually. Originally, they were scripted to be Hallie and Derek, which would have been tremendously interesting, had the dicks on the Internet not ruined everything for the righteous and pure of heart horror fans that would never have leaked any information about a beloved franchise.

Not that I'm mad or anything.

What we do get is an overwhelmingly confusing reveal. The first killer (of course there's two) turns out to be Mickey (Timothy Olyphant), a character so inconsequential that I didn't even include him in my plot rundown. In fact, my sister didn't even remember him and thought he was Derek for about five minutes of the final scene.

And the other killer is... local reporter Debbie Salt. But she's really Billy Loomis's (the killer from the original) mother, see? In disguise! Get it? I... what? The fact that both of the killers are onscreen for about as long as the crew member who accidentally stuck his butt into one shot in Cici's scene was infuriating to many. I mean, what's the point of a mystery if the perpetrators aren't even guessable characters?

So their identities do kind of suck, but! But! The finale is still sharp and witty, making great use of Sidney's relationship with Billy and ending with some truly fantastic onstage action and zippy one-liners. It all explodes in a geyser of camp and blood and hilarity, much like the original film and loses none of Scream's integrity and engaging power.

So even though the killer's might as well have been two oven mitts, the scene they get is one for the Gods and I personally think that's an even tradeoff. After spending so much time with 80's slashers, I'm just glad that 1) I can see everything that's happening and 2) the reveal is comprehensible if you're not a schizophrenic.

Welcome back, spoilers avoiders! Now you can read on, safe in the knowledge that you won't find out that Portia's eyebrows are the killer until you watch the movie.

This review ended up much longer than I anticipated, so I'm gonna wrap up here before the last of you falls asleep at your keyboards. 

The humor is top notch, the meta is even better (the Stab scenes featuring Heather Graham and Tori Spelling are hysterically terrible), and although none of it is quite as scary as the original film and the middle can be a slog, two showstopping scenes (the girls get in a car crash with Ghostface and Gale is chased through a sound studio) and the bombastic finale make it all worth every penny.

Scream 2 is a worthy sequel despite its production woes and maintains the consistent gold standard quality of Wes Craven's 90's postmodern period. Although the legions of terrible Scream imitations were already saturating the market, this film stood above the current to prove that it could still be done well under a skillful guiding hand.

In conclusion, Portia de Rossi has terrible eyebrows.

Killer: Ghostface (voiced by Roger Jackson)

Final Girl: Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell)

Best Kill: Omar Epps is stabbed in the ear through a bathroom stall.

Sign of the Times: BROWN LIPSTICK; CiCi has one of those see-through phones.

Scariest Moment: Sidney and Hallie have to climb over an unconscious Ghostface in the front seat of a cop car.

Weirdest Moment: Ghostface threatens Sidney via instant messaging.

Champion Dialogue: "Everybody thinks sororities are just about blowjobs, but it's not true."

Body Count: 10

1. Phil is stabbed in the temple through a bathroom stall.
2. Maureen is stabbed to death in a crowded movie theater. 
3. Cici is stabbed and thrown off a balcony.
4. [Randy is stabbed to death and has his throat slit.] 
5. Officer Andrews has his throat slashed with a knife.
6. Officer Richards gets his head impaled by a pipe during a car accident.
7. Hallie is stabbed to death.
8. Derek is shot in the chest.
9. [Mickey is shot 16 times in the chest.]
10. [Mrs. Loomis is shot to death.] 

TL;DR: Scream 2 is a rare sequel that continues the story of the original in a unique and exciting way.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 2188

Reviews In This Series

Scream (Craven, 1996)

Scream 2 (Craven, 1997)

Scream 3 (Craven, 2000)

Scream 4 (Craven, 2011)

Terror on the Landline

Year: 1996

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette

Run Time: 1 hour 51 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As a Christmas present to myself, I picked up the BluRay box set of the first three Scream movies and two documentaries at Target. It was only ten bucks, how could I not? (I promise I'm not a corporate shill for Target - although I wish I was. I'd be making more money on this blog, that's for sure.)

The purchase afforded me a great opportunity to review one of my absolute favorite horror films of all time. In fact, without Scream, this blog wouldn't exist. At least, not in the form it takes today.

It all started way back when in early 2011. I was looking for a good movie to watch, and the only one coming out that looked interesting at all was Wes Craven's Scream 4. I wasn't really a fan of horror films at the time, although I loved reading horror fiction. 

Goodness knows why I hadn't made the leap to watching films yet - I think I thought I was too scared of them despite having already seen The Sixth Sense, The Exorcist, Poltergeist, and Drag Me To Hell. Whatever. I was a fool. The fact remains that I was intrigued by the trailer for Scream 4 and made the momentous decision to rent the first three films from Netflix to catch up.

I devoured those movies with the voracity a kid who just discovered ice cream sandwiches. I thought they were scary, hilarious, and well-crafted. The only thing was, I hadn't seen any of the films they were referencing. Scream 4 had long since came and went in the time it took to receive and view the entire trilogy so to feed my new hunger, I turned to the films mentioned by the Screams to provide some important background.

