Post-Modern Murders 05: Scream 2 (1998)

At the outset of Scream 2, Jamie Kennedy, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Joshua Jackson are in a film class obnoxiously discussing which sequels are better than their predecessors. Allow me to jump in on the conversation: Scream 2 is way worse than the first Scream. That's not to say it's a bad movie, it's just an astoundingly middling movie (which makes it among the best post-Scream slashers) that shows all the marks of something rushed out for profit less than a year from the original. The movie is self-aware in a way far smarter than the other Scream films, it knows how dumb its own existence is, especially as anything but the redundant cash-in sequels the first Scream was rallying against. After Killer #1, Mickey¹ (Timothy Olyphant, mouthful of scenery as he departs the mortal coils of the celluloid universe he inhabits) declares his motive is to blame the movies for driving him to murder, Killer #2, Debbie Salt aka Billy Loomis' mom (Laurie Metcalf, aka Roseanne's sister, only slightly more restrained in her ham) shoots him dead saying that his motive is dumb - she's here for good old-fashioned revenge. Long after Drew Barrymore paid the price for forgetting Pamela Voorhees' original reign of terror Mrs. V gets her fan club after all.

1. In all of these movies once the killer is revealed they go completely (and often hilariously) psychotic. Eyes all bugging out, screaming and flailing about. I'm not sure where this came from outside of bad acting or directing. Billy and Stu were delightfully restrained once revealed which made them seem that much more unstable in, you know, a real way.

Scream 2 feels like Kevin Williamson rolled over on a hungover Sunday to a call that he needed to have a finished sequel script in pronto. What results is a checklist of "Things Scream Did Kinda Okay" for its interminably long run time ². Let's go down the list, shall we?

1) Opening murders referencing the movies. This pre-credits death honor goes to Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett (pre-Smith) in a scene that's both too on the nose and confused all at once. The couple are out to see the premiere of Stab, a rushed-out cash grab based on the events of the previous film.³ Maureen (Pinkett) doesn't like horror movies for the same reasons we heard in Scream but she still manages to portray the stereotype of "black woman who talks during movies" because why the fuck not? Maureen is stabbed to death during Stab-Drew Barrymore (Heather Graham)'s death sequence, surrounded by Ghostfaced-costumed fans who are none the wiser. Get it guys, we're desensitized to violence thanks to movies. Herp derp.

2. Two hours is not okay for a movie where so little happens.
3. The movie-within-a-movie directed by an uncredited Robert Rodriguez is amazing and I found myself wanting more of this and less of, well, everything else.

2) Jamie Kennedy. He has suspects because this is a sequel and these are the rules of the sequel. Movie reference, movie reference. Surprise death in one of the best scenes of the film. Probably a huge mistake to kill him off here since the entire cast of Scream 3 manages to be simultaneously more annoying and less interesting than Randy ever was.

3) Phone menace. I don't know why Sarah Michelle Gellar is here. Additionally, I don't know why she was always cast as the blonde in peril when she should have been playing The Final Girl. She's motherfucking Buffy. She is famous for playing a role that was LITERALLY DESIGNED in opposition to the characters she's always brought in to play. A lot of this can be that, in all fairness to Buffy because that show is great, SMG is not a fantastic actress. She does what she does just fine but I'm not sure she could ever carry an entire film on her own shoulders in the way Neve Campbell does.

4. I'm aware how this sounds because what the fuck did Neve Campbell ever do? I guess in the same way SMG is Buffy and no one else could be Buffy, no one else could be Sidney. Their ranges just don't extend outside of these characters whatsoever.

She has the honor of being the girl who gets menaced by Ghostface on the phone in a scene that feels like a total afterthought. "Oh yeah, that phone scene was the driving point of the entire film. Guess we should do it again. Right?"

4) Maybe the boyfriend did it! Hoo boy. Jerry O'Connell is no Skeet Ulrich and that's saying a whole lot in very few words.

And it goes on like this for the extent of the film. The bodies pile up, people are chased the whodunit is in name only (by the end of the film there are only a handful of people left who had lines) and a pointless sequel will lead into several more.

This isn't to say the film is without merit. Once again, Craven turns the wide open into the claustrophobic - Randy's death takes place in broad daylight in a crowded area, but as the scene builds everything seems to collapse in on him until it's too late for him to realize the killer is right behind him. Sidney's escape from a crashed car while climbing over an unconscious killer is the only moment in the entire series that comes close to the intensity of Scream's opening eight minutes⁵. Gale's chase through the campus production studio is the best in the franchise. What's most baffling is how not scary Scream 2 is. Sure, outside of the opening maybe the original wasn't very frightening but Scream 2 plays more like an action movie, ala Terminator, than even an action-horror film, ala Predator. Somehow the man who created Freddy has forgotten that a man with a knife is, on its own, not especially scary. Scream 2 ends up worse than Scream but on a tier far above 3 or 4. As we'll see, sometimes it's better to not have anything to say at all than to say something and sound like a goddamned idiot.

5. Despite ending with one of the most egregious uses of Voorhees Scale Killer Teleportation I've ever seen.

Post-Modern Murders 04: I Still Know What You Did Last Summer

I Know What This Movie Thinks Is Scary. Dream sequences. After ending its predecessor with one, I Still Know opens with another one, scaring Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) awake during a class at Generic Northeast Liberal Arts college, possibly the same one from Urban Legend (“There’s this girl in my class who was menaced by a hook man. No seriously, I swear it happened to someone I know!”). After we’re briefly introduced to nice guy cuckold Will Benson (Matthew Settle), Julie gets a surprise visit from Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.) who has taken the drive from North Carolina to pick her up for their old hometown’s July 4th celebration. Julie, understandably doesn’t want to go back to the town where her friends were murdered and they almost died not even a year ago. But Ray is grumpy that she doesn’t understand his blue collar, down-home sensibilities and storms off, presumably to drive all the way back home. Phones, Ray, pick ‘em up.

