Scream Review
by Serdar Yegulalp (syegul AT ix DOT netcom DOT com)August 19th, 1997
SCREAM (1996)
A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
(C) 1997 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Fiendishly smart mutation of the slasher genre, in which the awareness of the genre's exploitations by the characters is a main point.
"Do you like SCARY movies?" oozes the voice on the phone.
"Yeah, sure," says the bored girl who's getting real sick of this persistent wrong-number weirdo. She gets fed up with him calling her and pestering her about scary movies. So she hangs up. And in he comes with a knife the size of a hatchet.
And with that we are off and running with SCREAM, Wes Craven's best movie since NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET -- quite possibly his best movie ever. After NIGHTMARE, Craven went on to make a string of muddled and disappointing movies -- DEADLY FRIEND and SHOCKER stand out as two of the worst. But then he came out of nowhere with SCREAM (working title: "Scary Movie"), which takes the whole how-come-people-in-a-horror-movie-don't-ever-do-the-SMART-thing? notion, feeds it back into a fiendishly constructed story about a madman on the loose, and lets the whole thing fly. It isn't a parody -- it's too intense and genuinely scary to be one -- and it isn't a straight playback of slasher cliches. It's more like a neat new mutation of the genre, a crossbreeding of ideas to create something really new and creative.
The killer's m.o. is set up in the first scene: he calls someone, taunts them with sneering jibes about scary movies, and then come in and stabs them to death. A lot. To hide his identity, he goes running about with a black cloak and a "Father Death" mask on. (Be forewarned that there is a good deal of on-camera bloodshed in this movie -- nothing that a seasoned horror veteran can't take, but those expecting a lightearted parody a la HAUNTED HONEYMOON are advised to stand clear.) He (?) is stalking and murdering the friends and relatives of a young girl whose mother was raped and murdered by a serial killer almost exactly one year ago. Her friends -- some witty, some boorish, some hilariously insensitive -- have various theories about who, how and why. None of them are correct.
The killer continues his rampage, drawing attention from the media. One of the folks who gets interested is a tabloid-style journalist who dashed off a bestselling book about the mother's murderer -- only she's convinced that the killer was framed, and that the real perp is still on the loose. Nobody buys the theory... at first. But as the clues and bodies pile up, it's plain that something even more bizarre than what we can see is afoot.
SCREAM knows its territory. (If it didn't, I'd worry about Mr. Craven's right to his throne.) It's loaded with in-jokes about horror movies (see how many you can rack up) -- but most importantly, it's populated by people who are perfectly aware of how horror-movieish the whole thing is. Also, they don't just lie down when the killer storms in: they throw everything that isn't nailed down at the guy. Slam doors in his face. Trip him up. Smash bottles over his head. Do everything except shove him into a meat grinder (and believe me, I was expecting something along such Grand Guignol proportions). But like all good slasher villains, he does the Timex thing and keeps ticking.
The final 40 minutes of the movie is one giant blood-soaked war zone that's reminiscent of the hair-raising ending of another, quite dissimilar movie -- BLOOD SIMPLE -- which used bizarre plot mechanics and double-backs to keep the audience shrieking. By the time you get to the final act, the tables have been turned so many times you'd think they were on Lazy Susans. It's both funny and horrific, and I will not reveal a single thing about how it gets tied up, except that a couple of people have *some* of their theories about who dies and who lives in horror movies proved quite correct.
Last note: SCREAM seems to have revitalized b.o. interest in horror movies -- a waning genre since the 80s, poisoned by endless and lame sequels and hordes of uninteresting ripoffs. I anticipate a wave of imitations in the wake of this one -- and, unfortunately, another case of hardening of the arteries. SCREAM 2 is already in the works.
Three and a half out of four rubber masks.
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