Apr
15
“Scre4m” Review
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This review will be spoiler-free. Part of the fun of the “Scream” movies is not knowing where they’re headed and that all their purported rule-breaking will result in something truly original in a genre not known for its freshness.
In the eleven years since “Scream 3″ signaled that the franchise had tapped itself out (at least for the time being), we’ve seen the rise and fall of J-horror remakes, torture porn and moribund franchise reboots. It was a grim period in our nation’s history, the aughts. That most horror films were released with PG-13 ratings was an indicator that the genre had become toothless and practically family-friendly. When I was a young ‘un, the allure of horror movies was that they were hard-R affairs, and I couldn’t even get into the theater without some “Mission: Impossible”-style wirework. But I’m digressing. Fact is, for over a decade, the horror genre didn’t seem to know what to do with itself, post-”Scream.”
So, how does “Scre4m” send-up ten years’ worth of bad horror cinema? Well, it largely ignores our cultural fixation on zombie movies, save for showing a lengthy clip from “Shaun of the Dead,” and it doesn’t even bother mentioning the “Twilight” saga; are those considered horror by anyone but me? The “Scream” movies aren’t interested in the supernatural. “Scre4m” is a straightforward slasher, which is kind of refreshing. Yes, it splits the difference between being a sequel and a reboot, but doesn’t suffer for it as much as I’d feared it might.
In the film, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) returns to her hometown of Woodsboro to close out her book tour. She’s written a self-help tome called “Out of Darkness,” presumably for Final Girls from horror movies to draw strength from. At any rate, she’s arrived just in time for a series of Ghostface-style killings that have Sheriff Dewey (David Arquette) and his wife Gale Weathers-Riley (Courtney Cox) at their wit’s end trying to solve. A new batch of dumb teenagers, including Sidney’s niece Jill (Emma Roberts, who looks uncannily like her Aunt Julia), all do double-duty as potential victims and red herrings.
I’d argue that the opening sequence of the film is actually the best in the series. Giving away anything about its particulars would ruin its impact. Suffice it to say, the movie gets off to a great start. Does it sustain that momentum and cleverness? Eh, not really.
The middle section at times feels draggy and unfocused. Too many new characters are introduced, taking the attention away from the Sidney, Dewey and Gale. Lots of bodies are stacked up along the way, but the kills are unspectacular for the most part. The movie’s not terribly scary, either. Perhaps the most frightening thing about it is all the work Courtney Cox has had done. Gale looks like she was exposed to the Joker’s Smilex gas.
All that being said, the final third of the movie redeems its blah middle section. I won’t reveal the details, but I wish that director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson had gone even further the ending. They start down a path that’s really bold, but hold back. As it is, it’s a solid (and more commercial) conclusion. I just think that the new direction they suggest the series could go is something I’d desperately like to see.
-Brad Lohan
Apr
13
An analysis of the “Scream” series would be incomplete if I left out its first imitator, the Jim Gillespie-directed, Kevin Williamson-scripted “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Released less than a year after “Scream,” it capitalized on the renewed audience interest in dead teenager movies and was successful enough to warrant a theatrically-released (and clumsily-titled sequel), “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer,” in 1998 as well as a long-delayed DTV installment, “I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer” in 2006.
“I Know What You Did Last Summer,” which I will henceforth refer to as IKWYDLS because the title is so bloody unwieldy, feels like a step back from “Scream.” Neither as witty as “Scream” nor as thrilling, it’s not another game-changing send-up but rather a straightforward slasher. I remember feeling a little let down by the film the first time I saw it in college. I honestly expected “Scream 1.5,” something to tide me over until the official “Scream” sequel opened two months later.
Revisiting the film after having not seen it in at least ten years, I found it to be pleasantly diverting. It’s a darker movie than “Scream,” the characters less sympathetic and for the most part deserving of their gruesome fates. I’ll do a deeper analysis in a moment. First, an overview…
Body Count: Five (confirmed). If you count deaths that are faked, then seven.
Best Kill: Max (Johnny Galecki) gets a hook through the chin by our rain-slickered slasher.