Next, we get a cheap jump scare as roommate Carla (Brandy) is creeping around the house in the dark. Look, you’d think that, knowing your roommate was almost murdered and keeps a kitchen knife in her bed stand, that creeping around the closets at night would be mildly triggering. But Carla is an asshole anyway, as we’ll learn, in the long tradition of secondary I Know franchise players. Carla’s boyfriend, Tyrell (Mekhi Phiffer), is also a dingus and that’s about the full extent of his characterization. Out at a club, Julie thinks she sees Captain Philips up in the rafters but no one else is acknowledging the dude in full rain slicker so it’s probably a hallucination. And that’s where, once again, the movie comes close to stumbling into being interesting and/or suspenseful. Julie is clearly suffering from some form of PTSD, why not make it seem like she could possibly be the one picking up the hook? But nah, fuck it, that might limit the amount of high angle shots on JLH’s low cut wardrobe (the full extent of this film’s direction, mind you). 

And now the movie goes full retard in assuming the audience is already on the short bus with it. Carla receives a phone call from a radio station telling her that if she can name the capital of Brazil, she’ll win a trip. Carla, who is basically a 13-year-old girl has no fucking clue. Julie, a poli-sci major, also doesn’t know. 

Allow me to take a personal aside here. Sometimes horror movies stick with you, long after the credits have rolled. After seeing The Ring, I turned my TV to face the wall for a few nights. I’m still off put by the haunted bereavement of the Palmers from Lake Mungo. Thinking about the claustrophobic shots of The Descent give me tachycardia. When I was a young, naive, not-so-cynical child of 11, my father took me to see I Still Know in theaters (like I’ve said previously, these films are Puritanical compared to what I’d been watching to that point anyway). Off the top of my head I couldn’t name the capital of Brazil. But I knew it wasn’t Rio de Janeiro. It’s a fair guess, I suppose, as the most populous city in Brazil and likely the first one to come to mind. If you asked a Brazilian the capital of California they’d probably guess LA or San Fran (or maybe they wouldn’t, American public school systems am I right, folks?). But here’s where the film just assumes you’re as dumb as it is. With no Google to turn to, Julie pulls out a bag of coffee, which somehow makes them think of Rio (wuha?), to which the DJ exclaims they’ve won a trip to The Bahamas (WAT?!). Brazilia is the capital of Brazil. I know that now and will never forget it because even at 11 I knew something really fucking stupid happened. Sure, this is obviously the writer’s “clever” way of letting a few people in the audience know something isn’t right. But what the fuck? Why do you feel the need to make your characters idiots and, by proxy, call your audience mouth-breathers just for watching your shitty flick? On top of that, Julie makes the decision to bring along Will, Ben’s Son, which is the fulcrum of the killers’ entire plan. What if she brought along Ray as an attempt to repair their relationship? Oh wait, she DOES try this but Ray is a cranky baby man. This isn’t even a nitpicky thing, it’s a major plot point of a major motion picture and the screenwriter is sitting at his desk saying, “Ah fuck it, everyone is a moron.” Eat an arm-length, hook-shaped dick, movie. 

Oh, and then we get a JLH song on the soundtrack playing over Ray being mopey cause farrrrrrrrrrrt. But actually he’s planning on proposing to her but for plot reasons turned down the vacation to the Bahamas but then changes his mind and instead of calling to say, “Sorry for being a Barry,” he and his friend (John Hawkes) decide to drive the 12+ hour trip up to surprise her as if she doesn’t have to make this decision right now and AAAAAAAAAAAAA. Strap in, IT GETS DUMBER.

On the drive up Ray and Meatpal come across a body in the road but it’s not a body it’s a mannequin dressed like Ben Willis and the real Ben Willis murders his friend and chases Ray down with a car leaving him for dead. It’s a good thing Ray left his Mapquest print out back at the docks so Fishsticks McGee would know exactly which route he was taking and when he’d get there. He probably used all that road construction equipment he had to set up a detour from the first movie to divert all the traffic to the 95, too. I hate this movie.

The cast arrives only to discover that hurricane season starts today and all that’s left is the off-season skeleton crew. You can probably hear me sighing and rubbing my temples through your computer screen at this point. This island in the Bahamas which is an obvious tourist destination, closes shop on Fourth of July weekend because, like clockwork, a hurricane will most definitely hit there at the same time every year and not let up for weeks or even months. Maybe this Caribbean island is in the Southern Hemisphere where summer is winter, toilets flush counter-clockwise, up is down and Rio is the capital of Brazil. Why not gift them a trip to a private island resort for rich fucks where each set of suites is separated by miles of dense jung-NO. STOP IT BRAIN. STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS MOVIE MORE THAN ANYONE WHO HAD CREATIVE INVOLVEMENT.

The next 50 minutes are Ray’s zany adventures, jump scares, stupid red herrings and padding the body count. The running up of the murder score is even more egregious this time around because Fisherman Stevens murders the entire staff of the island when his target is only Julie. Side note: when he has the chance to kill Julie, sleeping in a tanning bed, he opts to instead lock her in and then teleport away. Even Benny doesn’t want to rob the audience of breasts. Thanks, Ben! Then, Julie repeats the “What are you waiting for, I’m right here!” monologue nearly verbatim because the original has gone down in the annals of cinema history and is worth doubling down on.

The final chases are neither suspenseful or scary and go on forever and a day. We’re spared more Julie James PI work with an info dump about how Ben Willis used to work on the island and murdered his wife and daughter, but I guess didn’t bother knocking off his son and then moved them to North Carolina where he had time to murder more people before being run down? If you can’t figure it out, don’t worry — neither could the writer. 

