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Five Cream

January 14, 2022 Hud Leave a comment

SCREAM

2022/18/114m

“It’s always someone you know.”

Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett / Writers: James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick / Cast: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Melissa Barrera, Jack Quaid, Marley Shelton, Jenna Ortega, Mikey Madison, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Dylan Minnette, Sonia Ammar, Kyle Gallner, Roger L. Jackson (voice).

Body Count: 8

Laughter Lines: “You want me to help you and the host of a morning show to commit murder?”

“Why isn’t it called Scream 5!?!?” people hollered. Well, watch it and this year’s Randy sub – his niece – will explain exactly why. Did you really want a film named 5cream? Some spoilers follow.

OK, I’ll cover a bit of it: It’s like Halloween (2018) being both a sequel and a reboot – a ‘requel’ as the character, Mindy, puts it during a scene where Woodsboro’s endangered teen-populace discusses the Stab movies, now up to their eighth instalment with a film simply titled Stab.

As ever, it wouldn’t be a Scream movie without the obligatory opening kill, and we meet a teenage girl alone in her cutesy home, making some food, texting a gal-pal, when the phone insistently rings. It’s ‘Charlie’ from her mom’s ‘group’, who’s chit-chatty and slowly steers the subject on to scary movies. The Babadook is her answer when asked what her favourite is, and there’s an amusing disagreement over ‘elevated horror’. It’s not long before he has her playing a game and then she’s attacked by Ghostface, who slices and dices, slashing towards the camera as the title thunders on to the screen.

Here’s where Scream 2022 fucks with us. She isn’t dead. The girl – Tara – is recovering in hospital when her estranged big sister, Sam, returns for the first time in some years, her dorky boyfriend, Richie, in tow. Sam has a difficult past, at odds with Sheriff Judy over past troubles, and when she sees a vision of Billy Loomis in a mirror, it’s a big “huh!?” accompanied by a call about her “family secret,” which we’ve pretty much got figured given her age and so the film wastes little time in clueing us in that Sam found out her real daddy was Billy, became a tearaway, and bailed as soon as she hit 18.

When someone is murdered for realz (a “woah!-is-that-really” Kyle Gallner), Sam and Richie visit Dewey for help, who was force-retired, separated from Gale, and living in a trailer. Reluctantly, he joins them in gathering Tara’s friends, as he’s been through enough of these to know the killer will be among them. At the home of Randy’s sister, Martha (Heather Matarazzo joyfully returns for a cameo), Mindy addresses the requel details around legacy characters passing the torch to the next generation, setting up nicely for Gale and Sidney to re-enter the fray, and also explaining why only the events of the original seem to matter (Roman who?).

Given that Courteney Cox had asked to be killed off in Scream 4, you should be worried about the fates of our mainstay trio far more than ever before – Scream ’22 doesn’t shy away from its brutality and it’s genuinely sad to have to say goodbye during a tense showdown in a deserted hospital ward halfway through.

Sam and Richie strive to get Tara out of Woodsboro, but end up waylaid and having to stop at the home of Tara’s BFF Amber, where the obligatory adultless teen party is raging. Despite their knowledge of conventions, characters continue to find reasons to venture off alone until all the main players remain and it’s revealed that Amber’s house is where Stu used to live!

The finale playing out back where things began is a real moment. The zoom out that reveals Sam in the doorway that Dewey staggered out of 25 years earlier with a knife in his back genuinely gave me the chills. It also allows for a revisit to Randy’s “turn around” moment on the couch, being watched in Stab by Mindy, saying the same thing in a fun infinity mirror moment. More interestingly, when Gale and Sidney turn up, they’re so aware of the conventions and deceptions it makes for some excellent dark humour and some great fights between good and evil.

Most fans were weary of a continuation without Wes Craven, and the direction and aesthetic favoured by directors Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin is certainly not a pale imitation; there’s a reduction in gloss, less colour, which gives the film an edge of feeling more dangerous, like it means business where the previous couple of instalments were softer and lightly sugarcoated. Where they’ve had to adhere to Scream lore, they rearrange the cups, hiding the prize in a different place.

