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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Wes Craven (1939 - 2015)

I cannot just take back everything I've ever said about Wes Craven, so I'm not going to, but his passing made me take a moment to think about his body of work. And, DAYUM, he certainly cast one hell of a huge shadow over the horror genre. Over the years I have joined in conversations about Craven to offset some praise that I may have seen as overly enthusiastic. I referred to the man as a great craftsman, as opposed to a great artist, and I would often mention my annoyance with his obsession over booby traps and how they were so often used in his work to hammer home the point about how thin the veil can be between civility and savagery. And then there was the fact that his name was used, rightly or wrongly, to sell a lot of inferior movies to us horror fans in the past couple of decades. Hey, he's not the first and he won't be the last. It just took the shine off his reputation, and made it even easier to forget about his fantastic legacy.

Let's start at the beginning, and look at a number of his better-known works.

  
The Last House On The Left (1972) may well be a sleazy reworking of The Virgin Spring but it led to numerous horror/exploitation movies that would either wear their influence in the title (The Last House On Dead End Street) or in their obviously similar plotting (Night Train Murders AKA Late Night Trains). And that infamous tagline has also been riffed on by numerous, inferior films. Not only was Craven a startling, daring director, but he also seemed to align himself with great marketing.

And then, after a little-remembered movie entitled The Fireworks Woman (1975), came The Hills Have Eyes (1977).

Craven once again seemed to single-handedly create a new horror genre touchstone with his intense, nasty tale of inbred killers pushing a family well beyond breaking point. And he created, arguably, his second major horror icon with the help of Michael Berryman.

The next few years brought some interesting additions to Craven's filmography, including some TV work, a comic book movie (the enjoyable Swamp Thing - which benefits from a great cast and a scene in which Adrienne Barbeau bathes in jungle waters that would have made the teenage me spontaneously combust if I'd been fortunate enough to see it nearer the time of its initial release), and a much-maligned sequel to The Hills Have Eyes that features one of the most amusingly unfathomable flashback sequences ever, with the notable exception of Freaked.

Thankfully, in the very same year, Craven also served us up a very dark dream. A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984).

"If Nancy doesn't wake up screaming she won't wake up at all." ANOTHER great tagline. I think it would be redundant of me to try digging deeper into this horror classic. Most people know by now that Craven got the idea from a bizarre news story, and New Line Cinema developed in the '80s into "The House That Freddy Built." What I will tell you, that you may not know already, is that I first saw this movie when I was about 10-11 years old. And I loved it. It was the most intense horror I had ever seen at that point in my life (Halloween was already a comfortable old friend by then, and I had yet to really delve further into the genre). It had some fleeting nudity, a cute leading lady, torrents of bloodshed, and unforgettable visual flourishes. And it also had Freddy Krueger. Yes, the first movie may have kept the slasher icon (ANOTHER icon) as a darker, less talkative, character but he was still the main draw. Just waiting to see what he would do next was equally exciting and terrifying. He broke all the rules. As did I, that very night, when I ended up switching on my bedroom lamp for the duration of the night, to ward off the boogeyman (a situation that seriously displeased my mother when she came in the next morning to find that I'd been letting a bulb burn all through the night).

That would have been enough for most directors, but Craven used his success to keep delivering more interesting slices of entertainment for us horror fans. They weren't all good, but how can you not love Deadly Friend (1986) when it gave us all THIS moment? And The Serpent And The Rainbow (1988) became, for many, the only non-Romero "zombie" movie to provide scares without repeating the gore and shocks that we'd already seen so many times before. Shocker (1989) and The People Under The Stairs (1991) may remain more products of their time than actual enduring classics but I can't deny having a lot of fun with them when I first saw them. I don't think many would say the same about Vampire In Brooklyn (1995) - although, in fairness, I haven't even seen this one for myself yet; it's reputation precedes it.

A low point? Perhaps. But not for long. Because along came Scream (1996).

  
Scream took the horror genre conventions and played with them in a perfect way to blend real scares/thrills with major entertainment value in a way that had eluded Craven when he tried to explore thematically similar material (a la meta-layering) in the unjustifiably dismissed New Nightmare (1994), a film which has at least grown in stature in the years since it was first served up to unwitting, and perhaps unprepared, audiences.

Scream has divided horror fans in recent years. While it's hard to deny that it gave the horror genre a much needed shot in the arm it's equally hard to deny that it also led to some major bad habits that don't look likely to be broken any time soon (the floating head poster design being just one minus, with the pop culture riffing also sitting uneasily within scripts that aren't clever or witty enough to carry it off successfully). I've even been sucked in to the recent MTV TV show. Don't judge me.

Some of those bad habits came to the fore when Craven teamed up with screenwriter Kevin Williamson once again to refresh the werewolf movie with Cursed (2005). I am one of the few people who find Cursed to be a lot of fun. It's majorly flawed, with two of the biggest problems being poor CGI and a distinct lack of decent bloodshed (leaving the film, ironically, feeling quite toothless), but the script is fun, the central performances from Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, Judy Greer and Milo Ventimiglia are great, and it has a clear love from the cinematic history of lycanthropy that it is springboarding from.

Didn't like Cursed? No problem. Craven showed that he could leave the CGI aside to craft some masterful suspense when he released Red Eye (2005).

Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams helped make Red Eye so enjoyable, but it's clear that the direction from Craven is what enables this particular piece of hokum to flat-out entertain, despite a central premise that is absolutely ludicrous when you give it even a few seconds of actual thought. Thankfully, Craven doesn't let you have any time to figure that out. He's busy letting his cast have fun in a game of cat and mouse that involves wince-inducing use of a pen, bluffery, and the constant threat of escalating violence.

My Soul To Take (2010) may not have been a great swansong for the horror master, which is why we're lucky to have Scream 4 (2011). Some may disagree, but I think it took the franchise to the next logical step, and showed that Craven could easily create new and imaginative ways for teenagers to perceive horror. Which, in a way, is what he did all the way back in that Last House On The Left.

RIP Wes Craven - check out his entire filmography at IMDb here, as I deliberately kept this piece focused on his horrors, and more specifically the horrors that I had seen, and you'll probably be tempted to watch at least one of his movies this week.