Category Archives: Reviews

“Hello Sidney, how’ve you been?”

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SCREAM 4

4 Stars  2011/15/111m

“New decade. New rules.”

Director: Wes Craven / Writer: Kevin Williamson / Cast: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Hayden Panettiere, Emma Roberts, Rory Culkin, Nico Tortorella, Eric Knudsen, Marley Shelton, Adam Brody, Anthony Anderson, Mary McDonnell, Alison Brie, Marielle Jaffe, Anna Paquin, Kristen Bell, Aimee Teegarden, Roger Jackson.

Body Count: 15

Dire-logue: “You forgot the first rule of a remake – don’t fuck with the original!”

Think of a band you loved when you were younger who since split. Imagine them reforming – you’d be stoked. You’d go and watch them perform and you’d enjoy but there’s something… something just isn’t working for you. The songs are the same, they can still play but they look older, less energetic now.

This is how I found watching Scream 4 earlier today.

Don’t misinterpret the fact that it’s a good film because it is. Very enjoyable for the most part in spite of a slack middle third but perhaps the memories of a time when Sid, Gale and Dewey and indeed I was younger and more fresh faced and sprightly jade the affair to some extent. Argh, screw this stroll down memory lane shit, let’s discuss the film.

Things begin as they always do in the Scream movies: the big pre-credits kill, only this time around Craven and Williamson slap the audience in face with a wet fish in an effectively amusing poke at the imitators who tried to fill the high-budget slasher void in the intervening decade. We’ve all seen those Paquin/Bell stills so without ruining the joke, let’s just say that the Stab movies didn’t end with the ill-fated Stab 3 – they’ve continued and they’ve gotten just a bit silly. Time travel is even brought into the equation.

Sidney Prescott is now a successful writer and is at the end of her tour promoting Out of the Darkness, a sort of self-help bio that brings her to the last stop of promo: Woodsboro. That little piece of suburban California where it all began a decade-and-a-half earlier. Gale and Dewey are married but suffering from the mental strain that small town life puts on their relationship. She’s trying to write fiction, his deputy (Shelton) has a crush on him.

As soon as Sid returns, Ghostface comes too, neatly coinciding with the anniversary of the massacre as he begins offing high school friends of Sid’s cousin, Jill (Roberts). Gale wants to investigate but finds herself marginalised by Dewey and so teams up with school film club geeks Charlie and Robbie, who step into Randy’s shoes for an explanation on how the horror genre has changed since Billy and Stu first used old school rules to their advantage. Add to this, they’re holding a Stab-a-thon party as the kids of Woodsboro modern hold the films in Rocky Horror-like esteem. Can only lead to trouble, methinks!

Scream 4‘s big mickey take targets remakes, reboots, rehashes, re-imaginings – whatever you want to call them. The rules have flipped, horror now looks to do the opposite of what came before so much is made out of the Saw movies (one girl quips that torture porn is shit and features no character development), and any number of remade films are name checked and the industry criticised for not being interested in anything that isn’t a remake or reboot of some kind.

So are we dealing with a reboot here? Well, yes and no. It’s still a slasher movie so certain rules can’t be bargained with and, despite them protesting otherwise, some of the “knowledgeable” teen characters still saunter off and investigate strange sounds, call out “who’s there?” and make all the standard body count pic mistakes.

The main bulk of Scream 4 plays out mechanically: spooky call >>> stupid behaviour >>> killer appears. Though it’s worth noting that all the characters toyed with in this vein are female. In fact, this is the first Scream film where girl victims outnumber the boys, who are killed almost apologetically without much of a build up.

However, mechanics of another kind aid the film’s step into the 21st Century: now the kids can talk about Twitter, information is spread via text, IM’s, there’s a Ghostface voice-app for the iPhones they all seem to possess, and according to the film nerds, the killer’s logical step towards innovation is to film the murders. Weird to think back to Gale’s breezeblock sized cell phone in the first one!

Thankfully, as I started to question what the fuck they were playing at with such a flat opus, a neat twist is pulled out of the bag concerning the killer’s identity and their always-exposited-at-length motive, which stacks up well with the film’s acerbic prod’s at celeb culture – I feel like Lily Allen’s “The Fear” should’ve been playing in the background. The film doesn’t so much offer up red herrings (apart from a really obvious push towards our suspecting a probable loon early on) as the cast is so dominated by women that it’s difficult to work out which one of them (if any) it could be. However, the climax seems to borrow back a big chunk of unbelievable camp from Scary Movie – but it was funny as hell and had the audience clapping.

