My daughter is home for a couple weeks and we watched Scream last night. If you follow the chronology, it would actually be Scream 5, as this is the first post-Wes Craven production, and really suffers for it. Daina gave up immediately, not because she doesn't like horror movies, but because it was simply unwatchable as far as she was concerned. However, Akvilė and I persevered.
At one point I opined that maybe these Scream movies were not-so-subtle parables on date rape. The killer inevitably turns out to be one of the best friends and girls seem to suffer the most in these films. However, this Scream broke a lot of rules including allowing its initial victim to survive the attack. We couldn't quite figure out whether this "Ghostface" was just an amateur or if it was intentional.
The "teenagers" were for the most part new to me, save Jenna Ortega and Dylan Minnette, although his bleached blonde look threw me at first. Unfortunately, they couldn't save this movie from itself. It cast itself as a "requel," which as one of the teenage girls laboriously described is a movie that revisits the original without necessarily following the plot or remaking it with a new set of characters like the 2007 reboot of Halloween. In this case, members of the original cast reappear to help guide the kids through the nightmare and some of the newbies are actually offspring of the original cast. However, this incarnation essentially serves as a prequel for this year's Scream VI, where Ghostface takes on Manhattan.
I never really liked Slasher movies outside the original Halloween, and even it had a number of plot holes. What made it work is that it was loosely based on the Babysitter Murders that took place in Oakland County, Michigan a couple years before. John Carpenter compressed it all into one night and provided what essentially became a set of rules for the copious slasher movies of the 80s. Scream came around relatively late in 1996, but was the brainchild of Wes Craven, who created Nightmare on Elm Street. Scream was meant broadly as a farce with the teenagers fully aware of the rules but still powerless to stop the assailants dressed in Halloween masks.
Sadly, the killers turned out to be their own best friends who simply enjoyed the thrill of the kill. You knew the killers came from the inner circle in this movie, unless the teens held a seance at some point and resurrected Billy Loomis and Stu Macher. That would have been better than what transpired in this insipid movie. There's zero attempt to address motives beyond the most banal conclusions, much less create characters you have any empathy for. It all seems so random and utterly senseless, breaking virtually every rule of the slasher genre.
It just shows you the power of a franchise. Not only have they made six Scream movies to this point but had a three-season series on MTV a few years back. The first season was enough for me. It was captivating and tried to offer some motive or sets of motive. The murders were spread out over several episodes so it allowed viewers to empathize with the victims, but in the end the guy you are supposed to least expect turns out to be the killer.
It all seem AI generated at this point, including the visage of Billy Loomis in the rear view mirror of the car. The directors tried their damnedest to throw viewers off the trail. The only problem was that none of it added up, and you are led to believe there was a third assailant, who will probably carry over into the next installment.
There has to be some kind of inherit logic to any horror movie. Ultimately, it is a whodunnit with a lot of gore. A pretty safe format as viewers will hang around just to see if they solved the mystery. However, by stretching the movie to nearly two hours, Matt Bettinelli-Opin and Tyler Gillet stretched even my daughter's patience. You had to wonder what generation these guys were appealing to as only the youngest of viewers would fall for these jump scares.
Surprisingly, Scream received generally favorable reviews even from The Guardian. I had to scroll pretty far down Metacritic to find less favorable reviews. Richard Lawson sums up the innumerable problems in his review for Vanity Fair. This is a genre not meant to be self-aware. The victims only succeeded in doing such stupid things that you still found yourself shouting at them on screen for being so dumb. The problem was that the pair of ghostfaces were just as dumb.
Comments
Post a Comment