What flaws there are are minor at best: There’s not really a high-concept kill scenario that lives up to the inventiveness Drew Barrymore scene, or Sarah Michelle Gellar’s torment in Scream 2, compensated for with harsher, nastier grue instead. The new characters seem slightly less fleshed out, but this is also addressed when Richie addresses them en masse from Gen Y to Gen Z, and the identity of one of the killers seemed quite evident given how little the actor had to do up until that point.

Things are left wide open for further sequels, with enough characters left standing to do it all over again, probably without the need for Campbell and Cox’s characters to be dragged out of retirement once again. It seems like the passing of the baton that Scream 4 flirted with carrying out has actually worked this time.

And for those who were hoping for a Kirby Reed return – look closely at the YouTube videos shown on screen when Richie is watching the review of Stab 8.

Blurbs-of-interest: Courteney Cox had a small cameo in The Tripper, directed by David Arquette; Jack Quaid was in Tragedy Girls; Jenna Ortega was in Ti West’s X; Marley Shelton was in Valentine; Kyle Gallner was in the Nightmare on Elm Street remake.

Reviews

Guess Who

August 2, 2019 Hud 2 comments

Some slasher movies go the Michael Myers route of the audience knowing who the killer is from the off, others opt for a classic cloak and dagger whodunit mystery. Sometimes, these are dead easy to suss out (*cough* Prom Night *cough*), sometimes friends or reviews inadvertently blah (cheers, Ian, for clueing me in on who was the Parka loon from Urban Legend), and sometimes they try to fool us.

Obvious spoilers follow…

All-American Murder (1991)

Downgrade student Charlie Schlatter sees his uptown girlfriend burned alive and becomes the main suspect in a series of murders around campus. But who is doing it? In a twist I never saw coming, it is the ‘dead’ girlfriend, who burned up some poor other girl in order to operate off-radar. Even Christopher Walken didn’t figure that one out.

Difficulty of mystery: 88%

D-Tox (1999)

Who is killing off the traumatised cops in a remote wilderness rehab center? Will it be the token British guy? Why yes, it will.

Difficulty of mystery: 7% – if there’s a British character, it’ll be the British character.

Deadly Blessing (1981)

Sharon Stone and the girl who played Patti Simcox in Grease go to visit their recently widowed gal-pal at her farm on the borders of a sub-Amish community, where somebody is killing off the locals. Is it The Incubus that the Hittite community accuse widow lady of being? Why no, it’s the boy-raised-as-a-girl from the farm next door. Didn’t see that coming.

Difficulty of mystery: 74%

Death Bell (2008)

This Korean flick uses the supposition that, as an Asian horror movie, it’ll be the ghost of some long-haired girl killing off students at an academic sit-in for the top performing kids of a Seoul high school. Grades are everything, so it could be anyone.

The Ace here is not who the killer is, but who it’s been all along, which comes out of left field but is awesome nonetheless.

Difficulty of mystery: 89%

Fatal Games (1983)

There aren’t a whole lotta seeds planted for you to guess who the mystery javelin-wielding killer after youthful athletes is, but at the same time given that top-billed Sally Kirkland doesn’t have a whole lot of meat to her role, it becomes kinda obvious near the end that she’s going to get to ‘flex some acting muscle’ at some point.

This was actually lost on me though, because I had no idea what she looked like when I first saw it and thought the killer was going to be the lesbian swim coach.

Difficulty of mystery: 53%

Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985)

I’d not seen The Final Chapter at the point I slotted this VHS into the machine so assumed it was just going to be a standard Jason venture. BUT NO. There is a mystery killer pretending to be Jason. Who is it? Lordy, they could not make it more obvious if they tried. Still, I was all “WTF is going on??” when this random dude was lying dead on the ground. It’s probably why I don’t hate the movie though.

Difficulty of mystery: 2%

Girls Nite Out (1982)

There are so many viable suspects here that the killer, when identified, is pretty out of the blue, but given the big traumatic-past-event story, looking for a character the right age to be involved narrows the field significantly (see also: The Prowler), so it should be no surprise. That the film ends as soon as the fiend is revealed is lame though.

