Scream (2022)

Is anyone else getting as tired as I am of the formulaic way so many franchises have been "reinvigorated" over the past few years? Find some way to ensure the film connects to the original. Have at least one character from the first movie to help push those nostalgia/familiarity buttons. Make up for any weak plotting and poor scripting with some extra FX work. Oh, and have one big surprise, or death, that doesn't really feel all that surprising. Horror movies get a bonus for allowing a central character from the original to face their fear while showing how the trauma of being stalked by a crazed killer has affected their life. From the Star Wars movies to the Halloween movies, and now Scream, this is the way it works. I WAS looking forward to the next instalment in the wildly uneven The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, but now I am not so optimistic. 

Scream starts, funnily enough, with a phone ringing. A young girl, Tara (Jenna Ortega), is attacked in her home. That attack brings her sister, Sam (Melissa Barrera), back home to Woodsboro. Sam is with her boyfriend, Richie (Jack Quaid), and she introduces him to a group of sort-of-friends that includes Amber (Mikey Madison), Wes (Dylan Minnette), twins Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad Meeks-Martin (Mason Gooding), and Liv (Sonia Ammar). Everyone wants to survive the latest potential ghostface killings, but everyone is also a suspect. That's why Sam gets in touch with Dewey Riley (David Arquette), who subsequently warns Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) to stay far away. 

The first film in the Scream movie series to be directed by anyone other than Wes Craven, and the second script not written by Kevin Williamson, this is a film that very much highlights the lack of both of these talents behind the camera. Not that directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are bad. I've enjoyed most of their work before this, to varying degrees, and they stay firmly in control of the mechanics of the film, as it were, with the actual visuals and editing here being the least of the problems with the film. The overall feel of the film still lacks something though, that confidence and playfulness that Craven could wind through all of his better works. That is never more apparent than in a sequence that should be playful and fun, with the frame being blocked in ways that leads viewers to expect a jump scare at any moment, but instead ends up irritating and tiresome as it plays the same trick in a couple of different ways.

Never mind the directors though, especially when the writers, James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, have to shoulder almost all of the blame for how bad this is. It's probably easier for me to list my criticisms of the script here in a series of bullet points.

* A distinct lack of tension. In attempting to feel fun and unpredictable, the writers made this arguably the most predictable, and therefore boring, entry in the series. So far.

* A killer so obvious that I really hoped my gut feeling was wrong. It wasn't. I saw the end of this thing coming a mile away. That's down to sloppy writing, whether it's to do with just dismissing characters until they start to become more prominent when you know the final reveal is due or interactions between characters that feel like they're pointing a neon-lit arrow at someone.

* The meta commentary here is awful, and I mean AWFUL. This is, in certain ways, very similar to The Matrix Resurrections, but that film showed how you could do super-smart commentary on events that also discuss the very film you are watching without feeling like a lecture delivered by idiots misunderstanding the appeal of their own source material.

* As subjective as it is, a lot of the humour doesn't work. I would also argue that a lot of the new characters don't work, but I'd say it's about a 50/50 with who I liked and who I didn't (although not liking the new lead is a big stumbling block).

* There's one character depicted in "visions" here, and it's a very bad move. It's usually best to leave that trope to Stephen King, who has used it so often that it's part of his comforting appeal when I read his stories.

* Putting even more emphasis on the Stab films, but without the wit or fun cameos that have been there in previous excerpts from the film-within-the-film series.

* As difficult as it is to confirm the feeling in my gut, the characters generally feel dumber in this film. Being so easily separated, being fooled by tech that should surely be avoided, and turning up somewhere after being specifically warned to stay away. These things have always happened in the Scream movies, and many other horror movies, but characters used to end up reluctantly "breaking the rules" as dangerous situations forced them to make difficult decisions in the heat of the moment.

Do the writers get anything right, in between silly moments like showcasing the "Randy Meeks Memorial Home Theater"? Yes. It's a shame that they can only deal with the characters of Sidney Prescott and Gale Weathers by merging them into some kind of symbiotic Laurie Strode-alike, but they do a lot better by Dewey Riley, giving Arquette some of the best scenes that he's had in the series. I also liked Quaid's character, the easy interplay between Brown and Gooding, and the fact that we had a bit more time with Sheriff Judy Hicks (played by Marley Shelton, reprising her character that I enjoyed in Scream 4).