That's how I spent summer watching every single Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street film, Halloween, The Blair Witch Project, both Paranormal Activities (at the time), Sleepaway Camp, and a whole canoe load of other shockers. 

I fell in love with the genre. Head over heels. I became a black hole, sucking in terrible three-dollar DVDs like they were candy. I never did watch Scream 4 until the DVD release in October, but by that time I was a committed disciple.

Scream began the chain reaction that led me to Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and Jamie Lee Curtis. And later [REC] and Dario Argento and Prom Night. Pinhead. Gingerdead. Mario Bava and  Barbara Crampton. It's what led me to pursue a career in film and to start this blog.

So what the hell impressed me so much about this little slasher from 1996 that it shaped my entire life for two years and infinitely more to come?

Nipples.

I kid, I kid. But much like Rose McGowan's nipples, Scream is visually stimulating and rock solid. 

Let's begin at the beginning, shall we? The 12 minute opening scene to Scream is, hands down, one of the most important and terrifying scenes in horror history. I could write an essay about this scene. In fact, I have. 

Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) is home alone preparing to watch a video when she gets a call from a mysterious stranger. What at first seems to be an innocuous wrong number turns sour when the man on the other end threatens to gut her like a fish. Chastising her for shouting "Who's there?" when she hears a strange noise and challenging her to a deadly game of horror trivia, the stalker (Ghostface) reveals that Scream is no ordinary slasher flick.

Not only are the victims in Scream unusually crafty and clever, they're big horror fans. They've seen enough slasher movies to know what not to do when confronted with a masked serial killer, so they're well-equipped to fight back.

Rife with movie references both obvious (the kids watch Halloween at a party) and subtle (a line in the opening scene, "Drive down to the MacKenzies," is a direct reference to Halloween's final scene), Scream is the first widely successful "meta" horror film (although Wes Craven's New Nightmare, a meta masterpiece, came out two years earlier, it didn't find much of an audience until long after its release). 

The cinematic postmodern movement was just beginning and Scream's genre-savvy protagonists who are well aware that they are, in fact, characters in a movie pushed it over the edge. It spawned dozens of copycats and brought postmodernism to the mainstream. 

She must have just watched I Know What You Did Last Summer. Copycats, man.

So here we are with Drew Barrymore, the film's biggest star, fighting Ghostface in the very first scene. Audiences must have been surprised but nothing could have prepared them for her gruesome murder five minutes later. That's right, Scream pulled a Psycho. By killing off the major star early on, it made the audience feel like anything could happen.

No character is safe.

And that's just the first of Scream's masterstrokes.

The film shifts focus to Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), a spunky brunette whose mother was brutally raped and murdered one year earlier. This has left her with some real intimacy issues much to the dismay of her horny boyfriend Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich). Although characters in the film keep insisting that he's hot and the perfect guy, I have a hard time believing them considering that he looks like this.

I dunno. Maybe it's a 90's thing. But I'm pretty sure the name for this look is "raccoon bassist."

And although this isn't your typical slasher, so every character is more important than just being considered Meat, it's time to Meet them anyway. There's Sidney's best friend Tatum Riley (Rose McGowan), the feisty hot blonde; her boyfriend Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard), an obnoxious bumbling oaf; and Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy), a sarcastic video store employee who's obsessed with horror.

There's also Tatum's brother Dewey (David Arquette), her older brother who is a newly minted police deputy and Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), a trashy TV journalist who would be willing to stab her own grandmother in the back for a great scoop.

Just within the confines of this list, two of the most important elements of the Scream franchise are displayed. First is that the adult storylines are given just as much weight as those of the teenagers (Dewey and Gale's interactions are a major plot thread), which is highly unusual for a slasher film. Usually they prefer to focus on the young pretty starlets as they line up for the slaughter.

Second is that no death in the film is tossed off. Every character has an important influence on the plot and a rapport with the audience. Whenever Ghostface knocks off another victim, we know their personality, backstory, and regret their passing. This is the key to making effective horror and Craven has long since learned his stuff.

All of this is indicated in the fact that each character has a specific last name. I bring this up in my Wes Craven essay, but most slasher films prefer to have their characters listed as "Billy" or "Stu" or "Randy." This way they're just meat and their deaths have no consequence. But Craven wants you to feel it hard when he slices and dices.

Also the last names are a handy way to link them to their families, family being a key theme of this suburban slasher. Throughout the plot Sidney learns the secrets that her mother has been hiding from her - secrets that have been bringing danger down on her daughter's head. Craven has made a career off of the dark corners of idyllic suburbia and Scream is no different. By displaying a "perfect" nuclear family life ripped at the seams, the film has much more thematic resonance than the typical slice and dice flick.

Also there's a brunette protagonist. Don't scoff, this is a big deal.