Difficulty of mystery: 66%

Happy Death Day (2017)

Who is killing Tree over and over and over and over as she’s stuck in a time loop? Only time will tell. And tell again. Actually, it’s fairly obvious given that the film almost deliberately chooses to focus away from the character, the same method used in Broadchurch and I figured that shit out!

Difficulty of mystery: 57%

Harper’s Island (2009)

Thirteen episodes sees a wedding party and a few locals burned, skewered, propellered, and crushed to death – but who is behind it all? I had a few guesses throughout, especially the guy who ‘died’ in a random accident rather than a homicide. But it wasn’t him. It was the groom, hidden by a series of deliberate misdirections.

Difficulty of mystery: 91%

House of Death (1981)

Less an unmasking than a roulette wheel spin that lands on a random guy, who has no concrete motive provided in the matter of seconds during which we see his face, a flashback that tells us nothing, and then he’s dead.

Difficulty of mystery: Void.

I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

Like the way Mrs Voorhees shows up for the first time at the end of Friday the 13th and just is the killer, Ben Willis doesn’t put in an appearance (unmasked anyway) before Julie figures out he’s the killer, so he never really appeared on the line-up of suspects beforehand.

Difficulty of mystery: 49%

The Initiation (1983)

Daphne Zuniga is a college girl with no memory of anything before age nine who begins experiencing weird occurrences in the run up to her final initiation into the Delta Rho Chi sorority. It’s likely to be the mystery individual who has broken out of an institute. But who is it? WHOOOOO?

The film toys with a lot of Freudian blah, Daphne’s little trances when she looks in a mirror, and ultimately we find out if her EVIL TWIN SISTER, who intends to kill her and take over her life!

Difficulty of mystery: 78%

Intruder (1988)

A review I read of Intruder stated that the killer was Jennifer’s ex-boyfriend and saw the film early enough in my genre interest that I didn’t figure it was all a ruse.

Difficulty of mystery: 59%

Lovers Lane (1999)

The local teens are being hunted by a hooded, hook-handed killer in this Scream / Last Summer cash-in, which tells us it’s the recently escaped guy who killed the final girl’s mom and the final boy’s dad thirteen years earlier, only for it to be a father-daughter killing team instead, using his escape as the perfect patsy for their own revenge for, it seems, a bad break-up.

Difficulty of mystery: 55%

Mischief Night (2014)

A babysitter is tormented by a masked killer who is about to stab her and then… stops. He can’t do it, she’s different. They bond. They screw. What the fuck is going on? Is this even a slasher film??

Turns out the handful of victims we attributed to the intruder were in fact the babysitter’s kills, all to get the attention of some guy. She’s a regular bunny boiler. I totally did not see this coming.

Difficulty of mystery: 70%

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

All write-ups of My Bloody Valentine I scoured before seeing it just went with the escaped-lunatic-returns-to-town explanation, so I thought we were dealing with Harry Warden from the off and was confused when TJ pulls off the miner’s mask and it’s… Axel!?

Difficulty of mystery: 62%

The Pool (2001)

There’s little mystery to this cross-European effort shot in Prague with teens from an international high school celebrating their finals by partying after hours at a water park, where a skull-masked dude with a machete chops, skewers, and – in the most memorable scene – sticks his blade through the bottom of a waterslide.

With American, German, Czech, Australian, and British characters in the roster, who do you think it’s going to be? Yes, the British guy. Again.

Difficulty of mystery: 12%

The Prowler (1981)

A teen couple are slain after their graduation dance in 1945. The dance is banned forever. Well, 35 years. Come 1980 the nasty soldier-of-doom is back with various sharp things to kill anew.

Seeing as there are only two characters old enough to have been of age at the time of the first killings, it’s really no surprise when the Sheriff is unmasked by the boring final girl at the end.