Ray appears in the nick of time. Ben, Will’s Son does the usual “I’m the killer, time to flip the crazy switch and overact no TV and no beer make Ben, Will’s Son something something, by the way have you figured out my name yet?” Will, Ben’s Son gets stabbed by his father when Ray, a student of WWF tag team matches of the mid-80s moves out of the way of a fatal clothesline in the nick of time. Will, father of Ben, Will’s Son gets shot eight times by a gun that holds six in the chamber. The movie ends on what could only be yet another dream sequence. 

And thus ends the Julie James saga. The sun comes out, ending the hurricane season, I guess and shitty Carla, boring Ray and dumb Julie made it through. I started writing this when the credits rolled and then, I shit you not, after the credits is a JLH music video.

The I Know duology is miserable. At its best it’s a barely serviceable slasher for babies with some decent acting (limited entirely to the first). At it’s worst it’s insulting and contemptuous towards the viewer. At it’s middling it’s JLH’s cleavage and, hey, that’s something for 11 year old me.

Fuck You, Movie

-If I decided to list every piece of idiot bullshit in this movie the review would have just been a video of a monkey drinking his own piss. It’s everything. All the time. 

-During JLH’s karaoke (and/or subtle plug for her failed singing career), the words “I STILL KNOW” come up on the karaoke screen. Only Julie sees it somehow so either they were playing up Julie being maybe crazy (a plot point which, as mentioned, doesn’t actually exist textually) or Ben Willis is a technomancer.

-Tyrell: “See any killers out there Julie? How about Freddy or Jason?” I wish.

-Oh hey, there’s two killers that’s original.

Voorhees Scale of Inhuman Feats Performed By a Human Killer: 7/10

-Precognition: Knowing the exact route Ray will take on his 12+ hour trip North, setting up a fake radio station prize and elaborate vacation to Kokomo knowing that Will will be invited along as a third wheel.

-Teleportation: Dragging bodies in and out of places and cleaning up the mess in minutes, Bamfing all around Hotel Willis, suddenly appearing behind Tyrell while three other characters are looking at him.

-Invulnerability: Surviving the events of the previous film, if the closing stinger isn’t a dream then add surviving 8 rounds to the chest.

-Possible Technomancy

Post-Modern Murders 03: Urban Legend (1998)

I know that the UK banned a lot of horror movies in the 70s and 80s so there are probably a lot of Brits with really low standards in regards to the genre. That said, I hope whoever wrote that box line was not only fired from The Sun but fired into the sun.

Horror movies need to give you a character the audience can relate to or latch on to in some way. For even the most base slasher movie or torture porn flick to work the viewer must care about someone. Anyone. We want Jamie Lee Curtis to survive Halloween¹ because Laurie Strode seems relatable and likable. "Girl Next Door" is often a cliche used to evoke the just as cliched "Final Girl" because we recognize that person as our friend, lover, sister or even babysitter. Hell, with a clever pen the villain of the film can serve as the audience surrogate, dispatching bands of intolerable shits in creative ways. Without connection there is no pathos, and what we're left with are simply gore effects used on expendable meat.

1. Or Terror Train. Or Prom Night.

Sometimes, as in the case of Urban Legend, we're not even lucky enough to get some neat gore effects for our eyes to glaze over to. I mentioned previously that the worst sins a film can commit are being forgettable or being boring. I Know What You Did Last Summer was boring, but I remember how boring it was and why it was boring. A week removed from screening Urban Legend and I don't remember a whole hell of a lot without looking at my notes.

But this film was never meant to be sold on characters.² No, everything meant to sell tickets to teens is in the title. The phrase "urban legend" is enough to evoke some unsettling imagery, embedded in your brains at youth around campfires and at sleepovers. The hooked killer/escaped mental patient/both on Lovers' Lane, alligators in the NYC sewers, missing kidneys and there being two Ultimate Warriors.³

2. Maybe on actors though, I don't know how many of the now recognizable cast were famous at the time.
3. There was, in fact, only one Ultimate Warrior. Many people probably confuse Warrior with "Texas Tornado" Kerry von Erich or WCW's Warrior rip-off, Renegade, both of whom passed during their respective careers.

The phrase was all the promotion the film needed, and the screenwriters must have assumed that the pre-conceived notions of the audience would conjure a plot where one didn't exist. Urban Legend isn't merely half-baked, it's a plate of leftovers that was set for ten seconds in the microwave instead of ten minutes. It is the standout example of everything that went wrong with post-Scream slashers chemically composed into a 100-minute pill which is not meant to be taken orally.

Someone is killing the pretty people at [Prestigious Northeastern Liberal Arts College] using the various means and methods described in urban legends. This film's pre-credits death comes via the one about the axe-wielding psycho in the backseat. Our killer, protected from the elements by an oversized winter parka pops up in silhouette. An axe swings, the camera quick cuts and first blood is drawn (offscreen). We’re introduced to our cast of assholes who set up the plot of the film. There's not a single likable character in the bunch. The dickheads (two in this movie, Joshua Jackson and Michael Rosenbaum) are neither so vile you want them to die nor are they laughably evil; the "slutty blonde" (Tara Reid) is only in about three scenes⁴; the best friend (Rebecca Gayheart) is equal parts vapid and unbearably bubbly; Jared Leto is there so that 15 years later you can say, "Wait, Jared Leto is in this?" Final Girl (Alicia Witt⁵) drifts from scene to scene with no characterization while plot happens in her general direction. I think, at times, she reacts to some of these things, but it's difficult to tell.

4. She plays a campus radio host who gives really bad sex advice. Her only other scene is in a library which is kind of hilarious if you think about it.

5. I spent the entire movie thinking Alicia Witt was actually Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose. However, I doubt that would have changed much in regards to quality.