Neve Campbell delivers here, thankfully looking more interested than she was in Scream 3 and Panettiere impresses as girl geek Kirby. Curiously, it’s Arquette and Cox who seem most out of place. Gale’s plotline of trying to get back to her old self (a metaphor for the whole production, perhaps?) doesn’t really go anywhere and Dewey hardly seems to be involved at all and looks only tired rather than his perky, parable-spouting self from the other films. But why a rather mannequin-styled Mary McDonnell was wasted in such a crappy role is a weird one.

I’m likely to make some amendments to this review when I take a second look at the film. The first go-round with a big deal of a film is always problematised by expectations, especially when dealing with Scream or a film I’ve been holding out for for some time but at present, I’m satisfied but at the same time I learned that, as the Carpenters once sang, trying to get that feeling again is a non-starter. We’re all older and so the teen culture we knew has shifted at some points beyond our comprehension. Take the bits you can and remain bewildered at the rest, y’know, like when you made your parents watch the first Scream.

Scream‘s 5 and 6? I dunno if the band could do another comeback tour…

Blurbs-of-interest: Emma Roberts was the lead in Scream Queens and American Horror Story: 1984; Anthony Anderson (another actor under-used) was in Urban Legends: Final Cut. Arquette directed and featured in The Tripper (with a cameo from Cox); Marley Shelton was in Valentine. All four survivors returned for Scream (2022).

Premature Endgame

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SCREAM 3

 3.5 Stars  2000/18/112m

“Welcome to the final act.”

Director: Wes Craven / Writer: Ehren Kruger / Cast: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox Arquette, David Arquette, Patrick Dempsey, Parker Posey, Jenny McCarthy, Scott Foley, Liev Schrieber, Lance Henriksen, Deon Richmond, Emily Mortimer, Matt Keeslar, Kelly Rutherford, Patrick Warburton, Roger Jackson.

Body Count: 10

Dire-logue: (after the murder of a Stab cast member) “He was making a movie called Stab. He was stabbed.”

The problem with Scream 3 is that it had a clever joke threaded through it that got lost in the blur of a new writer trying to make ends meet. What is it? It’s that there’s two mysteries at play: Who is the killer in Scream 3 and who is the killer in Stab 3? There are two Sidney’s, two Gail’s, two Dewey’s. One might be a killer or victim in either. Sadly, Ehren Kruger couldn’t make it work right and most people ignored it.

What’s left is a respectable effort all the same. Compared to 90% of slasher films, Scream 3 is still top-notch stuff but there’s a definite sense of boredom on behalf of the returning cast and crew that drowns that enthusiasm of the newcomers. Kevin Williamson’s long-delayed treatment was finally handed to Kruger, possibly something that’s been repeated in the imminent Scream 4 if production rumours are to be believed.

Neve Campbell also seemed tired of going through the motions as it-girl Sidney, who is also (understandbly) sick and tired of being chased by loons in Father Death masks. So a lot rests on the shoulders of Courteney and David, by then finally married off screen, playing ever-bickering Gail and Dewey, this time split up asnd reunited on set after Cotton Weary is slain in the pre-credits slaughterhouse, which is one of the better moments.

Fictional follow-up Stab 3: Return to Woodsboro is immediately thrown into jeopardy by the news, which pulls in Hollywood detective Dempsey and his sarcastic partner. Meanwhile, Sidney is hidden away in the Californian wilderness with her dog and a dial-in job as a crisis counsellor.

A second murder shuts down the film and the killer manages to contact Sidney, who takes the bait and joins her old buddies to once and for all find out who the fuck is dicking with her and end the madness.

The subtlety of the first two films is out the window as almost every utterance by the new cast members is tainted with suspicion. Even with a crowbarred-in cameo by Randy, the cast seem oblivious to horror movie rules and split up time and time again once they’ve been gathered in a Beverly Hills mansion for the homerun.

Still, there are some great touches: Sidney’s exploration of the set of her old house nicely echoes events of the original film and once the killer reveals themself and spits out another long-winded motive (you gotta wonder why these guys spent so much time trying to kill her if all along they planned on giving a lecture on the whys, hows and whos?) she fights hard, even saying she doesn’t care about the reasons as she’s heard it all before.

