Scream, No. 4 - Scream 4 (2011)

[Dictated but not read]

There isn’t really much of a reason for Scream 4 to exist, just as there isn’t for most horror sequels in particular. Look to the post-Scream Saw franchise, which devolved into a narratively incoherent death spiral once perpetuation grew more essential than purpose. For that, or most other horror sequels, the only point is usually to deliver audiences a calming, familiar thrill like what they’ve seen before. It’s soothing, but it doesn’t make for good horror, and longevity kills whatever strength the original idea might have had. Too bad, too, since well-financed horror is now unlikely to happen unless it has that guarantee of the familiar. So even while horror franchises are played out in one continuity, reboots and remakes and re-whatnots still apply, a kind of horror-wide meta-cycle of cannibalizing self-defeat, making one question just what the future of horror possesses.

A variation on this very argument lies at the heart of Scream 4, which uses the eleven-year interim since the useless Scream 3 to remark upon what horror has done in response to Scream. To that end, the in-film Stab franchise (now up to Stab 7, with no exact real world parallel, save for the Screams, which haven’t this particular longevity) have created a world much like ours, where teenaged audiences are just as aware of discussing “meta” post-modernism itself as a thing, rather than merely employing it. (By the way, it’s implied a Stab 3 did eventually get made, possibly a fictionalization of the failed Stab 3 production in Scream 3 – which is perhaps a self-imploding notion beyond even the purely fictional Screams’ realm…or something.) But since the Stabs diverge from the actuality of the Scream franchise, they serve as a warning for writer Kevin Williamson, to point out the pitfalls of excessive self-reference.


It’s long been the Screams’ onus, and bizarre privilege, that they are as aware of their potential flaws as we are. As the first Scream states, “slasher movies are dumb, as is this one, but we know it.” Now it says, “Excessive self-reference is a bottomless pit without end, and once it invades cinema as a whole, the problem exacerbates.” You could say this about Scream 4, that while it lambasts the purposelessness of Saw IV (rightfully called “dumb” – though ya should’ve picked on V instead, guys…), and lists the proliferation of modern horror remakes, it also possesses many of the same problems as them. Then you can take a step back, and say since Scream 4 exemplifies those problems, it makes us aware of them in a way, say, Halloween circa 2007 doesn’t. Just like it’s arguable Scream 3 sucks by design; Scream 4 isn’t remotely that soulless, but it’s still a strange, over-stuffed, purposeless beast.

Remakes (and reboots) become the name of the game. Necessary, too, for each new entry must redefine how it relates back to franchising as a whole: Scream just the genre (horror), Scream 2 sequels, Scream 3 trilogies, Scream 4 remakes. Which has a pertinence beyond mere reiteration of repetition, like a standard Part Four. And from the perspective of the Ghostface killers (yeah, it’s two, we know that’s comin’, which is the point even), the 2011 Woodsboro Massacre is a remake of its 1996 cousin. By that definition, there are variations on old scenes, the killers stabbing each other to appear as victims, or the bound and gagged red herring suspect – moments at once familiar, but with a new twist, as many a remake presents to us.


But Scream 4 is still in the same continuity as the other three, so it isn’t a remake, not in a pure sense. Which is needed, for its characters to be aware it is a remake – otherwise, they’d have no notion of Stab 1/Scream 1. So it’s a reboot, too, in the sense that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or Live Free and Die Hard is a reboot – that is, unlike Batman Begins or Casino Royale, the timeline isn’t shredded, but nostalgic events are presented to us largely for that nostalgia value. Meaning Scream 4 has a value now in 2011 by dint of its distance from 2000’s Scream 3, while with time that value might wane. In the story, it’s certainly a nostalgic reunion for the series’ three perpetual survivors, Sidney Prescott (Neve “I Can’t Name Anything Noteworthy Since Scream 3” Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courtney “Up Yours, I’m In ‘Cougar Town’” Cox), and Dewey Riley (David “Whatever” Arquette). Boiling the plot down once and for all, they’re back in Woodsboro, as the present teenaged populace faces the deadly Ghostface remakes.

Nostalgia, for as essential as it’s been for much recent cinematic pilfering, plays a major part in Scream 4’s success – It cannot work without reference to its older kin. Truly, Scream 4 doesn’t really echo any of the stylistic excesses of more recent phenomenon – torture pornography is mostly name-dropped, then tossed aside, and it doesn’t seem like a Platinum Dunes remake either (that is, it isn’t horridly blue ‘n’ teal). This is perhaps the challenge of defining future Scream sequels…Their mission statement is to comment upon the state of (horror) cinema, but they’re forever wedded to aping the slasher tropes of the 1980s – because this is the format 1996’s Scream chose for itself. And now, when truly I can say Scream 4 is more thoroughly dedicated to self-commentary than any other in the series, it’s a hindrance that it must forever phrase those ideas in the milieu of knife murders.


It’s possible to define the Screams without reference to their post-modernism. Under that definition, we focus upon Ghostface as a stalker of mass media. He bullies with phone technology. The gadget-crazed are endlessly impressed at the last decades’ technological innovation (as if that’s anything new), leaving Ghostface with a new(ish) realm to explore – cellular telephone machine technology gives way to Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, web streaming, blogs (erp?!)… This isn’t actually a gigantic focus of Scream 4, as that’d be to miss the greater reflexive commentary for the ornamental details.

Ah, but that idea’s still there, another thread to add onto Scream 4’s overtaxed shoulders, along with exploring the Stab franchise, our heroes lives these past ten years, the nature of remakes, the nature of reboots, general media commentary, and a dozen new faces who all get to fall to the blade. Oh, plus give all this enough actual pertinence to old events, so that again a duo of multiple murderers is driven to kill specifically as an act of revenge against Sidney Prescott – her mere existence now inspires psychopaths.

No doubt Scream 4 is too caught up in juggling assorted ideas, accumulated in time from the once-simple notion of “What if characters in a horror movie had seen other horror movies?” It’s like how Saw went from “Two dudes awake shackled in a restroom” to “Multiple generations of ironic gadget masters train each other to spread a twist-heavy social message.” In its way, Scream is very much like Saw…Each series feels the need to repeat twist endings in every entry, which patently gets in the way of telling a story naturally. There is some effort from each to be at least marginally clever. Each piles on the threads and expectations with each sequel, and has grown beyond the confines of what was once a trilogy.


What Scream hasn’t done is grow entirely beyond what it’s capable of saying, lest it enter the realm of the alluded-to Stab 5, with its time travel antics. That’s a weird sort of throwaway gag in Williamson’s script (or possibly one of those danged uncredited Ehren Kruger rewrites, because still Williamson’s stupid TV career – “The Vampire Diaries” – keeps him legally limited from doing his own Scream movies). But a Scream’s throwaways, when they seem cinema-pertinent, are not to be dismissed, especially since there’s been some hint that 4 might engender an imminent Scream 5 and 6 – a second trilogy, like nothing else except the Stars Wars prequels, provided this one is successful enough. It’s hard to picture what sort of over-arcing meta-text could follow the “remake”…possibly the “remake’s sequel,” to show you how dumb further Screams appear at present.