There’s an old urban legend about a vicious murder that took place in the abandoned dorm hall on campus and every year there's a party to commemorate this thing that maybe happened. All of the main players are in a folklore class taught by creepy professor Robert Englund. Yep, Freddy himself shows up as an obvious red herring. More urban legends are thrown about that definitely won’t be used as poorly shot horror set pieces over the next 80 minutes. The murders are timed out fairly regularly and peppered with characters walking backwards into somebody else paired with a musical stinger. Alicia Witt and Jared Leto stomp around and try to get to the root of the mystery, as if I didn't have enough shit-ass detective work last time around. Turns out people were actually murdered at the college in the mid-70s leaving only one survivor — Robert Englund’s professor. Which, while not being a “Fuck You, Movie” moment, dips dangerously close when you think about it for more than a second. The murders of 25 people is national news, especially in an era before school shootings were an every few month thing. It would be like trying to cover up Kent State.

The worst of the movie comes from the acting, especially Witt, completely unable to bring basic emotions to the table. Her response to people she knows being murdered appears to be scrunching up her face and squinting her eyes, reading less "Oh no, my friends are being murdered," and more, "Hey I'm hungry, I could maybe go for a sandwich. Maybe the dining hall is open late tonight." Leto can obviously act and Fringe showed Joshua Jackson can be quite good as well - here both appear to be on lithium. However, the prize goes to Rebecca Gayheart⁶. When she’s revealed to be the killer, she chews scenery at high speed, eyes bulging like a Roger Rabbit villain and adopting a southern accent that is neither explained nor present at any other point in the film. 

6. Prior to Urban Legend and a cameo in Scream 2, Gayheart had only appeared in Noxema commercials, for which she had apparently gained a modicum of fame. It shows. The blind, giggly optimism one has to emote for cosmetics commercials aimed at teens comes through but feels horrendously out of place. I'm aware they were probably going for this contrast to create some sort of surprise for when she's revealed as the killer but then she has to act crazy and well... The writers must have, at some point, realized that Gayheart would be unable to convince anyone of her brand of crazy or her motives, because during her reveal monologue she has a slideshow explaining it in more detail. You'd think at some point during maybe the third draft (hahaha, like this movie had drafts) it would be apparent that if you need a Powerpoint to summarize what has been going on and why then maybe something has gone very, very wrong with your plot.

As previously mentioned, the script doesn’t do anyone any favors. Just before the reveal of the killer, Leto, Gayheart and Witt escape in a car for help. While Leto goes inside a gas station to use a phone the two girls, previously vying for Leto’s attention, talk about who he’d be better with and then hug it out. This comes about a minute after Witt watched Tara Reid chopped into ground beef with an axe. When the characters don’t seem to find a serial murder too much of a threat, why should the audience? 

Most urban legends are ridiculous and far fetched to begin with, to the point where you wonder how anyone could possibly believe they ever happened in the first place. In fact, entire websites exist to investigate the facts, or lack thereof, behind the myths. Still, there’s someone, somewhere that believes that a woman used a lobster tail as a dildo and then died because the eggs in the tail hatched inside her body. I swear to you this is an actual urban legend. That sentence is the dumbest thing I have ever typed and I regularly write about movies where a zombie in a hockey mask who was once a handicapped child crushes someone’s head with his bare hands.

The utter idiocy behind that legend still doesn’t compare with how unbelievable it is that Rebecca Gayheart, all five feet of her, with a musculature that suggest she could be out-grappled by Peter Dinklage, has managed to overpower and murder several people⁷. The most ludicrous and insulting moment comes during Joshua Jackson's death. In a variant of the hook-handed serial killer at Lover’s Lane, Jackson is assaulted by the killer and hung from a tree branch. The car that Natalie is waiting in is the only thing separating him from a full hanging. We’re expected to swallow that the killer attacked Joshua Jackson, strung him from a tree and positioned him on top of a car both in total silence and within the span of about two minutes. Later, she’ll go full Voorhees and survive two bullets, a fall out a third story window onto pavement, going headfirst through a windshield and falling off of a bridge.

7. Don't get all Tatum on me. I think there's a place for lady killers. I'd have the same problem with Michael Cera being a killer in a movie where he shows Schwarzenegger-ian strength. 

Urban Legend is a bad Scream knock-off which makes it a really terrible slasher movie which makes it a fucking garbage horror film. It’s devoid of scares, poorly acted and scripted only in the loosest of terms.  It routinely thinks its smarter than it is and squanders what potential it has (and there is a good script in this idea, somewhere). In conclusion, Urban Legend is a collaborative work in the visual medium or “film,” starring “actors” who perform action and dialogue “script” written by a “screenwriter” and staged by a “director.” It exists in our reality on planet earth which is a cruel and uncaring meat grinder floating through one of infinite galaxies.

Voorhees Scale of Inhuman Feats Performed by a Human Killer: 9/10
-Repeat instances of invulnerability
-Inhuman strength
-Possible instances of teleportation
-Precognition: Knowing how characters will act and when

"Fuck you, Movie."

-Joshua Jackson starts his car and the theme from Dawson’s Creek plays, which he quickly turns off in disgust. 

-During the opening murder, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” plays on the radio as the killer pops up in the backseat. The lyric, “turn around, bright eyes” is emphasized. 

-“Oh and she was probably the girl from the Noxema commercials,” says a girl in reference to the Urban Legend the events of the story become. Fuuuuuck youuuu.

-Gayheart and Witt go to the dorm hall where the mythical murders from 25 years ago took place and begin to say “Bloody Mary” in front of it. Anyone over the age of 11 knows that’s not even how that works.

-No fewer than four people own the exact same LL Bean parka worn by the killer. The swim coach even wears it to walk around the indoor pool. 

-Michael Rosenbaum receives a taunting phone call from the killer before being murdered. Nope, totally not a Scream cash grab. Nope, nope, nope.