Difficulty of mystery: 19%

Psycho II (1983)

Is Norman Bates up to his old tricks after finally being released from the asylum? Motel managers disappear, sexy teens are attacked by a woman in a long dress with a big knife, Lila Crane is making trouble…

But it turns out the kind little ol’ lady from the diner is the one doing it, convinced she’s Norman’s real mother and defending him from all those intent on making his return to society miserable. Her motive is all undone come Psycho III though, so she wasted everyone’s time.

Difficulty of mystery: 85%

The Scream series (1997-2011)

I fell for Billy’s little act and never considered a second killer in the first one; In Scream 2 I figured out Mickey quite easily but had ignored Debbie entirely – which is weird as everyone else I’ve ever chatted to about it guessed her and not Mickey; Scream 3 was ruined by a book about the series I flicked through shortly before its UK release; Everyone was supposing Jill was behind the mask in 4 but it passed me by.

Difficulty of mystery: 73%

Slaughter Studios (2002)

This so-so budget affair is elevated by some creatively gruesome deaths and the gag that the homeless guy a group of amateur filmmakers scare away when they break into a soon-to-be razed movie studio is the one who knocks them off!

Difficulty of mystery: 96%

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014)

Ryan Murphy-produced sort-of sequel, sort-of remake to the 1976 dramatization of the unsolved Texarkana killings of 1946 is a clever concept for the most part. When I recently re-watched it, I’d forgotten who the killer even was, and surprised (again) that the first victim/final girl’s boyfriend wasn’t dead at all, and that he’d faked it all to pretty much move away. Like, rent a U-Haul, dude. There’s another killer too.

Difficulty of mystery: 67%

Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000)

There are so many suspects in Final Cut that the revelation that Hart Bochner’s Professor is the killer kinda just results in an “Oh, OK, fine,” response, because they’ve left so many potential red herrings alive for the climax that the huge twist promised by the producers way back when it was announced probably just meant “we’ve got 9 possible killers – no one will ever guess!”

Difficulty of mystery: 59%

For the record, the academic book Games of Terror gave away the killers in Friday the 13th, Prom Night, Happy Birthday to Me, Graduation Day, and the ‘revelations’ in Hell Night and Terror Train (the latter would’ve probably fooled me though). A friend of mine inadvertently gave away whodunit in Urban Legend as well (but that was quite obvious, right?)

Lists

Scream ‘cuz you know what he did that Halloween

July 28, 2019 Hud Leave a comment

SCREAM: RESURRECTION

2019/253m

“New season. New blood.”

Created by: / Cast: RJ Cyler, Jessica Sula, Keke Palmer, Giorgia Whigham, CJ Wallace, Guillian Yao Gioiello, Tyga, Tyler Posey, Mary J. Blige, Tony Todd, Paris Jackson, Roger Jackson (voice).

Body Count: 11

Laughter Lines: “Some dude turned him into a Pez dispenser.”

Leaving the town of Lakeshore in peace, and partially unresolved given the way Season 2 ended, the powers that be decided to reboot the TV format of Scream and take it to more urban surroundings, crop down the number of episodes, and… well, I have no idea what else. Some spoilers.

After the news about Harvey Weinstein broke, #MeToo, and various other black clouds gathered, the 2018 air date was delayed, eventually shifting from MTV for a get-it-over-stat run of airing the six episodes over three nights on VH1. Yeeps.

It could also be argued that the final product was so disappointing, everybody involved just wanted to wash their hands of it entirely.

Beginning with a nubile girl (MJ’s daughter, Paris) home alone getting a weird call, the opening scene proves to be a gag that introduces us to two trick or treating brothers who end up in trouble when they go looking for a stolen swag-bag of candy in the breaker’s yard inhabited by ‘Hookman’ (Tony Todd), who murders one, while the other escapes.

Eight years later (not five or ten for once!), surviving twin Deion (Cyler) is Weaver High School’s star football player, but also the plaything of a shady stalker, wearing the original Ghostface mask and making calls with the same voice: “Let’s see who you really are, Deion!” etc, etc.

The curse seems to leak out and infect a group of classmates when they share detention: The geek, the outspoken protester, her gay BFF, the goth, and the princess. Calling themselves The Deadfast Club before someone else comes up with it, they and some hangers-on are soon being slashed, injected, impaled, and litter-pick’d to death. Well, only the male ones. There’s curiously not a single female victim in Resurrection.