Best Exchange: Trying to play it cool after having (almost) committed vehicular manslaughter, Ray (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) asks Max, who just so happens to be motoring by, “What can I do for you, Max?” to which Max spits back, “You can wipe that my-shit-don’t-stink grin off your face.”
Most WTF Line: Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) attempts to convince a sheriff’s deputy that her ex-boyfriend’s been killed with this bon mot: “Listen, you little shit-stick-Mayberry-ass reject. There’s been a murder, and you are going to fry in hell if you ignore it!”
Most Surprising Extended Cameo: One-time omnipresent ’90s character actress Anne Heche plays Missy Egan, the creepy, grieving sister of the guy the heroes think they killed accidentally-on-purpose.
Best Scare: The mirror gag at the very end.
Hilarious Anachronism: Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) aspires to star on the soap opera “Guiding Light,” a show that every homemaker knows went off the air in 2009; I had to Google that to confirm.
Does a black character comment on a white character’s whiteness, apropos of nothing? Why, yes. Twice.
Is Jennifer Love Hewitt the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen? A-yup.
IKWYDLS is about four dumb teenagers — Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), her boyfriend Ray, her BFF Helen and her BFF’s insufferable toolbag of a sex partner, Barry (Ryan Phillippe) — who party it up at Dawson’s Beach on the 4th of July. They seemingly have their whole lives ahead of them. Helen’s just been crowned the Croaker Queen (talk about damning someone with faint praise); Julie and Ray hook up for the very first time; and Barry gets tanked because of course he does. Teetotaler Ray insists on driving them back home along a windy ribbon of road. Barry’s reluctant to give up the keys to his prized BMW, but Ray persists. And as Ray navigates the hairpin turns, Barry opens the sunroof and howls at the moon like a drunken werewolf. Then he dumps a bottle of booze in Ray’s lap, distracting him, and Ray immediately plows right into some guy who’s inexplicably in the middle of the road. Derp!
Very quickly, the kids determine that the four of them will get the gas chamber for committing vehicular manslaughter (I’m paraphrasing), and the only way they can erase this unfortunate little incident is to dump the body in the ocean. The criminal justice system is far more lenient on individuals who go to great lengths to dispose of people they accidentally kill rather than simply owning up to it, amirite? At any rate, as they try to chuck the guy off a pier, he turns out to be not so dead after all and grabs Helen’s precious Croaker Queen crown before disappearing into the briny depths. Barry dives in after him, retrieves Helen’s tiara and leaves the guy at the bottom of the ocean. Satisfied with how neatly they’ve covered up their crime, the heroes go their separate ways.
One year later, Julie returns home after her rough freshman year at college. She looks like death warmed over. But, since she’s Jennifer Love Hewitt, death warmed over never looked so good. Her mother is concerned, but Julie made a pact with her friends not to tell anyone about the guy they killed and tossed in the ocean, not even parents. Most people’s folks would freak out about something like that. And so, she remains evasive. Then she gets an anonymous letter, a letter that reads, “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”
Talk about a slasher who’s a bit of a procrastinator. It took this guy a whole friggin’ year to hatch a revenge plot!
Now, Julie must, with the help of her former friends, try to uncover the identity of the the person is tormenting them. Is it Max, who rolled by shortly after the accident and has always had his eye on Julie? Or maybe it’s Elsa (Bridgette Wilson), Helen’s embittered older sister? But what if…what if it’s actually Ray, Julie’s lovesick ex-boyfriend? Whoever it is, the killer trudges around in a fisherman’s slicker and wields a nasty-looking hook.
Unfortunately, the central mystery of the film is resolved in a way that’s kind of a cop-out. (*Spoiler*) I typically hate when the killer isn’t any of the red herrings but someone whose unmasking is only surprising by virtue of the fact that it’s a payoff that has virtually no setup. That being said, Muse Watson’s killer fisherman character, Ben Willis, sort of looks like Ernest P. Worrell’s evil twin. So he’s got that going for him. (*End Spoiler*)
How does IKWYDLS hold up? Though it’s not a worthy successor to “Scream,” it’s an effective slasher movie in its own right. One thing that’s interesting about it is that the heroes aren’t entirely sympathetic. They make a really stupid mistake that causes their lives to unravel. But the script shifts gears and becomes a detective story without spending much time on the characters’ remorse over what they’ve done. It’s just not that kind of a movie. I like how they at least dealt with Julie’s guilty conscience for a couple of scenes. At the end of the day, it’s a dead teenager movie, not a redemption story. And as a dead teenager movie, it works well enough.