Arquette is the heart of the film, which leads to the presence of Campbell and Cox feeling much more forced (despite it being obvious that they need to come into the picture at some point). Barrera and Ortega are disappointing, considering that viewers spend so much time with them. The former has to handle some of the more ludicrous moments, not really her fault, and the latter just doesn't feel like an important part of the cast once that opening sequence has finished. Quaid has enough charm and likability to make the most of his role, and I've just mentioned the enjoyability of Brown and Gooding in the last paragraph. Madison, Ammar and Minnette are there to make up the numbers, and there are a couple of enjoyable cameos to watch out for, as well as one awful one.

I won't deny that I enjoyed sitting in a cinema and hearing "Red Right Hand" accompanying some Woodsboro scenery, and there are a few bits of fairly graphic brutality that at least make Ghostface seem even more driven and vicious this time around, but I was very unhappy by the time the end credits rolled. Some have already been celebrating the fact that a sequel to this has already been greenlit. I would prefer if the series provided one last big twist, and just left an iconic killer to stay dead and buried now that the film-makers seem to have nowhere else to take the story.

4/10

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12 Hour Shift (2020)

You don't get too many dark comedies about an attempt to steal a kidney from someone, but writer-director Brea Grant is here to change that with 12 Hour Shift.

Angela Bettis plays Mandy, a nurse who likes to use her position to gain access to drugs and other things that might fall into her pockets. She's helping her cousin, Regina (Chloe Farnworth), to deliver a kidney to some dangerous criminals. Unfortunately, Regina is a bit of a liability. She mistakenly leaves the kidney behind, an error that leads to a night of multiple deaths in the hospital as Mandy tries to regain control of the situation while Regina gets more and more desperate in her attempts to procure a kidney. The other staff quickly grow more wary, and there's a prisoner (Jefferson, played by David Arquette) who might cause more problems.

Dark and twisted for almost every minute of its runtime, 12 Hour Shift is the kind of black comedy that will annoy just as many people as it entertains. There are very few characters who are outright likeable, and none of the leads are people that you'd want to be stuck in a crisis with. But Grant is smart enough to make people unlikeable in different ways. Bettis is savvy and ruthless, Farnworth is a bit of an idiot, Nikea Gamby-Turner plays Karen, who has been used to turning a blind eye to the "antics" of Mandy, other staff snap at one another, often with good reason, and there's at least one patient (played by Tom DeTrinis) who is so high maintenance that you might start wishing for him to be the one to lose a kidney.

Bettis is as great as ever in the lead role, someone struggling to keep hold of a situation that becomes increasingly twisted and slippery by the minute. Farnworth gets to have more fun, willing to embark on a murder spree to get what she wants, to hell with the consequences, and the scenes that work best have her manic silliness juxtaposed alongside the eye-rolling of Bettis. Arquette is a lot of fun as the cop-hating killer who might just prove to be a valuable patsy, Gamby-Turner is enjoyably weary and resigned to things playing out however they will, and Kit Williamson does well as a police officer hoping to stop more people from dying. Tara Perry, Brooke Seguin, Taylor Alden, and Missy Stahr Threadgill all do well, part of the supporting cast portraying staff, visitors, and patients, and the aforementioned DeTrinis is amusing enough with his annoying manner.

Admirably getting the tone perfect from start to finish, this is an unabashed triumph for Grant (in what is only her sophomore directorial feature, despite positioning herself near the very top of the tree when it comes to influential film-makers working on the independent horror scene in recent years). I could pick some other blood-soaked dark comedies to compare it to, but that would be unfair. It feels like such an enjoyably unique film that any comparisons would only set prospective viewers up for disappointment.

9/10

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Netflix And Chill: Spree (2020)

The more I see of his work, the more I think that Joe Keery may be the only one to have a major career ahead of him once Stranger Things is all wrapped up. Like some of the older cast members, he doesn't have to navigate his later teen years as if it's a minefield. Unlike some of them, he actually has a great screen presence. He also seems to have a good nose for material (or his agent does).