…Nah, all that seems unlikely. Scream 4, though well-intentioned in its remake fervor, isn’t doing the sort of business it needs to continue on. It frankly doesn’t seem pertinent to contemporary horror movies, even if it comments upon their greater development, partly because the Scream style itself isn’t stylish any more. That need to be a sequel to a 1996 movie kills its chances to comment upon current trends directly to audiences of those trends. Without knowing the films already, there’s little entry point here. Oh, the movie’s simple enough on is basic level – watch people get murdered – but that offers little to a viewer without the necessary ability to connect with its subtextual game. You gotta know Scream, gotta recognize parallels and internal self-subversions, which necessarily shuns a large part of the audience. Which is the nature of such a metatextual beast in the first place.


It’s telling that so much could be said of Scream 4 without ever addressing the new victim roster, the teens who would be expected to be the access for new horror junkies – new viewers just now coming to Scream’s awareness in a climate which has regularized that awareness. As a remake, we get unofficial parallels and escalations. Sidney’s cousin is Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts), and knowing simply she’s the Final Girl is enough substitute for a personality, not when Sidney’s still sorta claiming that spot. Though at film’s end, maybe that’s the point…Hmm…

Otherwise, we get the “hot girl” who dies as when first’s hot girl did…only it doesn’t really read that way, not until the film’s characters insist upon it – one of them insisting upon this forced remake read almost too strongly, almost as though he knew the killer’s intentions…Hmm…

And the nerd types, the Randies – now seemingly tripled, with double duty falling first to film club masterminds Robbie (Erik Knudsen) and Charlie (Rory Culkin), and Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) revealing herself later on to be the female equivalent of that trope – and fulfilling whatever “hot girl” duties the presumably more Tatum-esque deceased girl possessed.


Yeah, it’s another murder mystery, with too many characters vying for that spot as the killer. We discount some, like the boyfriend, simply because that twist’s been done before – and “the unexpected is the new cliché,” a fancy way of saying “We got new twists, unless that’s expected, meaning rather we’re recycling old twists, only maybe we’re not, so really, fuck it.” Yeah, the “virgins can die now” thing, the “homosexuals are safe” thing, that’s all old hat – as old as Scream-copying Cherry Falls, at least, though pre-Screams did all this too – as Williamson’s latest “rules” aren’t wholly indicative of the actual genre today, like, at all. Where was I? Oh right, the killer. So…SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS.

Obviously, I’m not gonna reveal who all is killin’ folk in a movie that’s but a few days old. I’ll still attempt some commentary on how the reveal goes down. The motive is the same as always – excepting the ever-present “revenge against Sidney for some damn reason,” we get the classic media whorism. Picture Rebecca Friday as a psychopathic killer, and there you go! It’s as loopy as the former three, and as much a strange and undercooked media satire – all in all, perfectly in fitting with the franchise.

And on survivors…Well, I feel bold enough to say, without names, that three characters are guaranteed to live through the movie. Three characters who’ve proven so totally immortal throughout the series – when Ghostface’s knife is instantly fatal to lesser characters, able to stab a spine or heart or freaking brain through the skull (yeah, the gore is a tad more permissive this time), the same sort of attack upon these unnamed three is barely effective at all. Really, these people, these survivors, resemble the horror icons of yore far better than Ghostface ever did – and we’re now on the seventh person to assume the shrouds now. At least there’s some acknowledgement (perhaps by director Wes Craven instead of either scribe) of the fact…towards the end, one of the unnamed survivors is compared to Michael Myers. Five seconds later, said character performs an attack that is recognizably a Myers special – the thumb-to-the-eye from Halloween 4, proof I’ve watch too many of these movies myself. It flips the tables, showing the heroes in stalker mode, and the villain in victim mode. But I’ve perhaps hinted too much as the ending with these musings, so I’ll quit it now.


RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 Scream (1996)
• No. 2 Scream 2 (1997)
• No. 3 Scream 3 (2000)


Ghostfacekiller said…

HEY, RANDOM BLOGGER. NICE POST. BY THE WAY, WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE SCARY MOVIE?

April 18, 2001, 4:45 PM

…

What?

…Oh I get it. This is an effort to fold back in on ourselves, like the Screams (or Stabs, if you will), and imbue this blog with the same sort of awareness. And my pointing that out is just another layer, as is my pointing out of my pointing out, as is my poi- Okay, I’ll stop that. But you don’t fool me, alleged “killer,” because that’s not quite a perfect recreation of a comment. For one thing, part of it is clearly an image, and – DO YOU WANT TO DIE? …Okay, I don’t even know how you’re doing that. To answer your question, obviously I don’t want to, but –

LOOK, IF YOU KEEP ON EQUIVOCATING USELESSLY, I’M GONNA GUT YOU LIKE A COW RIGHT NOW!!!

People gut cows? Whatever, I’m just going to post this and – YOU HIT THAT “PUBLISH POST” BUTTON AND YOU’RE!


Ah, very clever. But there’s no real end to such commentary. I make some witty rejoinder indicating I know everything you’re doing, then you say you know I would say that, and we keep going on in such a way like pointing a camera at the screen that’s recording its recording and –


Yeah, that’s exactly my point (though that is Photoshop, you lazy bum). I can see how this is pertinent for Scream 4, which boasts something like two extended false endings itself, and acknowledges that it’s doing it, which doesn’t negate the problem, and makes it a damn hard thing to conclusively end, meaning things are just a string of run-on sentences which eventually cut off all of a su

Scream, No. 1 - Scream (1996)

Scream is famous for reigniting the slasher genre during the ‘90s doldrums, and doing so with self-referential irony. This really hijacks any conversation about Scream, and I was surprised upon revisiting it just how little meta material there is in here. But the truth is that Scream, conceived by neophyte screenwriter Kevin Williamson, is primarily meant to be a straight horror film. It simply takes the basic form of your Halloween, My Bloody Valentine or Friday the 13th, and tells it with awareness and intelligence. Reflexivity existed in horror before (for high and low examples, see Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives – possibly my favorite entries of each franchise), but never quite this purely, I guess.

For whatever reason, even while Scream – then titled Scary Movie, and dropping that name would hold enormous repercussions – was simply a free-floating spec script, producers all over Hollywood seized upon the idea of filming it as a comedy. To be honest, that’d have been my instinct too. But Scream wasn’t made as a comedy. Instead, direction fell to Wes Craven, horror maven, most famous for creating A Nightmare on Elm Street, one of the movies Scream now sees fit to comment upon. While Craven’s Freddy-style cameo and self-deprecation (characters lambast his older efforts) allow for some meta playfulness, Scream’s central quest is to be a fright flick.

The comedy is still there, something Craven does a lot (only faaaaar more effective than the doofuses in The Last House on the Left) – but it’s only by Scream’s reputation that we even focus upon that. Between the horror, comedy, and even a heavy, unexpected mystery element, Scream is rather difficult to define.


Scream’s greatest success comes right out of the bat. Many (most) horror movies begin with an introductory murder, which often loses its impact through sheer inevitability. We get no sense of that redundancy in Scream, which is good since its opening is a lengthy twelve minutes long. Borrowing an idea from When a Stranger Calls (but not copping to that fact), things start with a phone call, as Casey Becker fields a presumed misdialer (voice of Roger L. Jackson, the series’ unsung hero). Like a slow burn, the call turns flirtatious, then sinister, as the unseen caller threatens Casey’s life…with horror trivia.