Parker Posey supplies some good comic moments as Gale’s fictional counterpart who thinks she can do a better job of investigating and then cementing herself to Gale’s side when the killer targets her. The other actors and crew members of Stab 3 fulfil their marginal walking-corpse roles without much ado. They exist purely to say a couple of witty things and then die.

“It’s all about MEEEE!”

Williamson’s schtick of trilogies is played out quite pointlessly (made all the more redundant by the arrival of the fourth film) with a lot of blah about rules n’ stuff that don’t apply convincingly. Yes, it all harks back to the start and Sidney’s mom (shown in a creepily close close-up from the photo Sidney had in the first film) but it’s clear that, despite his insistence otherwise, Scream was not designed to be a trilogy. You only have to scan the unused script for the second film where Sidney dies at the end to realise that.

As usual, cameos from industry friends are littered throughout: Jay and Silent Bob turn up (with Craven in the background); the Carrie Fisher exchange is fittingly amusing.

The film also felt the force of a screen-violence clampdown in the wake of the Columbine massacre in 1999 and the amount of claret on show is reduced from the first two, with quick cuts away from fatal slashes and stabbings or attacks obscured by the position of the camera or people/objects in the frame.

Looking at Gail’s hair, Dewey wondered what he ever saw in her

So it’s drier, unsubtle, a little all over the place and, surprisingly, occasionally badly acted. Plus Courteney Cox sports one ugly-ass yellow suit and seems to have had her hair cut by Stevie Wonder. Kruger’s dialogue isn’t as sharp as Williamson’s and his reasons for jockeying victims into position have become the cliches that the first film made fun of. This is not to say he’s a bad writer by any stance; Arlington Road was awesome and I really liked The Skeleton Key. The poor guy was handed the biggest horror franchise going and told to wrap it up. Had it been ‘just another sequel’ the results might’ve been very different.

A disappointing finale and one that hasn’t aged very well but its enjoyable elements outweigh the sluggish ones. I’d recommend watching it after sitting through something like I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, just to appreciate that they made a decent flick, just not a wonderful one.

Blurbs-of-interest: the Arquettes were later in The Tripper (which he directed); Patrick Dempsey was in Thanksgiving; Henriksen was also in The Horror Show, Color of Night and Madhouse (2003); Matt Keeslar was in Psycho Beach Party; Deon Richmond was in Hatchet; Carrie Fisher was the housemother in Sorority Row.

Legacies of the 90s: Stab-a-thon Stars

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As Kevins Costner and Bacon, Holly Hunter, George Clooney and Tom Hanks paid their slasher movie dues in the films of the 80s, the 90s saw many a familiar face from teen-oriented TV shows rushing to board the terror train following Scream‘s unprecedented success.

Some have remained famous, lots of vanished from the radar and some probably didn’t expect any success at all when they signed on for three scenes and a murder in a video shelf flick they thought nobody would ever see. Bet they hope nobody asks about Teenage Death Camp Massacre VIII now…

stars1aSo, starting at the top left, Sarah Michelle Gellar, arguably the biggest teen star of the era thanks to her role as ass-kickin’ demon hunter Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she played the role of defenceless girly victim in both I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2. She was also originally to play Sasha in Urban Legend before scheduling conflicts got the best of her. Apart from appearing in the first two Grudge movies, after marrying Last Summer co-star Freddie Prinze Jr., she’s disappeared a bit…

Seann William Scott, known as potty-mouthed Stifler in American Pie, became one of Death’s first screen victims in Final Destination but his career has flourished since. Katherine Heigl, recently surfing a wave of rom-coms after the success of Knocked Up, donned final girl shoes in Bride of Chucky and then “the Drew Barrymore role” for Valentine, which she seemed less than impressed with…

Puck from Glee (Mark Salling) looked a lot different (and significantly less buff) when he played Naomi Watts’ little brother in Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering. He later had a small role in the dull The Graveyard.

Another big name from the teen flick circuit, Joshua Jackson had been a fairly successful child star in all three Mighty Ducks movies and a leading role in Dawson’s Creek; aside from his role in Urban Legend and a cameo in Scream 2 (sharing a scene with Gellar), he also starred with Gellar, Ryan Philippe and Reese Witherspoon (who avoided horror at the time) in Cruel Intentions and almost-horror flick Gossip. He’s now in Fringe.