Post-Modern Murders 02: I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

It’s kind of insane how many hoops horror movies will jump through to absolve certain characters of guilt. See, teen slasher horror is all about punishing sins — sex, drinking, drugs, rock n roll, etc. In other cases the sin is more specific and far less puritan — revenge for a vigilante murder (A Nightmare On Elm Street), revenge for unspeakable acts committed on a loved one (Last House on the Left). But in the end, there’s usually a motive¹ , and, in the latter set of cases, it can be seen as deserved. But how can a movie have its cake and eat it too? Have characters do a heinous thing and then allow for the virtuous, innocent final girl?

 1. Lack thereof is what made the first Halloween so unsettling. 

It can’t. And that’s just one aspect of why I Know What You Did Last Summer fails. Whereas in Urban Legend all of the characters are assholes because they’re 19 and in college and that’s peak asshole, in IKWYDLS the characters are assholes because THEY STRAIGHT UP MURDER A GUY AND COVER IT UP. If Gorton’s Fisherman gone wrong, Ben Willis, wasn’t such a shitty killer whose motives drift in and out for the sake of a body count ² you might be tempted to side with him. Instead you hope a meteor will hit the tiny North Carolina fishing town where IKWYDLS takes place.

2. He kills two people who had nothing to do with his near-death experience for no reason. If you're gonna make shitty rules then you have to play by them.

 It’s fourth of July and four assholes run over a fisherman. Our cast of dreamy teens is as follows:

Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt): Has more objections to covering up manslaughter than anyone else. Is relatively nicer than anyone else in her crew. Cares more about her relationship than just the sex. Brings a teddy bear to college. Obvious final girl.

Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar): Freshly returned from NYC high school beauty queen turned washed up actress. Way to give up on your dreams in nine months. Is supposed to fill the archetypical horror “vapid blonde sexhaver” role but the sex is only vaguely alluded to because the movie is R in the loosest of senses and marketed to 14-year-olds. So they just drive home the fact she’s sorta shallow and call it a night. Fuck writing relatable characters, get paper.

Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.): Julie’s high school sweetheart. Behind the wheel when they nearly murder a man. A total blank slate of a character. 

Barry (Ryan Phillippe): Does a stellar job being hatable. Drunk asshole, possibly abusive, whose antics cause Ray to take his eyes off the road long enough to slam a one ton piece of machinery at 70 miles per hour into a human being. Frosted tips and sweaters.

We get our first “the killer is totally a real human but maybe also Michael Myers” moment when we see the accident that would not only turn this man to paste but also seriously injure Barry who is monkey screaming out the sunroof. But I guess a slasher wouldn’t be as fun if the killer was in a wheelchair³. Victim-slash-killer Ben Willis is just fueled by hate which lets him walk away mostly unscathed. He was also dicking around on a bend of a highway wearing black. Not to victim blame but c’mon son.

3. Wait, yes it would. Somebody write this.

 The four argue about what to do with the body. Barry is drunk and it was his car so he doesn’t want to go to the police assuming they’ll assume he was driving. Ray doesn’t want to go to the police because he’s not as rich as the others and thinks they’ll pin it on him (?). Julie wants to call the cops. Helen stands around in her tiara and looks as pretty as 1996 will allow but agrees with Julie. Eventually the ladies relent because step aside the men are talking. After several obvious signs that the dead man is not dead⁴, the group walk away assuming a job well done and that the current will take the not-corpse out to sea.

4. First he grabs at them on the dock. Then when Barry goes into the water to *sigh* retrieve Helen's tiara, dude straight up opens his eyes.

Cut to one year later. And nothing’s really changed except apparently these four close friends bound by a blood pact have not spoken since that night. Everyone is still terrible but now Julie is receiving eponymous threats in neat block lettering. We’re blessed with more arguing between the group of almost murderers. In fact, until the last 15 minutes of the movie we watch these clowns pace in circles, injecting a moment of suspense or danger here or there. First, Barry is hit by a car. Then, the killer breaks into Helen’s room while she sleeps but doesn’t attempt to kill her until later because he’s seen the script and this ain’t the climax. In fact, everyone except Ray gets a brief moment of peril with Captain Jack.

Maybe the fisherman knows that Ray is a blue collar dock worker just like him and feels for him, understanding that he’s just as much of a victim under the thumb of the privileged who run this town from behind a desk, making life altering decisions while he slaves hahahahaha, naw, the movie just wants us to think that maybe Ray did it because why not.

Julie thinks that the person they killed who was obviously not dead was some other local kid whose actually dead corpse washed up a few days later. Julie’s detective-ing leads her to Anne Heche and in a series of convoluted who gives a shits, it turns out that Ben Willis was out on Dead Man’s Curve that night because he too had committed murder (this of the pre-meditated kind) and was dumping a body. The detective side plot which actually leads nowhere is the entire second act of the movie and is unbelievably boring. More infuriating is that we know the killer isn't dead because we aren't mouth breathing morons. So we're just dragged along while Julie goes on a wild goose chase that pads out the entire middle third of the movie.

This takes up about 40 minutes of run time until Captain Hook stops fucking around and starts serving up filet o’ teen. Barry’s bumped off in a small crowded public place but the not supernatural killer can remove his body in seconds with nary a stray drop of blood. Helen dies after a lengthy chase that ends, and I shit you not, when she is fifteen feet from a crowded street and stops running because, I don’t know, it’s like there’s a few missing frames. She literally just stops and accepts her fate.

Perhaps this is Williamson making a Poe-ian comment on guilt. The hooked man is the proverbial tell-tale heart and Helen can no longer live with the idea that she (maybe) killed someone and offers herself up for hahahahah, naw, fuck this movie.