For every new hint of doom, we convince ourselves maybe Casey has a chance, because she’s played by Drew Barrymore – and the ultra-famous don’t get offed in intros. Even if, by generic formula, we recognize this futility, we’re still vested in the victim, as our survival instincts are piqued along with hers.

Craven uses performance and camera to slowly, slowly create a nightmare. It all must peak with the killer’s reveal – or the killer’s costume at any rate, and if you follow this subgenre, you know that’s more important. Simply by name-dropping the big horror franchises, Scream is obligated to serve up a villain as visually iconic as Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. Ghostface is a bold enough deign, as his (her, their?) white face and spectral form recall Myers mostly – as per the vaguer dictates of Williamson’s script. Ghost, skeleton, Grim reaper... And for all her struggles, Casey does become the opening victim (well, she and her token boyfriend), but not simply to satisfy genre dictates. Craven sticks with the scene as Casey slowly dies, highlighting tragedy as her parents discover the act. No pure comedy, other than the darkest sort, would dwell upon a death so wholly.


One interesting, hugely informative detail: That Ghostface mask already existed prior to Scream. It is generic, a dime store item, which is necessary for the nature of Ghostface. The killer isn’t some super slasher ala Freddy, but a mortal person emulating horror movies. It’s Leslie Vernon, in a sense, but told with the standard structure. So the killer must appear possible (though mightily improbable), lest the movie’s foundation crumbles. To that end, Ghostface is abnormally fallible; he falls, stumbles, gets smacked around, and it’s only through preplanning (and a mighty boost from story necessity) that he is repeatedly successful.

The standard slasher film follows with the Meet the Meat, where we’re also made wholly aware of whom the Final Girl is. Scream is no different in the broad strokes, giving us a Horny Couple, Nerd, Dopey Deputy, et cetera. But these types rarely register as mere stock roles. Williamson’s dialogue gives them concerns beyond orchestrating themselves towards death. And the cast is substantial, culled from teen soap operas (the wrong lesson Scream’s copycats learned). Fulfilling that old horror axiom that here there be actors before they were famous, only more so, Scream’s cast is wholly noteworthy.


First we meet Final Girl Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell, of TV’s “Party of Five” formerly). The film’s intent focus upon her alone makes that obvious – and necessary, as the use of Drew Barrymore has already satisfied that Psycho-style fake-out, and you’re allowed only one. Not to mention, Sidney is a virgin…and not just obliquely. This is text, her defining characteristic, a plot motivator – and possibly a source of contention, as the genre’s nascent misogyny actually becomes deeper when carefully plotted. And Sidney has a Deep, Dark Past, as many a Final Girl does. In these opening stages, it’s limited to vague utterances, which is often as far as many ‘80s slashers went; it solidifies in time into a wildly complex backstory, and let’s hold onto that.

Her boyfriend is Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich, who was alongside Campbell in The Craft) – yeah, that name is a Psycho/Halloween reference combined…and possibly also Black Christmas. He’s desperate for sex, and the more we learn of Sidney’s past, the ickier this becomes.

Billy’s minion, Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard, later Shaggy in Scooby-Doo) is one half of the Horny Couple, but let’s not let that define him. He’s anything but bland. In fact, Stu is downright insane, evidently, and notoriously tactless. All this I’ll address in a moment.

Stu’s other half is Tatum Riley (Grindhouse’s Rose McGowan, who makes for a ludicrously attractive blonde as well). Blonde, large of breast and tight of skirt, sexually active, she’s not long for this world. But we know she is, in the slasher dichotomy, a “whore” simply because Sidney is a virgin. There can be only one! A fount of spunk, genuine friendship, and never-ending pop culture references, Tatum is a more concrete person than her slasher designation would indicate. Which means her eventual fate seems more damning, as we only write her off knowing the genre she inhabits.

The odd one out (i.e. the Nerd) is Randy Meeks (“The Jamie Kennedy Experiment’s” Jamie Kennedy) – and note how every character has a last name! Randy loves himself some movies, and expounds upon them at length to his friends, blogs not existing yet. It shall be Randy’s duty to blatantly outline horror tropes for us, making him the primary source of Scream’s reputation as a post-modern classic.


What I’d neglected to mention is that each of these people is also a suspect – as is every single extra passing along behind. Scream is a murder mystery; in fact, it more fully commits to that angle than to its alleged comedy. This is a more obscure slasher trope, evident mostly in those few semi-realistic hack ‘n’ slashes which occurred between 1979 and 1981 – things like Terror Train and Prom Night (yes, Scream namedrops both) which open with pranks gone wrong, then ask us to guess the killer. You certainly don’t see this in the subgenre’s more famous films, where Voorheesesque super-slashers are known simply from the VHS box cover.

So our attentions are diverted constantly trying to figure out who the villain is…or if you’re watching it a second time, picking out clues. It sort of reduces Ghostface’s otherworldliness when he’s just some guy targeting specific people – horror thrives from randomness, and Scream’s excess of plot nullifies that. Though it makes it more engaging in a mainstream sort of way, which is the trade off, and a reason for the movie’s popularity. But I’ll admit it’s silly to see someone lurking in a Ghostface costume in plain daylight (front yards, supermarkets), when the only purpose is to impress us with the killer’s omnipresence – when he’d be more omnipresent (but less threatening) out of costume.

There are two ways to approach Scream’s mystery. You can play amateur detective, like the film’s cops (somewhat more effective than their genre kin). With this tact, you investigate actual clues, a character’s presence and accessories and, when all else fails, motive. Or you can play meta detective, and say Character X is the most likely suspect, therefore is the least likely suspect, because the twist must be a surprise. (I prefer this approach even when watching old school mysteries like The Thin Man.)

Scream is prepared to counter either method. Stu is the most evidently psychotic, therefore we instantly discount him. Billy is suspect, because the boyfriend is always suspect. Thus the police arrest him after Sidney’s first extended encounter with Ghostface (which, by the film’s later plot reveals, ought not to have resulted in Sidney’s death, which it didn’t…but still). Billy is then cleared as Ghostface continues to torment Sidney once he’s in prison. For the literalist, this pretty much clears Billy. For the metaphysicist (or whatever), this is an obvious red herring – too obvious, in fact, which again makes Billy innocent…depending on how you read things.


Because the police are an increased presence, one of their representatives joins our central character roster, and becomes the Dopey Deputy – obviously, too, because “Dewey” alliterates quite well with that. David Arquette (inexplicable one-time WWF star) certainly plays Dewey as the buffoon, struggling to maintain seriousness while the genre says he must be the comic relief. (The characters themselves never seem obliged to fulfill formula, but the movie regards them so.) Dewey is also largely responsible for making Scream a mystery, filtering the sheriff’s latest theories back to Sidney and her pals – and Dewey’s own sister, Tatum.

Scream’s other central character is someone I honestly cannot place in any other slasher movie – reporter Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox, of “Friends” and now “Cougar Town”). In a sense, Gale is on hand to probe the mystery. She’s also there to romance Dewey, a subplot so successful the actors actually married (…and then eventually divorced). She’s also also a meta device, as Scream becomes concerned with the effect of the media and so forth. Also also also, Gale is our exposition machine into Sidney’s backstory. These are a lot of roles to play, along with “queen bitch,” making Gale a fascinating but troublesome part of the ensemble.