-Brad Lohan
Apr
12
“Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” Review
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The New Bev screened the 247-minute cut of Quentin Tarantino’s revenge epic, “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair,” at the end of March. The film proved so popular, it was held over for another week at the beginning of April. Things have been kind of hectic for me lately, so this review’s being published a little later than I’d originally intended
This version of the film is what screened at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, complete with distracting subtitles. Why it was never released in full is puzzling, but there you go. I refuse to buy the two volumes on DVD because they’re barebones discs, and whenever I end up buying a barebones disc, a double-dip is announced within a month.
And so, I was excited to see “The Whole Bloody Affair.” It’d been seven years since I’d seen either film, and the New Bev is a great venue that I don’t make it out to often enough.
How does “Kill Bill” hold up? Well, it was never my favorite of QT’s films. As two volumes, released six months apart in late-2003 and early-2004, the original releases had a sense of incompleteness to them, despite being so overstuffed. Put back together, the experience now feels dreadfully overlong. It clocks in at over four hours. It’s nine minutes shorter than “Lawrence of Arabia” if that gives you some idea of how gargantuan* this thing is.
Worse, the movie doesn’t begin with my favorite title card in history: “‘Revenge is a dish best served cold.’ -Old Klingon Proverb.” How could they leave that out? I was also expecting this cut to have the street fight between Bill (David Carradine) and Michael Jai White. Carradine talks about it in his book, “The Kill Bill Diary,” which I bought from the man himself a few years ago at a comic book convention. Disappointingly, the scene isn’t in either of the two volumes of the film that I saw during their theatrical run, and it ain’t in “The Whole Bloody Affair.” What gives?
“Kill Bill” is a revenge flick about The Bride (aka Black Mamba, aka Beatrix Kiddo), played by Uma Thurman. After being shot in the head during her wedding rehearsal by her mentor and former lover Bill, The Bride awakens from a coma four years later; she was in a delicate condition when she was gunned down and believes her unborn baby to have died along with her would-be husband and their wedding guests. What follows is an exploitation epic like no other, blending dozens of genres and styles, eschewing traditional linear storytelling and ultimately stopping dead before its talky and anti-climactic finale. The film, I’d argue, is simply too much of a good thing.
Tarantino’s gift for excess is what makes him an exciting filmmaker, but there isn’t enough story in “Kill Bill” to justify its running time. As the narrative leapfrogs from one stylistically different chapter to the next, the film feels like it’s starting over rather than building towards a conclusion. Yes, the Anime segment about O-Ren Ishii is an interesting addition, but ultimately becomes exhausting and unnecessary. Why is so much attention devoted to one of Bill’s henchmen? It takes the focus away from The Bride, who ultimately feels underdeveloped despite the film’s considerable length.
One thing that also struck me while watching the film again is that we never see a scene where the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad acts as a cohesive unit. We never get a sense of how the team functioned before The Bride walked away from the life of a contract killer. It’s kind of amazing how that was left out, considering how much attention is paid to other minutiae. I think establishing The Bride’s relationships and/or rivalries with her team members would’ve lent some real gravity to her revenge mission. Instead, each body she stacks up carries with it the dramatic heft of defeating a video game end boss before advancing to the next level.
“Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair” might not top-tier Tarantino in my estimation, but it’s still quite a theatrical experience. Stacked against some of his stronger efforts, the film feels like a minor work. Even so, it’s at times a thrilling piece of martial arts cinema. It might not be everything one would want out of a filmmaker as promising as Tarantino, and yet even when he falls short, he’s still firing on more cylinders than his contemporaries.