The Final Girl chase is limited to the killer's boat where she finds the bodies of her friends and Ray gets tossed around but not killed. Old Ben gets cut down in a hilariously slapstick way, falling into the ocean and losing his dominant hand. We’re treated to a denouement that’s probably a dream and, mercifully, credits.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is barely a teen slasher and for most of its run-time doesn’t want to be. Slashers don’t have the leads stumbling ass backwards through clues to their killers’ identity. It seems like there was a deadline that had to be met, especially following the success of Scream, and Williamson ran out of ideas, knocking off half the cast in the last ten minutes. The theory becomes more plausible when you learn that Max (Johnny Galicki) wasn't even supposed to die and his death scene was added in re-shoots. The final product is wildly uneven due to cut and paste pacing. I guess it’s well enough acted. After all, nearly everyone in the cast went on to do other things and most continue to, but the fact that they do little but yell at each other and scream doesn’t leave much breathing room.

The worst sins a movie can commit are being completely forgettable and being boring. This is both. The only explanation for anyone remembering it with any kind of fondness has to be nostalgia and being young enough to not know any better. The modus operandi of these movies was to shove as many recognizable TV faces onto celluloid and hope to sell tickets. IKWYDLS serves as the most prominent example of why so many of the Scream derivatives would fail. Throw as much shit at the wall as you want, pad it with stars and pepper in some winks at the audience; but in the end it's still shit.

 Voorhees Scale of Inhuman Feats Performed By a Human Killer: 6/10 
-Invulnerability: Surviving a brutal car crash.
-Teleportation: Several instances including carrying off Barry’s body in a public place over the course of mere seconds, hiding a body covered with crabs in a trunk and removing it squeaky clean, bouncing around like fucking Nightcrawler during Helen’s chase scene.
-Precognition: Knowing the exact route Helen will take home when accompanied by a police officer to set up a detour.

Lines that made me say "Fuck You Movie" out loud to my computer screen:
-"Let's go down do Dawson's Beach."


Next time: "Did you hear the one about the blogger who gouged his eyes out during a 90s slasher? No, really, it totally happened to this kid who lived in my town."

Post-Modern Murders 01: Scream (1996)

It's the one we all remember. Fondly, probably. So let's get this out of the way right off the bat. Is Scream actually that good? Ignore the half-decade long downward spiral it flung the genre into, a tail-spin whose ramifications can still be felt. Ignore the nostalgia, if you can. Ignore the fact this is the film that turned American cultural icon Courtney Cox into Courtney Cox-Arquette (for a while). Should Scream be spoken of in the same breath as genre staples?

Yeah, probably. It's really good but not anywhere near as smart as it thinks it is. Even at the time it shouldn't have been given carte blanche to be as smug and clever as it wanted to be, but the audience was so desperate for a change from the same group of kids being stalked and stabbed by a masked murderer.

Wait, whoa, hold up a second here. Isn't that exactly what Scream is, though? It was. In the intro to this series I outlined what was happening in horror in 1996 and, to recap, all of the tried and true names and faces (Halloween, Krueger, Voorhees, Candyman, Texas Chainsaw) were no longer reliable. In fact, the 80s body count slasher was as good as dead. Think about it - if you were 17 when Friday the 13th opened, you were 33 for the arrival of Scream. Nearly half your life would have been spent under the banner of the slasher. The kids who were making out at the drive-in to The Burning were now hand-wringing over their children watching Beavis and Butthead or learning what a blow job was from the news. The genre needed something that loudly declared, "I'm not your parents' horror movie!"

And Scream did. Loudly. With all the smug pomp of Ferris Bueller twisting and shouting his way through the Chicago streets. Except Scream was far more Abe Froman than Ferris, dressed up to the nines to fool anyone willing to take a shot into believing it was something it obviously wasn't. And everyone fell for it. But let's talk shop first.

How about that opening? We all know it by now, right? Drew Barrymore with wretched 90s hair, the voice on the phone, "What's your favorite scary movie," "Want to play a game?" Now it's as much of a cliche as anything this movie points to. But then? Then, killing off Drew Barrymore in the first thirteen minutes of the film was drawing comparisons to Psycho's infamous shower scene dispatch of Janet Leigh. Think about that for a second. This new kid on the block was drawing comparisons to one of the greatest horror films of all time solely on the idea that they killed off someone relatively famous. (Keep in mind that Barrymore, at this point, was at a pretty big crossroads in her career and not at the level of star power we know her for today. She was a former child actress who drugged her way into irrelevance. She was close to going full Lohan maybe a year earlier.) Did or does Scream stand, in basically any way, alongside of Psycho? Fuck no. But that's the crux of the argument - horror was in such dire straits that anything that didn't smell like mothballs would be hailed as a triumph. It was horror's HOPE poster - Ghostface all looking off in the distance in primary colors. Gut you like a fish? Yes we can.

At the same time, the opening is fantastic. At first Barrymore seems to stroll through a generously-sized California property, bantering back and forth on the phone with an unknown caller. But as the call takes its turn, the house seems to get smaller and smaller. Ghostface encourages both Barrymore and the audience to guess at the questions of his grisly game: Who was the killer in Halloween? In Friday the 13th?¹  Am I at the front door or the back? Now, you and I know damn well that the game was rigged - each door had a killer at it - but Craven creates a mood so tension-filled and suffocating that there might as well have been 50 Ghostfaces around the Becker house. The once sprawling home has been shrunken down to a corner of the living room behind the television. And even when Barrymore does make it outside, Craven manipulates expectations wonderfully, not only tearing away the hope that seemed only a few feet away, but carving it up and putting its corpse on display.

1. Let's be real, we all would have blurted out Jason.

Scream makes a statement in its first 13 minutes and it's a bold one. Unfortunately, it's also a high point that neither the Scream films, or the sub genre as a whole will ever come close to reaching again.