Because I mention it, about Sidney’s backstory…The movie dances around it, but I won’t: Sidney’s mother Maureen Prescott was raped and murdered one year ago to the day (because all self-respecting slashers involve anniversaries). Sidney confessed against schoolmate Cotton Weary (Liev Shreiber appearing for a nanosecond, curious considering his celebrity status in the sequels) – wrongly, Gale thinks. The fact of the matter is (and I’m jumping the gun even more here), whomever Ghostface is murdered Maureen.

All these details and more (concerning Maureen’s extra-marital affairs, the town of Woodsboro’s sordid history, etc.) really complicate matters. Add to that our obsession with the killer’s identity, and there’s hardly any time let to simply be a “scary movie.” And then there’s that whole post-modern thing too.


It’s been a long time coming for the characters to acknowledge they’re in a movie. Oh, they spout off movie references time and again, but that doesn’t add up to anything. Once psycho mania has gripped Woodsboro, the teen populace descends upon Randy’s video story (an archaic institution where you picked up so-called “VHS tapes” while talking on your “cellular telephone”). But they seem obsessed with the mere act of watching horror movies, not dissecting them. There’s little more to the intended self-reference than saying “Certain movies sure do exist.” The filmmakers' statement is then, “This movie also exists.”

It’s not the wildest movie-about-movies ever, not by a long shot (Craven’s own New Nightmare is more thematically whole in its movieness). But when you’re getting the mainstream comfortable with post-modernism, it’s a necessary step. “A movie that is aware of other movies, yet is still a serious movie within its own genre.” It’s that seriousness which distinguishes Scream from Airplane!, which is the sort of movie you’d expect Scream to be, by its reputation. (Scream’s failure to be a ZAZ spoof had implications as large as that dropped Scary Movie title.)


Scream’s crisis of identity comes from a uniquely ‘90s sense of irony. By Scream’s own admission, movies of its type are usually braindead artistic vacuums. With stronger characters, a functional plot, and other elements, Scream does a respectful job of avoiding these mistakes. Other times, it openly admits them in. We get, for instance, a rather by-the-books spring-loaded cat scare when the time comes for Tatum to die. She gives a little look, as if to acknowledge how hoary that is. And…that’s it. There’s still a cat scare in Scream. As though admitting something is stupid makes it less stupid.

A more illustrative moment: While watching Halloween on TV (whose actions frequently parallel Scream’s), an extra praises the “obligatory tit shot.” At the same time, Sidney is upstairs breaking genre rules and giving it up to Billy…and unerringly not obliging that shot, even though she disrobes. Most ‘90s horror is so non-exploitative, that could just be something written into every starlet’s contract…Yet Williamson’s script already specified titlessness. I’m not complaining about a lack of nudity (hey, this is the Internet!), but about how perverse it is to mention it, not deliver, and leave it at that. If Scream satisfies a cliché, it’s being ironic. If it avoids a cliché, it’s equally ironic. It’s all pretty reductive.


Though the movie never reaches the heights of its opening scene, it improves towards the end, as the characters become more involved in exploring Scream’s very own “movieness.” Randy pauses Halloween to extrapolate upon what most slasher fans have known since 1981 (if not earlier): the Rules. Rules for surviving a horror movie – sorry, “scary” movie.

1. Never have sex.
2. No drinking or drugs.
3. Never say “I’ll be right back.”

…That’s it?!

I’ll be honest, in 1996 this entire monologue peppered every one of Scream’s omnipresent ads. I went in expecting further exploration of the idea, perhaps acknowledgment of other things. That is, I expected a complete deconstruction of the genre, perhaps something too detailed to even work as a narrative. What we get is underwhelming compared to those expectations. Even so, I forever hear Scream’s “Rules” cited as a defining moment in the genre, as certainly for many viewers who’d only briefly heard of Friday the 13th (as opposed to writing essays on every single entry), this was a revelation. The very notion of deconstructing movies became famous here, leading to a later movie climate with far more casual referencing.

Unlike Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, a movie about moviemakers, Scream is about the viewer, about watching – a pretty passive activity. Its mode of reference is similarly passive. Mentioning a movie – as many as possible – is enough. Reworking I Spit on Your Grave as “I Spit on Your Garage” doesn’t amount to anything more – and it’s unamusing beyond that spark of recognition. In this way, Scream really does just become a series of Airplane! gags, none informing the rest.


Though there are moments of promise (as I said, Scream improves in this section). The cleverest layering occurs as Randy watches Halloween, Jamie (Kennedy) informing Jamie (Lee Curtis) “Behind you Jamie,” just as Ghostface looms behind him.

Good enough. But there’s more. At Gale’s insistence, a camera feed records Randy’s oblivious antics, as we watch those watching Randy watching Halloween telling Randy to look behind him just as he tells Jamie. Just as we might be telling these characters, because a 30-second delay means Ghostface is no longer behind Randy, but near them.

Had Scream’s focus actually been upon moments like that, I’m certain we’d find them more often. But never forget it is a horror movie first, and its greater energies are expended upon an extended chase between Sidney and Ghostface (and many, many others, each doing precisely what Ghostface prefers – even crashing their news vans for no reason). Under Craven’s seasoned hand, this is fundamentally what a slasher would deliver, only better. Actually, it’s the most basic template movie Craven had yet made – sort of a victory lap for a director who’d already expelled his personal demons.

So even if Scream abandons comedy for horror in these moments, it cannot be elemental – not if that murder mystery has any say. We must conclude with the killer(s) revealed, and lose that iconographic Ghostface costuming just at the moment where it’d be most wanted. Therefore…

SPOILERS.

To reiterate, SPOILERS.


It turns out the killers were…the two most obvious suspects. That is, Billy and Stu, who worked in tandem to cover each other’s asses (allowing for justified off screen teleportation). For this surprise to work, you need to have over-anticipated the narrative. (Oh, and it’s harder to feel scared for characters when they might be the killer, which has harmed some earlier scenes.)

As with Friday the 13th, revealing the killer also changes the modus operandi. The goons have Sidney in their clutches, yet opt to monologue at her instead, ala Pamela Voorhees. So she asks about motive. Initially Billy rejects motives as immaterial (in meta terms, the right answer), but there are in fact two motives…

Stu’s: Recreate the movies. This cuts to the notion that violence in cinema creates violence in real life. Craven has repeatedly made films to counter this theory, but Billy’s reductive “Movies just make psychos more creative” is shaky ground. It’s Williamson’s argument, which rejects the notion with frivolous irony, and Craven as mere director can only do so much. Awkward!

Billy’s: Revenge. Ah, that’s always reliable. More specifically, Billy’s mom left him because Sidney’s mom had an affair with Billy’s mom, therefore (logically) Billy raped and murdered Sidney’s mom, and now intends to do likewise to Sidney. As skewed as that reasoning is, it fits perfectly with the funky counter-logic most slashers offer up. Though I doubt irony was the point this time – though if ever it is, god help you! Besides, by making one woman’s adultery (and then later Sidney’s own “sexual anorexia”) the basis for multiple murders, there’s that misogyny we perhaps feared this one slasher film might dodge.