Keke Palmer is the brightest light here as social justice warrior Kym, who doesn’t shy away from calling things out: When the killer calls her and asks if she likes scary movies, she pointedly responds: “No I do not, ’cause everyone in them as stupid as hell.” The other five central players pale in comparison somewhat, a couple are able to add some depth to their knife-fodder roles but the by-numbers dialogue doesn’t allow them a lot of room to manoeuvre.

Goth-girl Beth is our Randy/Kirby stand-in, firing off Slasher 101 factoids all over the show, and it would seem this series might’ve challenged the conventions over who will survive, but given that the gay and Muslim kids are first to go from the main roster, has anything really progressed much? This isn’t the first slasher opus to try and switch up race roles, but is probably the most notable, which makes it more tragic that it was virtually written off and will doubtfully ever air again.

As we know with all horror tales involving twins, there’s going to be some switcheroo nonsense in there and it’s a groan-inducing moment when the truth finally seeps out, leading into an unmasking that’s particularly anti-climactic and ill-conceived, taking it about as far from the smart-ass post-modernism of the original Scream movie, which goes unmentioned, along with the events of the other two seasons. A throwaway line about the mask being similar to the one used in the Woodsboro killings? Nah. Zip.

The kids do their best to try and subvert expectations, but we’re 23 years after Scream and 40 years after Halloween and Friday the 13th now. Applying the rules of their parents and grandparents doesn’t fly and it’s bleakly ironic that Scream: Resurrection has become exactly the kind of material that the original movie took to task in unravelling.

Blurbs-of-interest: Keke Palmer was in both seasons of Scream Queens; Gideon Emery was in Train; Tony Todd was Candyman, in Final Destination‘s 1, 2, and 5; Hatchet and its first sequel, Hell Fest, iMurders, Jack the Reaper, Candy Corn, and Scarecrow Slayer.

Reviews

“It’s way too 90s horror.”

June 1, 2018 Hud Leave a comment

SCARY MOVIE

2000/18/85m

“No mercy. No shame. No sequel.”

Director: Keenen Ivory Wayans / Writers: Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Buddy Johnson, Phil Beauman, Jason Friedberg, Aaron Seltzer / Cast: Anna Faris, Shannon Elizabeth, Jon Abrahams, Shawn Wayans, Dave Sheridan, Cheri Oteri, Carmen Electra, Regina Hall, Lochlyn Munro, Kurt Fuller, Marlon Wayans.

Body Count: 15

Laughter Lines: “Lose the cape, it’s way too 90s horror.”

The tsunami of 90s teen horror was always going to end up with this happening. The eventual combo of two parody projects, originally to be titled Scream if You Know What I Did Last Halloween, Scary Movie came before the endless onslaught of affiliated productions including Date Movie, Epic Movie, Superhero Movie, Meet the Spartans, and four – count ’em – sequels to this. Yes, the tagline told porkies.

Naming their film after the working title of Kevin Williamson’s script, Scary Movie works best when it’s specifically parodying the teen slasher tropes, too often straying toward fart gags, gay jokes, and pothead humor as a fallback. But the slasher ones are at least good.

After sexy teen Drew Becker (Carmen Electra) is killed by a Ghostface masked loon, the students of the local high school worry that they may be targeted in payment for running over a fisherman and tossing the body in the sea a year earlier (though the victim wasn’t even involved in that, so no idea why they’d think it?) Virginal Cindy Campbell (Faris, in a career-making role) is at the centre of it all – could it be her booty-thirsty boyfriend Bobby? Angry jock Greg? Two-faced Buffy? Then there’s Officer Doofy, ball-busting reporter Gail Hailstorm, and various other possibles.

The plot is actually entirely redundant, as the film moves from joke set-up to joke set-up, at its strongest when Cindy is in full Sidney Prescott mode, with side-jabs at The Matrix thrown in to good use, great send-ups of Tatum’s “wanna play psycho killer?” moment, the cinema murder at the start of Scream 2, and the soon-to-be overdone Blair Witch and Sixth Sense parodies.