And then we meet our cast of, what would usually be cliches. Sidney, the obvious final girl (Neve Campbell);  bad boy boyfriend Billy (possible failed Johnny Depp cloning experiment Skeet Ulrich); Randy the movie nerd (Jamie Kennedy); Stu, the obnoxious jokester, (Matthew Lillard), bumbling cop Dewey, (David Arquette); breasts (Rose McGowan). Except almost all of these characters, save maybe Lillard's Stu (for obvious reasons), feel very real and are crafted with far more care than your usual selection of dead meat. This is where I want to talk about the best written character in Scream: Tatum. Tatum does not, in any way, fulfill the "slut" archetype that 80s slashers got their rocks off on. She isn't shown having sex and we don't see her tits. ² In fact, the entire idea that she could (or should?) fit into this archetype is based on

a) Body: she's blonde and has a rack
b) Clothing: she's wearing a skirt and a tight top that shows off aforementioned selling points
c) Archetype: well, someone's gotta fill it, right?

2. The fact that 90s slashers are relatively puritan will come up occasionally and I want to clarify that I don't believe some boobage is required for a horror movie. References to this are in direct comparison to 80s slashers where studios mandated either a corpse or a nip ever couple of minutes.

As Tatum says when Stu implies the killer has to be male, "That's so sexist." Her sexuality is limited to the above and a passing mention of being able to see Tom Cruise's dick in a movie. She's smart, clever (and not in the way this script is), funny and genuinely cares for her best friend. The assumptions we assign to each of the characters as the sit around the fountain and bullshit come from the way our minds have been molded by the let decade of horror, whether we're conscious of it or not. This is where Scream works the best, in the subtle moments of genre rebellion that exist between bouts of douchebaggery.³

3. Similar genrefuck Cabin in the Woods takes the opposite approach of turning actual humans into cliches for its own purposes, but Scream turns the cliches into people before our eyes. 

But what about Kevin Williamson's holy relic of a script? For starters, the kids' discussion outside of school following the opening murders feels like things that despondent 90s teens could actually say. Shit on Kevin Williamson for Dawson's Creek, but the guy does have an ear for dialogue.⁴ The in-jokes and ribs feel positively restrained here compared to the rest of the Scream series. Unfortunately there was no one to keep Williamson just a tad more restrained, and by the sequel he has been hailed as the second coming of screenwriter Christ, coursing his dialogue into an ego-driven meta circle jerk. Wes Craven could have, perhaps, wrangled Williamson in a bit if he hadn't decided to go dive headfirst into post-modernism hand and hand with Williamson, already dipping his toe in the pool with New Nightmare just two years earlier. And, wow, some of the dialogue is just obnoxious.

"But this is life, this isn't a movie." (Fuck you, Kevin.)
"Well the first Nightmare on Elm Street was good but all the rest sucked." (Fuck you, Wes.)
"You're starting to sound like a Wes Carpenter flick." (Fuck BOTH of you.)

4. Except for Teaching Mrs. Tingle. Apparently the studio fucked with it massively after Columbine but outside of any sort of violence, the characters are the most insufferable shits in teen film history.

Courtney Cox and Henry Winkler⁵ end up grounding the film, and without them the movie would disappear a bit too much up its own ass (in later entries this will mainly fall on the backs of the Scream Trinity of Campbell, Arquette and Cox). Winkler, in an uncredited role is a blast and Cox, clearly trying her damnedest to shed the Monica image, steals almost every scene she's in as the time-warped hell baby of Nancy Grace and TMZ. 

5. Winkler's death was actually added in re-shoots because the studio felt there wasn't enough blood between Casey's death and the party. Even the savior of horror films wasn't safe from an 80s-minded studio mandate.

The film isn't very well known for its middle act. Nothing of consequence really happens outside some scant plot/character development (Sidney has a mysterious past!⁶ and setting up the red herrings for the whodunnit. And the film IS, at its core, a whodunnit and it never tries to hide it. The whodunnit nature of Scream would be something that the wave of 90s slashers would latch onto. The use of a very human killer is secretly Scream's greatest rejection of past genre tropes. I say secretly because for all of the hooting and hollering Scream does about not being other movies, it never really acknowledges this concept until Scream 3. Meanwhile, the final act party sequence is where the movie makes its boldest proclamations of self-awareness. The film is fairly famous for setting up the rules of surviving a horror movie and then going out of their way to shatter them. In front of a paused video rental of Halloween, Randy memorably proclaims:

1) You can't have sex (Sidney does and lives)
2) You can't drink or do drugs (Randy is drinking a beer as he says this)
3) Never say I'll be right back (Matthew Lillard doesn't even take ten seconds to throw this one back in Randy's, and since he is the audience proxy, our, faces)

6. The Maureen Prescott issue will be addressed in Scream 3's review. I think it's one of, if not the most troubling aspect of the entire franchise.

But this isn't the tip of the smug, all-too-clever iceberg that is the Scream franchise. And while it will get far worse in the future, the symptoms of what makes the entire endeavor fairly intolerable can be seen here. A janitor named Freddy who wears familiar clothing (and played by Wes Craven because why the fuck not?). Randy announces the killer getting in one last scare a second before it happens. Tatum's death scene is the absolute nadir of the film between her sarcastic taunting of Ghostface ("Can I play the helpless victim…Oh no please Mr. Ghostface, I wanna be in the sequel!"), the overuse of dutch angles and the pants on head stupid death.⁷ Campbell accuses horror movies of  being "All the same - some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can't act who's always running up the stairs when she should be going out the front door. It's insulting" It is. And it still is even if you point it out thirty seconds before you have that character do it. This is where the inherent problems with Scream lie. Being self-aware of what is bad or cliched, and then announcing and drawing attention to the fact you are aware that these things are indeed bad, and then actually doing them does NOT, in fact, absolve your use of them as bad. In fact, it might actually make it worse because your'e also being a dick about it. The meta references come at such a rapid fire pace that it's utterly exhausting at times (and with a weaker screenwriter, as we will see, goddamned intolerable). Calling slasher movies stupid and then being a slasher movie does not make you any more clever. The Scream franchise is so bathed in irony and self-loathing that, in a way, it's the most hipster horror film ever made. Where a movie like Friday the 13th: Part 7 is bad, it owns it. There's no tongue in cheek gags or winks at the camera and that makes the endless sequels more repayable and enduring than any of Scream's.