Although Scream is by no means a perfect film, it stands tall on the backs of a cavalcade of masters of the field. Craven is a consistently intelligent and creative director and imbues the film with his personal stamp of elegant visual compositions. Screenwriter Kevin Williamson expertly balances the comedy and horror elements in a never-before-seen style that brings the movie a lively spark. 

His tradition of writing overly eloquent dialogue for high school students as they deconstruct genre clichés (also seen in Dawson's Creek and Halloween: H20) works at its absolute best here in the hands of a capable cast. And composer Marco Beltrami's score takes Western influences to give an unexpected jolt to the typical horror score.

And the acting is unusually solid across the board - you can tell they're having fun and a lot of the best comic moments are tiny improvised details that arose naturally from the script as interpreted by a talented and dedicated troupe of young actors. Cox and Arquette have great chemistry (although the amount of acting in that regard is suspect), with her reveling in a delightfully bitchy character and him turning in a career-best performance as a young officer of the law trying to prove himself.

And all the kids are game, although Matthew Lillard displays the best comic aptitude with pitch perfect line deliveries peppered throughout the film.

He's literally the most obnoxious character put to celluloid but you can't not love him.

Although I have long posited that there is no good story that can't be told in 90 minutes, I welcome Scream's nearly two hour run time with open arms. There are very few slashers that deserve this distinction, but Scream isn't your typical film. Not only is it an excellent horror comedy, it's also a whodunit.

As the cast is picked off one by one, the central mystery of the film is that of who is behind the mask (which would quickly become a Halloween icon). I won't spoil it here, but that mystery is given one of the most unique and unexpected solutions in a manner that is totally supported by the previous events of the film and completely satisfying.

Usually the end of a slasher film with an unknown antagonist is anticlimactic. Either it's some character who hasn't been onscreen once until the big reveal (Friday the 13th) or the killer is someone we could never possibly have guessed because the script never gave them any possible motive (Memorial Day). It's no fun when the big reveal isn't one of our possible suspects (or at least a character that we know well).

Ghostface in the garage with a candlestick!

Scream manages to avoid all of those pitfalls yet still be a fresh and enticing mystery movie that plays on our knowledge of genre conventions to keep us guessing until the very end. And that infinitely compelling framework is why I will allow it to exceed the typical approved slasher length.

And it does this all without having a single actress take her top off. And the gore scenes are pretty great but couldn't quite make it through the MPAA filters intact. So this is a slasher with no boobs and a medium amount of gore that is still great because the people making it knew that storytelling is what will keep an audience interested.

This is why we should keep hiring geniuses. A slasher could have buckets of blood but still be a piece of boring cardboard without a strong story. Craven knows this and I thank him for being a genius.

On the strength of its incredible story, Scream overcomes all of its obstacles, of which there are few. I mean, there's a couple dubbing issues here and there. Maybe the later deaths could have included more genre satire. There's some weird unscary daylight moments in the middle ten minutes. And there is one joke that falls entirely flat (A "Wes Carpenter" reference that makes no sense in a movie that acknowledges the existence of other horror films. Wes Carpenter is not a real person. Yeah, I get the joke but it makes no sense considering that every other director or actor mentioned in the film is 100% nonfiction).

But one joke isn't enough to kill a solid comedy and one silly moment isn't enough to kill a classic horror film.

Scream created an icon in Ghostface, led the postmodern revolution, and revitalized the entire suffering slasher genre, which still carries on in spurts and starts to this day. It's entirely original and works within the tropes of the genre to create a new entity that is entirely alive and beautiful.

Scream is one of those few smart movies that hit it big and we have Wes Craven to thank for that. This film is just another brick in my argument that the horror genre has weight in cinema. It's often looked down upon, but under the guiding hand of a talented auteur, horror can be just as important and game changing as any other genre.

So keep screaming. I know I will.

Killer: Ghostface (voiced by Roger Jackson)

Final Girl: Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell)

Best Kill: Tatum gets stuck in the doggy door as the garage opens, crushing her nipples neck.

But really though.

Sign of the Times: Sidney has an Indigo Girls poster in her bedroom; People are shocked that Billy has a "cellular phone."

Scariest Moment: The opening scene.

Weirdest Moment: Ghostface stalks Sidney and Tatum in a grocery store.

Champion Dialogue: "I'm the one who's been selfish and self absorbed with all this post-traumatic stress."

Body Count: 7

1. Steve is gutted with a hunting knife.
2. Casey is gutted and hung from a tree.
3. Principal Himbry is stabbed, gutted, and hung from a goal post. 
4. Tatum is crushed in a garage door cat flap.
5. Kenny's throat is slit.
6. [Stu has a TV dropped on his head.]
7. [Billy is impaled with an umbrella and shot twice.] 

TL;DR: Scream is a witty and scary horror comedy that changed the game forever.

Rating: 10/10

Word Count: 2342

Reviews In This Series

Scream (Craven, 1996)

Scream 2 (Craven, 1997)

Scream 3 (Craven, 2000)

Scream 4 (Craven, 2011)