Plenty of the cast die only to reappear in the sequels as the same character; some are killers but then not; some seem entirely surplus – was Shorty supposed to be Randy?? – and a good chunk of the gags have become entirely cringe-inducing in the intervening years. Avoid the sequels like the plague.

Blurbs-of-interest: Faris played it straight in Lovers Lane and weird in May; Shannon Elizabeth was in Jack Frost; Lochlyn Munro later appeared in Hack!, Freddy vs Jason, The Tooth Fairy, Initiation and Totally Killer; Jon Abrahams was in House of Wax; Dave Sheridan was in Victor Crowley.

Reviews

Scream 19

April 6, 2018 Hud 2 comments

BRAXTON BUTCHER

2015/15/111m

“Every town has secrets.”

A.k.a. The Butchering (USA)

Director/Writer: Leo McGuigan / Cast: Shaun Blaney, Jenna Byrne, Andrew Stanford, Diona Doherty, Ciaran McCourt, Vicky Allen, Joshua Colquhoun, Rachel Morton, Philip Rafferty, Natalie Curran, Stephanie Donaghue, Odhran McNulty, Brandon McCaffrey.

Body Count: 16

Laughter Lines: “Ready to be the final girl?”

During the rehearsal of a prank in Braxton Butcher, one character turns to another and says: “It’s too Scream 3, it should be more Scream 2.” And that pretty much sums up what this cute homage is all about. Leo McGuigan, only nineteen when he directed this, is clearly on Team VeVo in terms of ranking the Scream flicks in realising the second one is the best one. Minor spoilers ensue.

It’s a well established fact that the sexiest accent in the world is Irish. Those with a keener ear will be able to delineate between regions therein; but spades being spades, everyone in this film could drop my pants any second with just a few brief utterances. Ahem, anyway…

Cops are called to the Miller house in the small NI town of Braxton after the neighbours hear screams. There, they find Mom and Dad slain, laid out on the bed, their teenage son, Tommy, nowhere to be found. Instead he’s busy crashing a party at the town hall, where he slashes up a number of classmates, leaving survivors Ryan and Cora.

Ten years later – never nine, never eleven – the two have drifted apart: Ryan has grown up to become a detective, and Cora presents a local radio show. In a curveball turn of events, she and her bratty teen sister are slashed up by a mask and Parka wearing loon, leaving Ryan to investigate with the help of his new partner, Will.

News of the murder fascinates the local teens, who show no sign of calling off their town hall throwdown, even when their own peers begin getting sliced up. Ryan’s seventeen-year-old niece Julie is thrust into the centre of things, as she has a sort of Sidney-Billy on-off romance with Danny, who has been dating bitchy girl Claudia, who is seeing Oliver on the site, despite the fact he’s with Sarah. Confusing.

Clocking in just shy of two hours is ambitious for any slasher film, and Braxton veers into being quite talky here and there, with a lot of characters to keep track of, but McGuigan has clearly studied what works on a visual level and pushed these elements to the forefront, most commonly extended scenes of characters being stalked or chased. Sure, the budget is probably quite far south of Wes Craven’s but this is still leagues ahead of other recent British efforts that looked like local am-dram groups rented a camera and wrote a stalk n’ slash script in an afternoon: “Yeah, it just needs tits, lesbians, and some ketchup!”

The actors are all game – screaming at the right moments and not really making all the idiotic decisions expected of them in this genre, although the killer opts to terrorise female victims with more drawn out cat and mousery than the boys, who are largely victims of quick stab n’ go drive-bys. Vicky Allen is a hoot as bitchy Claudia, who would have VICTIM stamped on her forehead in any other film, but here is given the chance to redeem herself as the situation heads south.

I read a couple of effusive reviews that had me thinking I was about to see the next Cold Prey, which isn’t quite the case, but considering McGuigan’s tender age and the effort he and the crew appears to have put in, seeing beyond the usual pitfalls of making a teen-horror film, this deserves more exposure, if not only to see what is likely the beginnings of an impressive career.

Reviews

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