It sounds like I’ve been pretty harsh on Scream. That’s not wholly fair. It is willing to attempt genre commentary, which opens it up to criticisms you’d never level at, say, Dr. Giggles. With self-reflectivity, meta jokes and movie references, Scream opens up a mighty can of worms. Those worms get out of hand, but so be it. Other people now have the freedom to play with these worms (this is a bad metaphor). We’ve perhaps become over-obsessed with Scream’s baseline reference-for-its-own-sake practice (the “Family Guy” approach), but other movies have evolved Scream’s layers quite ingeniously – things like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

And what of horror? Immediately following its success, Scream clones emerged just as Halloween clones once did. I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, Valentine, Cherry Falls…The list isn’t as extensive as it was in the early ‘80s, because a faux Scream demands budget, and a cast, and respectability. (These things are all a little teenybopper and watered down, by the way.) None of ‘em got the irony thing as right as Scream did, misunderstanding that movie for their inspiration (when they maybe should’ve looked to more ideal meta movies, like Sunset Blvd. or 8½.) Well, every era gets the horror franchise it deserves (what’d we do to warrant Saw?!), and the ‘90s got Scream – a joke on the former generation, with little to add except that knowingness.


RELATED POSTS
• No. 2 Scream 2 (1997)
• No. 3 Scream 3 (2000)
• No. 4 Scream 4 (2011)

Scream, No. 2 - Scream 2 (1997)

Scream did phenomenally well, far out of proportion with its genre. If that doesn’t peg it as mainstream horror, I don’t know what does. Credit a wonderful convergence of elements, from Kevin Williamson’s knowing script that was just meta enough, and a likeable, recognizable cast, combined with Wes Craven’s informed horror direction, giving Scream that minor shock of exploitation it needs. And for a movie which reignited the slasher subgenre, it’s no wonder Scream had a sequel turnaround akin to the original Friday the 13th. That is, in under a year, Scream 2 was already made and in theaters.


Such a quick turnaround isn’t conducive to ideal moviemaking, so it helps Williamson had already planned out his sequels’ general direction before ever selling his original Scream script. You’ll hear this cited as proof “it was always conceived of as a trilogy,” or some such George Lucas nonsense, but it was really a way for Williamson to ensure Scream’s draw to investors with the promise of a franchise. And once that hoped-for ultra-success came true, sequelizing was simple.

Even so, Scream 2 has the added challenge of a small window, plus all the common disadvantages of sequels: replicating appropriate elements, repeating stories which do not naturally repeat, being generally subservient to a former muse. Scream 2 has one arguable advantage on its side: irony. “Sequels suck,” ignoring provided counterexamples (Aliens, T2, the non-Cameron House II), therefore our sequel sucks, but we know it sucks, so it’s good that it sucks, therefore it doesn’t suck. Or something. This is sort of the Scream 1 approach, which is not as useful now. Not to mention, expounding upon the Rules of the Horror Sequel (bigger body count, more elaborate deaths – not useful info to the victims, however) doesn’t yield a whole lot.


But luckily for Scream 2, it is a sequel, so it doesn’t just have generic horror cinema to comment upon. It has Scream! Indeed, Scream is a movie in Scream 2…actually, it’s not that simple. The movie is Stab. (Was Scary Movie not then available? Because that would’ve been a cleverer meta comment and would’ve preempted the Wayanses.) Stab is ostensibly a docudrama, in that it’s a dramatization of the real life (in Scream’s world, at least) Woodsboro murders. Only…Stab is really based on reporter Gale Weathers’ (Courtney Cox) book “The Woodsboro Murders,” and she’s evidently quite pleased to take liberties with the truth. So Stab isn’t that neatly a Scream parallel.

Stab is necessary, in order for Scream 2 to openly address criticisms of horror movies without seeming forced. It’s also a source of some overt comedy a Scream generally cannot sustain. So if you recall your obscure Scream dialogue, you’ll recall Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) ruing the likelihood that Tori Spelling might play her (for those of you no longer living in 1997, Tory Spelling was…oh to hell with it, just check here). With that knowledge, you’ll notice a joke when Spelling indeed plays Sidney in Stab. It’s apparently somehow funny for Luke Wilson to play Skeet Ulrich, in an overly-obvious example of consciously bad acting, but I don’t follow.

Stab provides some clearer fun as well, as what we mostly see of it (Casey’s opening murder, Drew Barrymore now replaced with Heather Graham) is a clear parody of excessive ‘90s horror. As guest directed by an uncredited Robert Rodriguez, it really plays like his whole career – that is, this same sort of over-the-top quasi-parody (think Machete, or Planet Terror, or anything that’s not Spy Kids).

But all this is just on the periphery – though it’s a lot of what distinguishes Scream 2 as one layer deeper into the meta than Scream. As I maintained with Scream, dwelling upon the post-modernism is misdirected, as there isn’t a whole lot to it. Scream 2’s introductory double murder gets the fullest benefit of the layering, as it occurs as a preview screening of Stab (with an audience ten times more enthusiastic than ones I’ve ever seen). The rest of the movie is mostly a serious thriller with reflexive characters, and distinct from a basic horror movie only in some specific ways.


But for now, this movie’s opening, the movie opening…Scream formula becomes apparent: Celebrities die first (here it’s Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett pre-Smith – though the rest of the cast is famous enough that’s just splitting hairs). Otherwise, this is nothing like Casey’s scene in the first. We follow a duo watching a horror movie in the theater, same as the scores of other rowdies. Whereas Casey knew she was in danger, here Phil Stevens and Maureen Evans do not. We get that viewer-benefit of seeing portents where they don’t, because indeed, if actual hints of doom looked like this, all of Stab’s moviegoers would be frightened. But they are not; they are murder crazed, which gives us a nice little dichotomy once Maureen dies in front of the screen, juxtaposed with the silly fake death (of a real death) of Heather Graham behind her. How do we relate to death in films? Is it right to enjoy it?

Ghostface, whomever that now is, has accomplished his ghastly, ghostly murders with the aid of innumerable Ghostface costumes the studio unwisely handed out. And here’s a problem unique to Scream movies, which most horror sequels don’t deal with: Ghostface is not a single identity, but a persona borrowed by multiple murderers, for multiple reasons. Though they all inexplicably retain the same modus operandi (an obsession with threatening phone calls, mostly)…that operandi now is less explicitly obsessed with general horror cinema, since the new killer is aping Stab/”real life” instead. Whatever iconography Ghostface retains is due to that costume alone, as there is no one figure to latch onto.

Oh, and however frightening the Ghostface mantel might be, there’s terror when a multitude of killers forever retains an obsession with Sidney Prescott. This means the killings are all somehow about her (and her forever-castigated dead seductress of a mother, Maureen – yeah, that’s two Maureens, quite intentionally), and not actually about the movies. This sort of plot-mandated motive equivocation does huge damage to any thematic relevance. If a Scream sequel posited copycat killers that were truly just random psychos influenced by Stab…well, it’s probably not the scenario horror defender Wes Craven would want to tell, but that’d be more terrifying than the Prescott soap opera.

This leaves “Scream 2 the murder mystery” as all we’ve yet to look at. ‘Bout time I mention plot, eh? Not that something called Scream 2 needs too much setup. A Ghostface killer or two (or three?) is murdering people. C’mon, it’s a horror sequel! What we need to know boils down to setting, survivors and suspects. And for anyone expecting a true horror sequel routine, where the former Final Girl is officially on the chopping block, the Screams are forever opposed to that (the jury’s still out on Scream 4, though once this is posted, I’ll likely have seen that).

