SCREAM
Needs more Drew. But doesn't everything?
Man, oh man. Catching everybody by surprise, raking in a huge amount of cash, giving rise to a slew of imitators and inspiring more love and hate than any single horror film of the 1990's, to write about Scream in 1999 seems futile. What can I say that hasn't been stated, spat, bubbled, and argued to the point of fistfights? Probably not much. 'course, that won't stop me from saying it anyway, half-wit repetitive twit that I am.
Scream aims for the same skilled dual-personality of Return Of The Living Dead - to be a spoof of its own genre, and yet be a superb example of the form. It's a little more ham-handed in trying to send up the genre, but it's got plenty of laughs - how can you not laugh when one guy backs out of a room, fiendishly declaring "I'll be right back!" right after being informed of the "I'll be right back" rule? Likewise, the scares don't come across quite as well, mostly because we've seen them so often before, though rarely this well.
The movie opens with top-billed Drew Barrymore (my future bride, by the way), answering a phone call when she's home alone one night. The guy on the other end claims to have a wrong number, but persists in conversation anyway, pressing on about scary movies. Soon he tells her that he's watching her, has her boyfriend tied up outside, and before long, it becomes clear just how little Drew there is in this movie. (this scene is a real nailbiter, and is the single most imitated aspect in the post-Scream teen horror craze. It misses a couple of opportunities though - did director Wes Craven really mean for Casey to say that ALL the Nightmare On Elm Street sequels sucked, even that last one? And it's probably a safe bet that she hadn't seen Friday The 13th twenty times; she'd seen the sequels, and it just FELT like twenty times)
So instead of Drew, Neve Campbell stars as Sydney, a small-town teenager who's approaching the one-year anniversary of her mother's murder. Mom's dead (and was the town slut when she was around, as it turns out), the guy imprisoned for it may very well be the wrong guy, this pain-in-the-ass reporter named Gail Weathers (Courtney Cox) keeps hounding her about it, her boyfriend's running out of patience and is tired of having to whack off twenty-five times a week, and as if that's not bad enough, some wacko in a mask and cloak is knocking off her friends and classmates. And you thought you had it rough.
Campbell stretches her acting abilities to the limit here; she has yet to demonstrate much range, but within her narrow field, she's quite good. Sweet, winsome, vulnerable yet tough, she's basically what all those "good-girl" slasher-movie heroines of the 80's strove to be but rarely pulled off. And even though you could only see 'em on the big screen, her freckles are for once not covered up by the makeup guys, and they're adorable.
Cox is never quite believable; she has yet to demonstrate even Campbell's range and has long been widely known as the one cast member on Friends that nobody would miss. It doesn't help that her character is such a bitch, and not in a good way. But the rest of the cast do their jobs quite well - Skeet Ulrich (as Sydney's boyfriend, sporting a goatee on the poster for some reason) smartly seems a shade menacing due to a continued uncertainty about whether or not he's involved with the killings. Matthew Lilliard is hilarious, going for a Stephen Geoffreys kind of nutjob charm, except here making it believable that he might actually get laid once in a while - I'd love to see more of this guy, but he never seems to take roles in movies I'd actually care to see. (She's All That? Wing Commander? Where's my gun?) Rose McGowan is just fine as Lilliard's girlfriend, wisely letting her breasts do most of the acting for her, and Jamie Kennedy steals most scenes he's in as the guy who knows about as much about horror movies as the more knowing members of the audience. Henry Winkler shows up as the principal, and he's way funnier here than in The Waterboy, possibly the most perplexing megahit of the 90's so far. Most notable is David Arquette as Dewey, a local deputy who grows a cheesy mustache to overcome his boyish face and still takes abuse at the hands of his little sister. Desperate for respect, he sobs to her "What did Mom tell you? When I wear this badge, you treat me like a man of the law!" He manages to inspire some level of goofy sympathy, when he could easily have been played for a total fool.
And Drew, poor poor Drew...so sorry to see you go so soon, luv. It's too bad she's only in this movie for about ten minutes - she's so incredibly appealing (love that haircut) that when she makes her early exit, one almost sobs from the heartbreak. (extra points for this film being one of those few where dead characters are actually missed - note the mournful look over at an empty desk in the classroom, and tragic music leading up to the discovery of that body) (Man, these kids actually have parents! That's a new one in this kind of film, ain't it?)