Eva Mendes joins Salling as another Corn almnus after debuting in Fields of Terror, the fifth in the series. She moved on to Urban Legends: Final Cut before mainstream Hollywood success followed. And who could forget Jack Black’s uncredited cameo as Titus the dreadlocked dope-smoking pool boy in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer? I bet he wishes he could!

Rounding off this box, Jennifer Love Hewitt, co-star to Neve Campbell in Party of Five, took the lead in both Last Summer films.

stars2aMrs Liev Schrieber, sometimes known as “Naomi Watts”, yet another survivor of the neverending Children of the Corn franchise, playing Salling’s big sis and eventual heroine. Josh Hartnett was Jamie Lee Curtis’ annoyingly slappable offspring in Halloween H20, in which he was smug boyfriend to Dawson’s Creek star Michelle Williams.

The late Brittany Murphy was on the verge of stardom when she played the heroine of Cherry Falls; and mini Aussie pop queen Kylie Minogue – relatively unknown in the US but with over 30 UK Top 10 hits to her name – was the ‘big star’ to be offed at the beginning of Australian Scream off-shoot Cut.

Like Josh Jackson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was a child star in 3rd Rock from the Sun, he turned up in many an art project and a strangely small and thankless role as an early victim in Halloween H20. The beautiful Kelly Brook, now better known to horror fans as one of the naked porn stars ripped apart by dodgy-looking CGI piranhas, was an unlikely criminal psychology student in Ripper: Letter from Hell.

Lastly, James McAvoy and Isla Fisher turned up in the strangely eclectic German slasher film The Pool, which starred Cherry Falls‘ Kristin Miller. Both were gruesomely dispatched fairly early on but can look back and laugh now they’ve had admirable Hollywood careers.

And lastly, I couldn’t get a good shot of the lovely Anna Faris, who, before she became a comedy queen thanks to doing all four (ugh!) Scary Movie‘s, turned up in the type of film they parodied, Lovers Lane, where she played Janelle the plucky cheerleader, who just wanted to make new friends but got gutted with a hook for her trouble. Here she is on the cruddy UK cover with it’s naff international title…

So there we have it, the biggest faces of the 90s horror scene, eleven of them died (one of those twice!), none of them went topless (well, some of the guys did), and only one came back for a sequel! Ha ha @ Jennifer Love Hewitt!

By Hook, By Crook & By the Book

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I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER

 3 Stars  1998/18/96m

“Some secrets will haunt you forever.”

Director: Danny Cannon / Writer: Trey Callaway / Cast: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., Brandy, Mekhi Phifer, Matthew Settle, Muse Watson, Jennifer Esposito, Bill Cobbs, Jeffrey Combs, John Hawkes, Jack Black.

Body Count: 9

Dire-logue: “This is the worst vacation of my life: I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m fucking horny and personally I haven’t seen one Goddamn psycho killer.”

If I Still Know What You Did Last Summer were not so ridiculously bad, it’d be two-star city for the most ridiculously named sequel going. Even after it grossed about half the original’s box office, someone involved with the production (possibly Producer Neil H. Moritz) admitted that the wrong script was chosen.

I Still Know is a collage of Slasher 101 cliches, godawful dialogue and performances most of the cast members would likely wish to forget, most of them phoning in hammy recitals as everything unfolds in the most predictable of manners. Nevertheless, upmarket production values and some saving graces still make it better than most of the contemporary Scream pretenders that surfaced around the same time (The Clown at Midnight comes to mind).

Another year has passed and Julie James (Hewitt) is back in college, struggling with nightmares that eeeevil fisherman Ben Willis is coming back for her after she escaped the slashings of his oversized, rather phallic hook on July 4th, last summer. Phallic, you ask? Look at the artwork; pointy hook slashing towards Hewitt’s much-contemplated cleavage. Anyway, her boyfriend Ray (Prinze) is acting a bit arsey and her roommate Karla is pushing her towards the affections of dorky friend Will.