Setting: Windsor College. A collegiate milieu inspires some horror namedropping, though Williamson is thankfully less enamored of that now. At least this time there’s some obscurity to the citations: House on Sorority Row, The Dorm that Dripped Blood, Splatter University, Graduation Day, Final Exam. Obviously slashers do well in higher education. Scream, with its focus upon relative verisimilitude, creates some problems when that setting/scenario actually proves incapable of engendering scares, but that’s not our concern yet.


Survivors: Gale Weathers, Dewey Riley (Mr. Courtney Cox, David Arquette) and Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy). It’s unusual for a horror sequel to see so many characters return; it’s unusual for a horror movie to have that many characters survive in the first place. (Watered down ‘90s horror!) Addressing them in turn…

Randy is our required movie obsessionist, provider of jokes and meta commentary. He was Scream’s poster boy, whose personal diatribes fans took as the gospel truth for how to read Scream. For Williamson, perhaps aware of where Scream came short as post-modernism, Randy is limiting – now when things like Stab and the media allow for some trickier games. That’s a fancy way of saying Randy, as amusing as he is, is nearing the end of his usefulness for the franchise. And in horror, you know what that means?

As for Dewey and Gale, they are in tandem the series’ surprise of the series. They enjoy a rapport you cannot plan, they evolve, grow fond of each other, and provide an outsider’s perspective into the murder mysteries. They are more interesting than Sidney. Gale is especially useful, as a media representative, as the media grows more essential to Scream 2’s thesis statement. That’s why it’s relatively mum on merely horror movies; Scream 2 aims to be a grand assessment of how the media (that catchall term) influences real life violence, and vice versa. And with Gale becoming more and more the focus of other reporters, those lines are getting blurred in a nice, metaphorical sense. Though, of course, Williamson must create dialogue to point that fact out, as nothing can be simple subtext.


The suspects: Now, among Scream 2’s challenges, here it encountered a biggie. The first Scream was engaging partly for its murder mystery, and so fans eagerly awaiting the sequel started debating the likely killer ahead of time. Never mind they didn’t yet know the characters. Preserving the twist became this gimmicky franchise’s raison d’être. And for a movie so interested in irony and how art and audience influence each other, isn’t it, well, ironic that Scream 2’s script leaked online during production? Oh yes, the Internet, that dreaded Beast of Babylon, wikileaked the hell out of Scream 2, and the dramatically appropriate killer. So with time running out before December 1997, Williamson hurriedly rewrote the ending (which nicely explains why it seems so awkward and rushed – it was!). New killers were devised (yes, plural, though that can’t be a twist the second time out), as non-killer characters become killers in the 11th hour.

Limiting ourselves only to Sidney’s immediate circle of chums, otherwise we’d be here forever…

Hallie (Elise Neal): Sidney’s roommate, and so transparently an attempt to recreate Rose McGowan’s spunk, it doesn’t really work. Without much time to prepare, the new characters largely seem less developed. Hence, it’s easier to identify the body count stuffers, and woe be to Hallie, for she is one of them.

Derek (Jerry O’Connell, whose every facial expression makes me want to slit his throat): Sidney’s boyfriend, which is another way of saying “El suspecto numero uno.” Why? Well, because Sidney’s boyfriend was the killer in Part One. So everyone’s unnecessarily suspicious of Derek this time around. Our only question is: Which game will Williamson play? Is another boyfriend killer so obvious that actually doing it isn’t obvious? How many turns around the obviousness horn does this go? Suspect or no? God, I feel like Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride!

Mickey (Timothy Olyphant): The other guy. The guy who serves apparently no purpose. The only reason Mickey even exists is so he can be the killer…unless he’s not the killer, and this is just another game.

Okay, SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER, Mickey is the killer…one of them, anyway. The “gimmee” killer who is revealed first, so the mastermind can be a surprise.


So the pieces are mostly in place, and it takes so much effort setting up these pieces, something like 50% of Scream 2 consists of steadicam expository conversations held in Windsor’s interchangeable leafy quads. Visually, it’s pretty, but hard to gauge dramatic progress.

The remainder of the film is an effort to rustle up some scare sequences, and when the movie is usually in so genial a mood, it’s pretty damn hard to muster sudden terror. (Compare that to Halloween, which maintains a general undercurrent of dread throughout.) Besides, Windsor College is hardly a dangerous location – it certainly lacks the isolation of Part One’s Californian wine country. The opening movie theater sequence adequately shows the danger of crowds, but the rest of Scream 2 hasn’t a mass of Ghostface-clad yahoos to fall back upon.

For example, the killers target sorority girl Cici (Sara Michelle Gellar, whose Buffy usually so effectively countered such threats), for fairly gratuitous, bloodthirsty reasons. She’s alone in her sorority house, in classic Black Christmas format. And yet…since Ghostface prefers to torment his victims with phone calls first, Cici has plenty of opportunity to flee for safety – which is demonstrably a few houses away. She opts not to, but instead stays in this isolated house and eventually dies, in an egregious example of horror movie stupidity. Careful, guys, we’re edging into generic slasher territory here.


There are similar moments, as crowded parties suddenly empty, with conveniently just Sidney remaining. Everyone moves exactly as Ghostface prefers – to the point of placing their heads in the specific, precise right (or wrong) spots. Again, I’ve seen dozens of lesser slashers which revel in such foolishness. Seems odd in Scream 2, though, especially when it is otherwise intelligent, such as Sidney gaining police bodyguards early into the picture. Sure, that’s how we’d actually go about such events, but knife murder is hard to accomplish when two guys with guns stand in the way.

Eventually resolving issues like bodyguards and massive crowds and a lack of isolation, stupidity takes over. Especially at the climax, because this was filmed while the script was still warm. Ghostface is able to corner Sidney when needed, with the following qualifications all in place: A) That the entire campus and city be inexplicably abandoned for hours, with no one willing to respond to screams. B) That the police be equally disinterested, despite the rash of killings. C) That Sidney’s police escort car stop at this specific red light for a specific amount of time. D) That her driver turn his head exactly when it benefits Ghostface most to slit his throat. E) That the other cop, still armed with a pistol, completely refuse to shoot a pointblank Ghostface, and instead resign himself to unplanned impaling. F) That Sidney, when presented with the opportunity to unmask an unconscious Ghostface, will not. G) That, when seeking help on a crowded college campus, she head directly to the abandoned theater building where Ghostface has set his trap. H) That off screen teleportation become a reality.

That’s all the result of making a movie on no time at all. Scream 2 enjoys advantages as well, as a sequel, one of them being it is able to specifically respond to criticisms against Scream. Mickey’s motive is to go to trial and blame the movies, like any good media whore. In true Williamson style, there is nothing conclusive, no clear argument or awareness of hypocrisy. But at least media is present, whatever is being said about it. With scare sequences set in the film school, and around news vans, it’s exciting to see a cinematic killer stalking the very environs of movies themselves. As far as effortlessly making films the text, this visual is stronger than simply kids sitting at home watching TV.

In the end, I could explore what elements I think do and don’t work in Scream 2…the movie still has a Get Out of Jail Free card. It is ironic. When the final line is a tossed-off “I think it’ll make a hell of a movie,” everything you didn’t like is written off as inessential, mere entertainment. Whatever you do like, well, it’s fun while the movie unscrolls.






















And for the record, the second killer was Billy’s mother.




RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 Scream (1996)
• No. 3 Scream 3 (2000)
• No. 4 Scream 4 (2011)

Scream, No. 3 - Scream 3 (2000)

With Kevin Williamson claiming his Scream franchise was always conceived as a trilogy, surely Scream 3 would be his opportunity to shepherd his greatest creation to its perfect…

Kevin Williamson didn’t write Scream 3. Instead, the man was busy failing to upgrade his career, by directing Teaching Mrs. Tingle and creating a tremendously unsuccessful TV show I only now become aware of, called “Wasteland.” This is a more pronounced example of Williamson’s “Dawson’s Creek”-based distraction while trying to write Scream 2. Armed only with Williamson’s story notes, penning Scream 3 fell to Ehren Kruger, whose subsequent Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and The Dark of the Moon doesn’t augur well. And somehow, despite a two-year cushion following Scream 2, 3’s production was even more messed up, with Kruger forced to deliver script rewrites all day every day. No doubt the final product seems aimless and unsure of itself, even as a simple thriller, to say nothing of Scream 3’s inability to have any deeper post-modernist point.

But wait, the problems don’t stop there! Williamson wasn’t the only one disillusioned by more Screams forever and ever; star Neve Campbell was nearly done with these things, and somehow got her contract to stipulate a maximum of thirty days filming. Add another onus to Kruger’s incapable neck, as Sidney Prescott’s (Campbell’s character) involvement in Scream 3 can only be minimal – but is still enough the movie can’t completely alter the focus. This increases Scream 3’s directionlessness.


Funny that Kruger serves director Wes Craven so poorly, when Kreuger did him so well. Though Craven clearly doesn’t care either. Given $40 million of Miramax’s money (somehow these things count as independent movies), he’s content to not even make a horror movie – with endlessly non-gothic, non-scary settings, murders staged as action sequences and edited to the bejesus, and bigger goddamn explosions than in a Bourne movie. Undoubtedly his schmaltzy Music of the Heart (the making of which legally necessitated Craven make Scream 3) is more frightening. At least they still get to advertize Scream 3 as being from “Master of horror Wes Craven,” the same genius behind The Hills Have Eyes II and Vampire in Brooklyn.

Further exacerbating the predicament, Scream 3 probably couldn’t have been a horror movie even if it wanted to. The MPAA was notoriously down on horror cinema in the ‘90s, demanding the first Scream get recut eight times to avoid the NC-17. And the Screams are among the less grotesque slasher movies. By the time of Scream 3, watchdogs literally demanded Craven not depict a single murder in a franchise defined by depicting murder. Scream 3 isn’t quite that worthless, yet what remains is about as incomprehensible as Friday the 13th Part VII. Allegedly, because Scream violence is realistically achievable (indeed, occasionally some real life asshole dons a Ghostface mask and stabs some fool, which does no one any favors), it is less allowable than, say, casual zombie evisceration. (We’re at the low ebb of a sea change at this 2000 date, as the torture pornography wave would soon render the ratings system completely meaningless.)

So Craven was asked to deliver the capping entry in a trilogy, with all hands tied, during a period where he was seriously considering abandoning horror movies altogether. How disillusioning. This leaves Scream 3 functionally unable to deliver terror. Owing to Kruger’s incompetence as a scribe, it also fails as a murder mystery. That leaves comedy the only viable form, and in desperation Scream 3 becomes the first Scream that can honestly be described as a comedy.

Without Williamson, Scream 3 is handicapped in the struggle to deliver the series’ trademark: post-modernist horror meta-commentary. Scream 2 demonstrated how commenting upon a sequel-qua-sequel is unproductive. More damningly, then, Scream 3’s focus is upon trilogies – and Kruger is so pop culture illiterate, the only trilogies he can think of are The Godfather and Star Wars (granted, this was right before a nouveau trilogy rush which brought us Lord of the Rings and The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean and whatever-the-heckamadoodle-hell-else). Honestly, for a series whose namedropping once reached the relative obscurity of I Spit on Your Grave, they can’t even muster the energy to cite The Evil Dead as a horror trilogy?! The utter valuelessness!


Thankfully, Scream 2 showed that going all ouroboros-like into one’s own existence was a superior substitute. It hypothesized the foundation of a fictional Stab film franchise, dedicated to misrepresenting the “real world” Scream events. This streamlines self-reference. Delving further into that particular rabbit’s hole, Scream 3 leaves the world of movie viewing completely, and enters the Stab set – as far as plot goes, today’s sees a new Ghostface killer stalking moviemakers.

(By the way, setting a slasher movie at the filming of a slasher movie isn’t a novel idea. It’s actually the least original of all Scream conceits. I’m struggling to recall any right now, because they’re usually DTV, but trust me these things exist. Often as Scream rip-offs.)

Under Williamson, this might’ve provided the opportunity to see how life and art influence each other in new ways, to see the Woodsboro/Windsor murders catch their own tail and pass metafictional event horizon. Under Kruger, it’s an excuse for lame Hollywood in-jokes, the sort we’ve seen made since at least 1950’s Sunset Blvd. A Scream as a lame, horror-tinged rip-off of The Player? Oh, sign me up! Yes, do!

Stupidly, the specific movie Scream 3 is concerned with is Stab 3: Return to Woodsboro (from now on, any movie lacking in an IMDb link is a fake movie – or something I already linked above). One infers Stab 2 parallels Scream 2. What is Stab 3 about, then, when there are no more real life murders to fictionalize? They don’t say, because that’s not really their concern (though it ought to be). Rather, Stab 3 is an excuse for two things: A) when characters say “Stab 3” and complain about its conditions, they really mean “Scream 3” (except when they don’t), and B) cheap soundstage versions of the houses from Scream 1 are more thematically resonant than the Scream 2 college stuff.


The opportunities for self-reference overwhelm. For the third time a Scream fails to match the promise of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, and utilizes its own “movieness” for nothing other than one-off meta gags. Going the cloy and winking route, Scream 3 gives us Jenny McCarthy’s Sarah Darling saying “Stab 3? Jesus I gotta get a new agent.” Translation: Jenny McCarthy admits she’s wasting her own time (amazing the pinup girl from “Singled Out” could even do that!). And when Jenny’s Sarah’s character Candy has but two scenes, then death, it means the same thing for Sarah, but not Jenny. And that means nothing in the film’s larger context.

Every new cast member seems distinctly un-Screamish, perhaps owing to the patent falsity of Hollywood. Hence we get unrelatable characters with Stan Lee-style alliterative names like Jennifer Jolie, Steven Stone, Rita Reynolds, Martha Meeks, Parker Posey – no, wait, that last one is an actual actress, and a damn funny one it must be admitted. As a member of Christopher Guest’s troupe, she’s gotta be. And in a franchise which has already postulated names like Gale Weathers and Cotton Weary, it takes effort to be stupider.


Speaking of those former characters, they’re back. Cotton not for long, as Liev Schrieber’s star had risen enough for him to be promoted to “contractual opening dead celebrity.” It’s a depressingly straight downfall, where Ghostface simply phones Cotton up, threatens his showering girlfriend, then stabs both of them. Despite a car race across Hollywood, there is no meta trickiness to this opening.