7. Humorously, according to an interview, McGowen found that she actually could fit through the dog door.

It's a testament to the framework of Williamson's script, Craven's direction and, especially, the performances that the first Scream holds up so well. Billy and Stu's revelation is simultaneously unhinged and restrained (something that every 90s slasher monologue will go way too over the top on) and then outright hilarious as Lillard slips further into delirium. The final chase actually comes in advance of the revelation and is pretty great in how far its sprawls while still feeling suffocating and personal, pulling us between tight bedrooms and even tighter cars while still flirting with the outdoors, similar to the opening. And the self-awareness can occasionally hit the mark. Gale and Sidney watching the time-delay footage of the living room and shouting at Randy to turn around as Randy yells at Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween to turn around is a great moment of auto-cannibalization.⁸

8. Randy's dialogue of "Jamie, turn around!" is a great little stroke of coincidence considering it's coming from Jamie Kennedy.

Given a different cast or a less competent director (or Wes Craven in full lazy mode as he often is), Scream could have fallen flat on its ghost face. Instead we're left with an enduring time capsule of the 90s slasher in its infancy. The affront of post-modernism is more palatable here because it feels restrained, as if they weren't quite sure how much irony they could get away with. Scream rides a fine line of being genuinely great at what it does and being such a miserable, arrogant shit about it that it's barely tolerable. It's the Tom Brady of horror. In that case, next episode's film, I Know What You Did Last Summer would be the Mark Sanchez.

Post-Modern Murders 00: Intro

Look, I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but there are rules you must abide by if you want to survive a 90s slasher movie. 

Number one: You have to be a brunette on a successful television show. Alternatively, you can be the star of teen rom-coms. If you're not smooching on Rachael Leigh Cook or one-fifth a party of five your odds are slim.

Number two: You have to be aware that you're actually in a horror movie. And you have to be all clever and smug about it. Say things like, "What would Jamie Lee Curtis do?" or "Freddy Krueger? I don't even Freddy know her!" For bonus points you can drop a, "Well at least we're not in a stupid horror movie!" 

Number three: Don't turn your back on the killer. Even though the killer is 100% human and probably your best friend, donning a stupid mask will turn them into unhinged monologue-ing loons with flimsy motives that involve your past and who have super strength and possibly the ability to teleport. On the other hand, the killer's weakness is definitely bullets.

Number four: If you're the movie nerd who knows too much about horror movies, you will not survive the sequel.

Oh, fuck. I hope I'm not in a sequel. Am I in a sequel? Cause there's a whole new set of rules for that.

                                                

HERE LIES THE MODERN SLASHER

IT WAS KINDA OKAY, I GUESS

1978 - 1995

The year is 1995 and after over 15 years of the slasher film and its franchises forging a distinct era of horror, the genre is circling the drain. Sequels are saturating the market, running once beloved horror icons into the ground. Not only had the shark been jumped but it had been shot, stabbed, burned, sent to Hell and gone to space. The years 1994 and 1995 saw sequels to Leprechaun, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Phantasm, Candyman and dozens more lesser known derivatives. For the entirety of the 80s, the teen body count flick could be produced cheaply, quickly and be almost guaranteed to turn some profit. Now, all of these were floundering at the box office or going direct to video (remember those?)

Everything changed when legendary horror director Wes Craven teamed up with writer Kevin Williamson on a movie that would lovingly be described as clever, post-modern, meta and self-aware. Within five years those would be dirty words. 

The Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. Destroyed and devoured were the cliches we’d all come to know. Over the top gore effects, sex and breasts, seemingly supernatural killers — all buried alongside the graves of Freddy and Jason who had, at that point, been canonically killed off “for good.” By the Willenium, horror would become sanitized and sexless. That’s not to say the 80s should be hailed as the golden age of horror. There’s some seriously wretched shit mixed in with the classics. But what was to come was only horror in its loosest description — people die, girls scream, etc. It was the right time and the right reaction, not just breaking the fourth wall but attacking it with all the snarky force it could muster. The reaction in the next decade would be violent. Japanese horror would intensify the scares, torture porn would bring levels of gore not seen since the exploitation films and Italian Giallo of the seventies. 

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen these movies. My grandfather started showing me horror at age four, thinking it funny to scare the absolute shit out of me with IT, Children of the Corn and The Exorcist. For a 13 year old, these movies felt like they were made just for me. And, of course, they were. Clean horror, R-rated in name only, filled with recognizable faces and an air of lightness never seen before. Plus, a gutted but clothed woman isn’t nearly as offensive to The American Mother as a single bare breast. Finally, horror that was kid tested and mother, well, not approved, but I was certainly able to rent Scream for an eighth grade sleepover with few objections.

But what it is or what it may be lacking in opposition to its previous generation’s ilk is not reason enough for an entire batch of movies to be immediately discredited. Tits and gore do not make a horror movie. The best horror comes from an exploration of the psyche, not from aesthetics. I’m excited to revisit the scary movies of my youth. Most new movements are a direct rejection of a previous status quo. For the love of horror alone, that’s worth exploring, warts and all. 

So let’s take a ride back to the days of TRL, Clinton jokes and frosted tips. Let’s grab some Jiffy Pop and a few tapes from the local Blockbuster. Your pick. What’s your favorite scary movie?

I'll be taking a loose style with these because after the third movie that's basically the same thing but palette swapped, it gets a little hard to write serious reviews. Plus how can you expect me to take Urban Legend: Final Cut seriously. Like, at all.