When Karla wins a radio contest that rewards her with four tickets to the Bahamas, Ray continues his arsey behaviour, neither confirming nor declining the free trip but telling Julie to go if he doesn’t make it. This is an especially fortuitous outcome for The Fisherman, who has gained psychic powers in his gap year and can tell exactly what highway Ray (plus an unlucky buddy) will drive along so that he can set up a faux road accident. He also knows exactly where the truck will stop. Ray escapes the hook but is too late to stop Julie going off to the Bahamas.

At the Tower Bay resort, holiday season is over and storm season is in, meaning only the “lucky” competition winners are there along with a skeleton staff, who will naturally be laid to waste to hike the bodycount as far as it can go. However, before people start dropping like flies, Julie becomes aware that all is not what it seems. The others blame it on her paranoia, but then, how do you hack into karaoke machine lyrics and change them to a sinister message…?

Sing it girl! Whether or not this was intended to be a hallucination of Julie’s is not clear but miraculously none of the other four people present notice the sudden change from I Will Survive’s chorus to “I still know what you did last summer…” A short time later, Julie finds a body in the closet, which is magically gone when she raises the alarm. Everyone ignores her again and even she gets talked into writing it off and going for a tanning session!

Eventually, the others are convinced when bodies begin falling out of washing machines and stuff and the chase is on. I Still Know kicks into gear at this juncture with a very nicely done chase as The Fisherman accosts three women through the attic of the hotel, cornering them at various times until they escape at the last second. Yes, it’s a complete retread of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s frantic rush from the first film, complete with the “hurry up and open the door!” moment.

Much material is repeated from numero uno; the body that Julie finds which then disappears without a trace of it ever being there. One must ask how Ben Willis is able to clean up so quickly? Then there’s the scene where she gets desperate and, as she yelled “What are you waiting for, huh?” last summer, this year it’s “Come and get me, I’m right here!”

What detracts from the horror is how laughable things become. The cliches come so thick and fast that it’s like Scream never happened. Gone is all of the intelligence of the first film, replaced by naivety and annoying behaviour: Karla finds herself on top of a glass roof and tries to stand up. The glass on one panel begins to crack so what does she do? She simply brings her other foot on to the same pane of glass, doubling the weight on the already splintering surface.

Add to this, there’s a sort of weird narration in the dialogue. Karla (again) goes to a door and sees it’s chained. She’s alone so why say aloud “damn, it’s locked”? Then Will appears, scaring the girls, steps into the light and utters a line of dialogue. Then Julie says; “it’s just Will.” FFS. Shouldn’t this be consigned to the commentary track?

So The Fisherman, now with a hook in place of the hand he lost at the end of the first film, is not only psychic but can teleport to precise locations around the hotel locus using his prior knowledge. When someone finds themselves alone, they tend to pause and listen for something (what they expect to hear is a question that’ll die with them) and the killer simply opens the nearest door over their shoulder and creeps up for the kill.

A half-decent twist is revealed at the end (though someone told me what it was before I saw it) and Ray and Julie are reunited to take on Willis, who advises a gun-toting Ray: “Think about is boy, you’re no killer – that’s my job.” Jesus wept.

Needless to say, I was left with questions:

  • Are we to believe the killer shelled out for four plane tickets plus accommodation just to get Julie to the island?
  • Why would the hotel accept guests during storm season and why does the ‘season’ last only about 18 hours?
  • When Julie is stuck in the tanning bed, why don’t they just turn it off – or at least down – before smashing it open with a barbell?
  • Where do the 50-odd other tourists all vanish off to minutes after the group arrives?

A film baren of any insight or intelligence but fun all the same with some nice visuals and that great chase scene. Prinze is given little to do and what he does get isn’t done very well; Brandy is surprisingly tolerable as the loyal BFF but talks as if she’s trying to hawk her latest album by reciting the lyrics and saying “girl” a lot. But the cast list is good with Jack Black in a bizarre uncredited role, pretty much playing himself. Hopes for a (related) third film effectively died along with the hotel staff and so unless the surviving characters sign on for a “15 years later”-style opus, their fates are uncertain. Instead we got I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer.

Blurbs-of-interest: Jeffrey Combs was in Frightmare and Castle Freak; John Hawkes was in Night of the Scarecrow and Identity.

If you, like me, think the title sucks, other reported working titles for this film included:

  • I Know What You Did Last Summer 2 – ok.
  • I Know What You Did Last Summer… The Story Continues – uuh…
  • I Know What You Did Two Summers Ago – yikes!
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