-Brad Lohan
*”You know, I’ve always liked that word…’gargantuan’… so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.” -Elle Driver (aka California Mountain Snake)
Apr
1
Do You Like Scary Movies? | “Scream 2″
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That “Scream” was an unexpected monster hit meant a meta-textual follow-up was inevitable. And so, “Scream 2″ opened less than a year after the first film. The production hit a major snag when the shooting script was leaked on the Internet — which was then in its infancy — and spoiled the ending to the movie. Kevin Williamson had to do a major rewrite during filming. Studios nowadays avoid this sort of hassle by going into production without completed scripts. There’s still the occasional leak, like when a near-completed cut of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” wound up on Bit Torrent sites back in ‘09 a month before its scheduled release. But with “Scream 2,” this was the first time a major motion picture had its creative direction drastically altered because of some doofus with a dial-up connection.
I was very excited to see “Scream 2.” Being a child of the ’80s, I grew up on film sequels, and with horror movies in particular, kind of get a kick out of how long some of those sagas can keep separating gorehounds from their discretionary income. “Scream 2″ didn’t seem like a cynical cash-in to me as much as a logical extension of the first film. To properly deconstruct the horror genre, director Wes Craven would simply have to do a deep-dive into sequels.
I think “Scream 2″ is unfairly maligned as many sequels are. It unfairly gets lumped in with the generally poor imitators that began trickling out at the time rather than being regarded as a worthy extension of the first film. More on that in a moment. First, the high-level analysis:
Body Count: Eight, unless you count Casey Becker’s on-screen death in the “Stab” movie-within-a-movie that plays during the opening sequence. Then it’s nine.
Does Sarah Michelle Gellar Die in It? Yes
Distracting “Dawson’s Creek” Actor Cameo: Joshua Jackson as Ripley-misquoting “Film Class Guy #1″
Best Cameo: Then-unknown Luke Wilson as Billy Loomis in a clip from “Stab.”
Best Exchange: Ghostface asks Randy, “What’s your favorite scary movie?” and Randy deadpans, “Showgirls. Absolutely frightening.”
Hilarious Anachronism: Film student Micky (Timothy Olyphant) carries around a Hi-8 camcorder.
Best Kill: Ghostface crashes a car at a road construction site and inadvertently plunges a length of rebar through the head of a cop who’s clinging to the hood.
“Scream 2″ picks up two years after the first film. Sidney Prescott has started college and tried to move on from the events of her ex-boyfriend’s killing spree in Woodsboro. Unfortunately for her, a copycat Ghostface killer has started bumping people off on campus in attempt at staging a real life sequel to the Woodsboro murders. And Sidney has a whole new host of potential suspects. Is it camera whore Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber), the man she wrongly accused of killing her mother? Or could it be nice guy Derek (Jerry O’Connell), her new and seemingly perfect boyfriend? But what about “freaky Tarantino film student” Micky with his fetish for strong female heroes? Then again, what if one of her fellow “Scream” survivors — Gale Weathers, or Randy or even Dewey — have cracked? As with the first film, I think the mystery is more enticing than the “killer” reveal(s) at the end. All the monologuing that goes on during the climax again grinds the action to a halt. It’s not as dire as the final reel of “Scream 3,” but I still prefer the “motives are incidental” concept that the first movie flirted with.
“Scream 2″ delivers on the promise that “the death scenes are always much more elaborate” convention of a horror movie sequel. The opening sequence where Maureen (Jada Pinkett Smith) is killed in a theater that’s running “Stab” — an adaptation of the events of the first film — strikes a fascinating parallel between how cinema violence and real-life violence affect people differently. It’s a real carnival atmosphere with people parading around as Ghostface and wielding glow-in-dark knives. But when Maureen is killed by someone in the crowd and shambles up on the dais in front of the screen during Casey Becker’s fetishized death scene, suddenly the party atmosphere turns into one of shock and revulsion. It’s a pretty amazing, self-reflexive moment that tries to re-sensitize the viewer. It’s an interesting commentary on slasher movies, particularly in one that ultimately proceeds to become a roller coaster ride rather than “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.” To the filmmaker’s credit, at least Craven takes a stab at being bold.
-Brad Lohan