As for Gale (Courtney Cox-Arquette, earning that hyphen at last), she and Dewey Riley (hyphen-supplier David Arquette) are kind of the only things keeping Scream 3 afloat, especially in the early sections while a disinterested Sidney Prescott is estranged from the narrative in the countryside and getting scare sequences (overtly supernatural, and thus totally out of place) simply for the hell of it. Over time, the franchise has truly become “The Gale and Dewey Show” (it also features a literal Gale show: “Total Entertainment,” because it’s somehow illegal to actually namedrop “Entertainment Tonight” and “Extra”). As the actual impact of Ghostface’s murders is nullified, the movie is instead a bumbling comic mystery, with a killer to unmask at the end. Things couldn’t seem more “Scooby Doo” if several of the series’ cast members went on to star in the live action Scooby Doo – and they did.

Parker Posey’s actress character Jennifer Jolie joins their investigation to – Okay, I gotta pause things here to address Kruger’s retarded naming system. “Jennifer Jolie” is easy enough to decode even without another character called Angelina – and that’s without Kruger then referencing Brad Pitt! Then there’s “Tom Prinze” – a combined Tom Cruise and Freddie Prinze, Jr. – and “Tyson Fox” – Tyson Beckford and Jamie Foxx. These are like the joke names a screenwriter might assign in the first draft, then later do a “find and replace” on, only Scream 3 never even had a first draft – and you can rest assured this is commented upon, because Stab 3 = Scream 3 = licking your own [CENSORED].


Now to pick apart Parker Posey…Her Jennifer Jolie plays Gale in Stab 3. Because Jennifer completely cannot separate reality from fantasy, she believes she’s Gale Weathers – even while wandering alongside Gale Weathers. In a different sort of movie, this conceit would be very amusing, and Posey performs admirably for that movie. She imbues her every movement with comic business of a most Looney Tunes sort – even turning in a hallway become funny. Total credit to Posey, who does what’s asked of her and then some. Clearly Scream 3 intends comedy. Otherwise, why cast Patrick “Puddy” “The Tick” “Kronk” “Brock Sampson” “Joe Swanson” Warburton as one of Ghostface’s more disposable victims? And why create a massive continuity problem with Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse by giving Jay and Silent Bob a backlot cameo – even while their Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back imagines Scream as a fictional franchise?


Oh god, those cameos! Using Jay and Silent Bob is like placing an Airplane! gag in the middle of The Sorrow and the Pity. There are many others – and it’s the most reductive movie-about-movies joke. Roger Corman (ALL HAIL!) appears as a movie producer. (I unequivocally loves me some Roger Corman!) Carrie Fisher appears, not as Carrie Fisher, but a lookalike who didn’t f@&% George Lucas. Self-deprecation and all, but the celebrity paradox is dangerously toyed with when she nearly says Gale Weathers looks like Courtney Cox.

Which begs a point: If both exist (as does Jennifer Aniston, by Scream 2’s admission), why wasn’t the fictional Cox considered for Gale in the Stabs? Actually, in a universe where Return of the Jedi, Halloween and The Silence of the Lambs all exist (to cite three randomly citations), it’s hard to picture something as evidently cheapjack as the Stabs taking off as they did. And aren’t these movies libel?! How can they tell fictional stories of Sidney Prescott by name with total impunity? And she’s not even a celebrity! She’s a girl who’s survived multiple murder sprees (get ready to add one more to that tally). Movie rights can be signed away, sure, but the ongoing Scream predicament seems manufactured to allow the perfect meta conditions.

So the very nature of the Stab franchise becomes hard to take seriously – a gicockulous failing when your entire franchise is about how franchises actually function (and then we bloggers come along to discuss the franchise franchise’s franchiseness). Other little series problems creep up. For all the “anyone can die” talk Jamie Kennedy supplies (despite his character’s being killed off in 2, his VHS collection specifically anticipates Scream 3’s conditions), one thing is certain: Sidney, Gale and Dewey cannot die. (Indeed, Dewey’s been murdered twice already, only for preview audiences to continuously will him back to life.) They alone survive Scream 3 (along with a fourth character I shan’t even discuss – played by Patrick Dempsey), and everyone else is automatically marked for death, and hasn’t a chance. And we’re to that slasher stage where you simply stop fearing for the meats’ lives.


Contractual survival greatly diminishes whatever menace Ghostface conveys – and what menace is that anyway now that it’s the fifth guy donning the costume? Ghostface “himself” – would-be horror movie icon – is operating on a greatly reduced level. That’s even while he’s a telephone-based supervillain. For Ghostface is a klutz…this has been consistent throughout the series, and actually works to give his victims a fighting chance. But once we know Cotton Weary is destined to bite it, nothing he does to Ghostface matters. In lengthy, lengthy fight scenes, Ol’ Ghosty can be knocked unconscious, crushed with bookcases, thrown multiple stories, you name it, and still murder precisely when Kruger’s script pages demand it. And he’s not powered by the supernatural immortality of a Michael Myers; narrative necessity alone dictates Ghostface’s capabilities.

Sticking with that thread…Randy promises trilogies deliver certain goods mere Part Threes do not. To rephrase his maddeningly useless new Rule Trio (Randy seems under the fool misconception his movie ranting helps people, a fantasy he shares with Kruger, Craven, and most bloggers), here is how a trilogy must end: With retcons! The past must be altered, and the franchise’s foundational moment (the rape/murder of Sidney’s mother Maureen Prescott) is rephrased so that today’s villain is the mastermind. To explore the twist without revealing the killer (I haven’t even mentioned his character), we now have a “director” who’s somehow convinced four other serial killers, mostly from one small town, to wildly assassinate tertiary people, all in revenge for Sidney Prescott’s horrible sin of being daughter to a woman who once whored around Hollywood and…um…uh…


We’re getting out of hand here! Whenever a Scream tries to postulate anyone could be the killer, it suggests a universe where murder is the logical response to any personal setback. Wildly misdirected murder. What did most of those dead in Scream 3 do to deserve it? They got cast in a horror movie. Sometimes, they’re merely people near those cast in a horror movie. They have nothing to do with Sidney Prescott, not directly. (Yet somehow her dad escapes the trilogy unharmed…hmm, how’ll Scream 4 deal with this one?) And the specific reason for Ghostface No. 5? He was a motherless bastard child! Good thing most bastards don’t orchestrate several dozen murders over multiple years, or this world would be far more messed up.

(And in a series which has twice used the “two killers” twist, it is – SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER – quite a letdown when Scream 3 has but one. And the actor – TV guest star Scott Foley, most famous for getting divorced by Jennifer Garner in favor of Ben Affleck [if Scream 3 were made later, there’d be a character called “Ben Damon”] – this actor has no ability to monologue with conviction.)

If Scream was really planned as a franchise, to the degree Williamson suggests, surely its final twists wouldn’t jibe as poorly as they do. For all this goofy trilogy talk, instead the Screams boast the wear and tear of a normal franchise. Repetition destroys what was once effective, and the plot grows harder to accept with each passing entry. If we still must believe intent on Williamson’s part, then this all falls back to that troublesome irony. The first Scream gave itself the right to occasionally suck by admitting it sucked – not a good argument, but one of its likely stances. Likewise, are sequel problems acceptable when you’re trying to make bad sequels? No, not really. Even if this were the case, bad quasi-badness is surely out of the grasps of the genuinely bad Kruger. And that points to Scream 3’s ultimate flaw – abandoned by one creator and barely serviced by another, the artifice of its own importance crumbles.


RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 Scream (1996)
• No. 2 Scream 2 (1997)
• No. 4 Scream 4 (2011)