The action is skillfully handled by Craven; this is his best work in a dozen years, maybe even his best, period. There's a whodunit aspect regarding the identity of who's doing the killing, and that's also handled well, although our answer is largely arbitrary; it could have been just about anybody. Then again, how many slasher movies really have a devastating, harrowing revelation about the killer at the end (I'm goin' back almost thirty years here to Psycho)? It's what happens with that revelation that helps make this movie stand out - you've gotta love that scene where two guys take turns stabbing each other, possibly the most hilariously demented thing I've seen in years. Tossing in clues and laughs both obvious and subtle, Scream goes above and beyond the call, if not quite as high as one might wish for.
The score by Marco Beltrami is great, blending orchestral music with electronics to good effect. The rock soundtrack isn't too bad either, with a few acts I rather like, and yet another cover of "Don't Fear The Reaper", played with a little more adventurousness by Gus (who?) than whoever did it on the soundtrack for The Frighteners. I was also under the impression that there was a song there by The Last Hard Men, which is the last known whereabouts of former Skid Row howler Sebastian Bach. Nothing by them shows up in the closing credits - maybe I'm thinking of the sequel.
Not everything in Scream is as entirely new as one has often heard it claimed. An almost unknown little movie called There's Nothing Out There (never seen it) previously exploited the notion of horror movie rules. Two films before, Craven also investigated the influence of real-life horror movies on people with New Nightmare, albeit in a more fantasy-oriented twisting of fiction and reality. Scream doesn't explore this link very seriously here - it's all kind of blown off with the line "Movies don't make psychos; they just make psychos more creative!" That's probably for the best; a movie like this does not need to be weighted down with Heavy Philosophy.
My only problems with Scream are in the details. Running 'em off quickly...the movie cheats by hiring a separate actor to play the killer's voice on the phone; while it's a gimme that the voice is disguised, this just ain't playing fair. Are there really 911 internet connections? Halloween is NOT a party movie. Only Jamie Kennedy delivers his pop-culture references like a genuine fan - from the mouths of everybody else, they feel too much like lines. There's a completely pointless, ridiculous shot where the killer (in disguise) can be seen in the middle of the grocery store - don't you think somebody would notice? There's also a really clumsy attempt to avoid the "only the virgins survive" cliché of so many other films; this doesn't bust the cliché at all, but presents a riff on it. Once, if you had sex, you were dead meat (like the dead slut mom) - now, if you have sex wish you'd had sex with somebody less likely to try to kill you afterward. I don't think this was much of an attempt to make sex a "healthier" thing in horror, but it still fails as any effort to cliché-bust. Lamest of all is the forced romance between Weathers and Dewey - we're supposed to be happy for this guy getting some action, but Weathers is such a cow that every time she's on screen, one wishes for hers to be the most revolting death of all. One wishes, and wishes.
Still, Scream comes across as an excellent example of teen horror, as good any produced in the past twenty years. One may be tired of the slew of imitators that have cropped up in its wake, but I suspect that these are a necessary step in the re-establishment of all kinds of horror - note the number of more adult-oriented horror films on their way, when even five years ago very few of them would have been attempted.
Scream is the first produced script by Kevin Williamson, who went on to get way to big for his britches, churning out imitations of his own script (most obviously, Scream 2) and a really bad TV series at a furious pace, with another on the way! (although I did really like The Faculty) For better or for worse, Williamson is the only screenwriter working today, other than Quentin Tarantino, whose name on a poster will help sell the film. The sequel went on to be a big hit as well, although it was mostly a very quick take, dropping off soon, and eventually becoming the single most hated movie in the genre on alt.horror, it would appear. (I thought it wasn't bad when I saw it, but I confess to being unable to remember anything about it)
I've never bought Williamson's claim that he always envisioned Scream as a trilogy - my disbelief is bolstered by his failure to complete a script for Scream 3, which ultimately was taken from his hands and given to another writer for lack of results. (I don't believe the Wachowski brothers' same claim about The Matrix, either) The only thing I've seen that gives his claim credibility is the casting of reasonably established actor Liev Schreiber as the guy convicted for Sydney's mom's murder - four seconds of screen time, no lines. How likely is it that he would have signed on for just that, without the promise of something more substantial in the future? Ah, I still don't buy it.
Love it or hate it, it'll be remembered. It wasn't actually the first teen horror movie to set off this trend - The Craft preceded it by about six months, but didn't quite attract the attention this one did. I loved this one, and am still perplexed by how long it took a widescreen VHS release to reach Canada. (same thing happened with Scream 2)