BEFORE: Two roads diverge here, and I'm going to follow one path, with Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr. both carrying over from "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed". I'm going to not follow the path with Matthew Lillard carrying over to "Scream", I'm going to get there soon enough, though.
You might think, while I'm knocking off as many horror franchises as I can this year, that it would have made more sense to watch the two "I Know What You Did..." movies first, then link to the first "Scooby-Doo" film via Freddie Prinze Jr., then link to "Scream" with Matthew Lillard - but then you're not looking at the big picture that way. If I'd put the films in THAT order, then I wouldn't have been able to work in "Scoob!" the animated film, or link from "Salem's Lot" - and that meant I would have had to find a new lead-in to October. But, with just a little bit of twisting around, and sort of splitting October into two main sections, linked together with just one documentary, I can get to all the films this month that I want to get to, and still leave a valid, workable chain of horror films for 2022. I can't really see what to do in 2023 yet, it's just too far off - let me get through this year and then see where things stand.
What I am doing is recording more horror films this month, even if I don't quite know where I'm going to program them, simply because this is the month where every channel is running them. I do the same thing in February for romance films, and in December for Christmas films. I've got to burn them to DVD when I can, because this year's crop of movies might not come around again - I feel a bit like a squirrel storing up acorns for winter, only with movies. Sometimes squirrels might forget where they buried acorns, and that's good for trees - I stash some movies away when they air, and then sometimes I don't have a way to link to them, c'est la vie. But, the more films I add, the greater the chances that I WILL be able to link to them in the future.
THE PLOT: Four young friends bound by a tragic accident are reunited when they find themselves being stalked by a hook-wielding maniac in their small seaside town.
AFTER: There's a new adaptation of this story, starting THIS WEEK, of course, and it's now going to be a series on Amazon Prime. This is that streaming service mentality, of course, why just remake a movie when you can remake it into a SERIES, and stretch a story out for three or four seasons rather than just a couple of hours. I guarantee you that series is only going to dole out one or two plot points for every hour you watch, and there's never going to be any kind of resolution, just cliffhangers to bring you back next week or next year.
OK, so I'm going to get to the "Scream" series next week, and this movie's poster prominently says, "From the creator of Scream" - they're talking about Kevin Williamson, who also created or produced other horror franchise projects, like "The Vampire Diaries", "Halloween H20", and "Dawson's Creek". I assume that last one is a horror series, right? I never watched it, so I'm guessing it's about a creek haunted by the ghost of somebody named Dawson, am I in the ballpark? JK.
Seriously, though, this writer/producer had three or four hit shows on at the same time in the late 1990's/early 2000's, and later on he focuses on shows about serial killers ("The Following") and "Stalker", which I guess was about stalkers, and then "Time After Time", a series based on one of my favorite time-travel movies, in which H.G. Wells time travels to the future to catch Jack the Ripper, who's done the same. Why didn't I watch that? Probably because I love the movie version with Malcolm McDowell, David Warner and Mary Steenburgen so much, I couldn't bear to see anybody mess with it.
I feel like I probably shouldn't link from a comedy/cartoon-based "horror" series like "Scooby-Doo" to a more serious horror film about a slasher terrorizing a seaside town, I'll get thematic whiplash, right? But it's all grist for the mill here in Shocktober. I think I actually prefer my horror films to have comedic bits in them, it makes the subject matter easier to take - I just also prefer ones without so much talking dog in them, though. But bottom line here, this slasher film is just as ridiculous as a "Scooby-Doo" movie, just in a different way, it's serious-ridiculous instead of comical-ridiculous, ya know what I mean?
The set-up is great, don't get me wrong - four partying teens home from college for the summer, and they hit a pedestrian at night on a secluded coastal road. After much discussion over what to do in this situation, ranging from "We should call the police" to "We should just drive away" all the way to "We've got to get rid of this body!" Naturally, do you know how many points you get on your driving record for running somebody over? Umm, neither do I, I was hoping that you might know. Forensics being what they are these days, and car insurance costing what it costs, and reputations being what they are, maybe you can see how one friend (clearly he's, like the ALPHA) might be able to bully the other three into going along with his plan to keep his driving record clear and his insurance payments down, and that's how the group goes from "What do we DO?" to "What's the best way to dispose of a body?"