Keery plays Kurt Kunkle here (aka @kurtsworld96 on his social media channels). He's been trying to get some decent traffic for years, often making videos to post online that end up with only a couple of viewers. But he keeps on at it. It's almost as if it's the only thing he wants in his life. Which gives him a plan. He kits his car out with a number of cameras and sets out to capture an audience with his latest shift as a Spree driver (think Uber, but definitely not Uber, if any lawyers ask about it). He is determined to go viral with a livestream that he will call "the lesson", all about helping people boost their viewing numbers, but it soon becomes clear that "the lesson" will be a deadly one. Except it's not clear to people who are checking in, assuming it is all as staged as so many other big moments on the internet.

As well as providing a lead role for Keery that may well open doors for him to a number of other projects (although, to be fair, he seems busy enough already), director Eugene Kotlyarenko, who also co-wrote the screenplay with first-timer Gene McHugh, appears to have taken this opportunity to fully expand on ideas he has been playing with in some of his previous work. And while we've seen this done before, someone looking to commit more and more extreme acts as they chase internet fame, the commentary here is arguably better than many other examples I can think of.

Keery plays his character perfectly, always trying to hard as he interacts with people while trying his best to deliver great content for his viewers. The other main character is Jessie Adams, a comedian teetering on the brink of being very famous. Played by Sasheer Zamata, Jessie shows the other side of the coin, to a degree. She is someone who knows how to play the long game, she knows the real impact of her actions, and this creates a third act conflict that both takes things towards a dark and twisted conclusion, while also proving to be a slight disappointment (only because I was hoping for one last plot reveal that never happened). Zamata is excellent, portraying the kind of successful and smart woman who can easily intimidate anyone who underestimates her. You also get some decent performances from David Arquette (playing Kurt's father, a DJ who often spends his time getting high), Sunny Kim (a much more famous DJ who keeps promising to tag Kurt in her social media channel), and Joshua Ovalle (Bobby, someone with a large internet following).

You may dismiss Spree as a film taking easy shots at an easy target, but that's not all it does. Kotlyarenko has made something that is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking, and the third act effectively ramps things up to show just how many more people will tune in when they get wind of a moment of madness being caught live and on camera.

8/10

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Riding The Bullet (2004)

Riding The Bullet is yet another movie based on a short story by Stephen King and yet another King adaptation with Mick Garris directing (he's also helmed Sleepwalkers, The Stand, The Shining TV mini-series, Desperation and others). Mick Garris can do okay with strong enough material and I liked his earlier collaborations with King but it seems that, as they've grown more familiar and comfortable with each other, the director has taken on a few of the author's failings. I love the written works of Stephen King but he can't hit a home run every time (who can?) and when he's not on top form his writing is often full of too much superfluous Americana while good ideas are swamped by all of the local colour and insignificant sideroads.

Riding The Bullet was the first story that King ever released online. It seemed to be a success and I enjoyed the story when I read it in standard printed form in Everything's Eventual (a fantasic collection of short stories from someone who really is a master of the form). But it's not a great story and it's not a very lengthy story. It takes about 60 pages or so to tell the tale so making a 90 minute movie out of the thing would seem to be a difficult task. The movie of Riding The Bullet runs for 98 minutes. That kind of tells you everything you need to know right there. Great movies have certainly been made out of shorter stories but Riding The Bullet doesn't even have all that much going on under the literary layers, so to speak, and with the movie not adding too much to the material it all feels like something stretched way beyond breaking point.

This is more of an enjoyable twist on the "ghostly hitch-hiker" tale than anything else as Alan Parker (Jonathan Jackson) heads home to get to his hospitalised mother (Barbara Hershey). On his journey he thinks back to childhood memories (one of them involving his turn to ride on "The Bullet" rollercoaster), talks to himself, encounters some characters that pad out the running time and then takes a lift from someone (David Arquette) that he begins to suspect shouldn't be in any condition to drive a car.

There's just nothing here at all worth noting. Garris scripted the movie from the Stephen King story and either lifts things directly from the source or adds completely pointless material (though a scene near the very beginning with a vision of death and some lively wall decor gave me hope for some impressively imaginative work that subsequently went into hiding for the rest of the movie). The acting is all fine and the soundtrack contains a few decent tunes. But by the time the end credits roll you can't help feeling that you just wasted your time watching something of complete insignificance.

Personally, I'd recommend this as one of the many Stephen King adaptations to avoid but die-hard fans may be better pleased with it than I was. It's doubtful though.

4/10.

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