And so they find themselves down by the pier, with a sudden expert knowledge on tides, currents, and how long it might be before this body washes ashore somewhere. Jeez, don't these kids know that they have to weight the body down, and also remove the fingertips? It's almost like they don't teach this stuff in school any more. But it's also worth noting that it's very important, before you dispose of a body, to make sure that the body in question is, in fact, dead.
Otherwise, he's JUST going to recover from the accident and the subsequent drowning and circle back next year with a large hook to start taking people out, you get that, right? Even worse, he (or somebody) starts sending notes to the teens when they come home from college - the notes read "I Know What You Did Last Summer". (Leading me to ask the obvious question, namely is there a porn parody of this film, called "I Know Who You Did Last Summer"? I'm guessing there probably is...). But then the questions start - how is this guy still alive? Why did he send notes to the teens, instead of turning them in to the cops? And how is his penmanship so darn good, even with a hook for a hand?
The rogue fisherman with the hook kills one of the kids who was there that night, but that kid's not even in the group! He just sort of, you know, drove by. So this killer has a lot to learn about social cliques, and how they function. You just killed somebody on the fringes of the social circle, you idiot! The main members of the group don't even care! But then the killer goes after Barry, and things get serious. Jesus, is he going to target Helen next? All the cool kids this semester are getting targeted by psychos, my god, get with the program already!
Meanwhile, there's some attempt to find the identity of the killer (aka the man that got hit by the car, we assume) before he kills everyone in town - he's ambitious, but he seems to lack focus. If he hates the four kids who were in the car, why not just kill them outright, instead of targeting their frenemies and sisters and such? Julie learns that a local man named David Egan died that summer, and so she naturally assumes that's the name of the man they hit with the car, only things don't seem to be lining up, David allegedly committed suicide, so it has to be somebody else. This was an unnecessary fake-out, and the path from David to the real killer seemed so contrived, that basically I no longer even cared. I think I fell asleep for a bit at this point in the movie, because we all came here for slashy-slashy, not talky-talky, right?
Then there's the issue of that boat's name - so very, very contrived here, leading Julie to think that Ray might be the killer, I mean, come ON, that's just stupid. How can Ray be the slasher, when he was IN the car the night that guy got hit? It just makes no sense that way - Julie is an idiot or she's seeing connections in places where there aren't any. Right? Ray doesn't have the stones to be a killer, anyway, it's just another fake-out / time waster. Like I said, by the time they got to the truth about the slasher, I honestly no longer cared. The job of the screenwriter is to MAKE me care about this, so that's a fail.
But that's the thing about great set-ups, sometimes - the rest of the story here maybe just can't possibly match the set-up? The movie plot plays out much differently than the one in the book this was based on, but I'll allow for a few changes, to keep the book readers interested in the movie version. But I also have the feeling that there were much better ways to do everything here, there were better ways to learn the identity of the man hit by the car, there were better ways for him to let the four teens know that he knew who they were, there were better ways for that man to exact his revenge. So it's like this whole thing is just wonky across the board, you have to figure there's no universe in which the events following a car crash would play out like this.
Maybe there's just a problem with the notion that four people can just "forget what happened" that fateful night. You can't just try to forget something, it's like trying to NOT think about a white elephant, that then becomes, over time, about the only thing that you CAN think about. Sure, let's just forget about that accident and maybe murder that we all participated in. Yeah, that proposition is just doomed to fail.
Also starring Jennifer Love Hewitt (last seen in "Can't Hardly Wait"), Ryan Phillippe (last seen in "The Lincoln Lawyer"), Bridgette Wilson-Sampras (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Anne Heche (last seen in "The Last Word"), Muse Watson (last seen in "Assassins"), Johnny Galecki (last seen in "Happy Endings"), Stuart Greer (last seen in "The Gift" (2000)), J. Don Ferguson (last seen in "Something to Talk About"), Deborah Hobart (ditto), Mary McMillan, Rasool J'Han, Dan Albright, with a cameo from Patti D'Arbanville (last seen in "Fathers' Day").
RATING: 4 out of 10 beauty pageant contestants
No comments:
Post a Comment