BEFORE: I've got time to knock off another horror franchise before I have to link to the start of my November chain. I'm bullish on connectable horror films in the future, partially because I've got a proposed chain for Shock-tober 2022 already, and even though that may leave me with a bunch of disconnected pieces, I also made a list of franchises I hadn't yet planned on watching. Even if I knock off the "Purge" movies next year, that still leaves franchises like the "Nightmare on Elm Street" films, "Friday the 13th" movies, "Final Destination", all the "Saw" films, "Species", "Creepshow" movies, "Evil Dead", "Child's Play" and of course the obvious one, the "Halloween" franchise. There's a lot to work with, so I may never run out of horror films, but I don't have time now to research which films might help me link all the scraps I have together into a coherent chain for 2023 - it's more pressing that I put together a definitive romance chain for next February, just to make sure that none of the films left on my 2021 schedule could be crucial in making those connections. If so, then I'll need to drop them and replace them with something else before watching them in November or December.
Drew Barrymore carries over from "Spielberg", and that's why I needed to drop in that documentary in the middle of a horror chain. I hated to lose a movie with so much archive footage in it, it almost could have connected ANY two movies, but then again, it did exactly what I needed it to do. There will be more movies in the future with giant casts, for example, "The French Dispatch", I wonder when I'll watch that one, what purpose will it serve?
THE PLOT: A year after the murder of her mother, a teenage girl is terrorized by a new killer, who targets the girl and her friends using horror films as part of a deadly game.
AFTER: You learn a lot of things by watching linked movies, I can attest to that - like I already knew that the little girl from "E.T." grew up to play the first murder victim in the "Scream" franchise. Sorry, spoiler alert for a film from 1996, if that's even possible - I sort of feel like the last person in history who hasn't watched these films yet, so I don't think that's much of a spoiler. Also, last night I learned that the young actor who played Tim in "Jurassic Park" grew up and played John Deacon in "Bohemian Rhapsody", which I think is ever weirder than Karen Allen being in "Malcolm X" or realizing that the mother in "Close Encounters" also played the mother in "A Christmas Story". Sometimes I just have to note these things and move on, I guess.
Tonight's film featured a bunch of actors who were RED HOT in 1996, like Jamie Kennedy, Neve Campbell, and Skeet Ulrich. Yeah, their stars may have dimmed a bit since then, but at least Jamie Kennedy seemed aware of that fact when he appeared in that "Last Blockbuster" movie. It also comes from the writer of "Dawson's Creek" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer", the director of the "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchise, and executive producers Bob & Harvey Weinstein, now most famous for sexual harassment lawsuits. I noticed a sudden influx of Miramax films that suddenly became available on cable last year, which could mean there distribution deals were cancelled or hung up by legal issues until then, I'm not sure. I mean, good films always win out and eventually return to TV and streaming, but I do notice that they tend to come in waves.
I also find myself tonight at the crossroads of horror and comedy (sort of?) once again - but dark comedy for sure, not like "Scooby-Doo" level slapstick comedy. There's so much self-referential material here, as if the characters in this horror movie KNOW that they're in a horror movie, they talk about "sticking around for the next reel" and certain people know all the common tropes, like the fact that teens who have sex in horror movies basically are living on borrowed time, they're doomed, but aren't we all? Horror movies have RULES, and this is a horror movie, so naturally it has rules, too, but is that because it's following the genre rules, or poking fun at them? Maybe a bit of both? Don't drink, don't have sex, don't feed them after dark - no, wait a minute.
And for God's sake, don't answer the phone when you're in the house late at night - what the HELL are you doing? I'm seeing some connections to "I Know What You Did Last Summer" here, with the killer putting people through essentially a horror-movie trivia contest, only one with deadly stakes. This was maybe the first horror film to make use of this new-fangled (at the time) technology called "cellular phones" - jeez, we'd only been granted the gift of cordless phones a short time before that, and caller ID a couple years before THAT. But the kids watching this movie for the first time might not understand - people used to call other houses at random, for the purposes of humor or "pranking", and that person HAD to answer the phone, they had no choice. What it really was someone you knew, or a very real radio contest, or TV's "Dialing for Dollars"? And every time that prankster called back, the target of the prank HAD to answer, apparently, it's not like they could just turn the phone OFF or leave it off the hook, right? Wait, I think they could...
Look, the other reason I had to wait so long to watch the "Scream" films is that I wanted to wait until I forgot nearly everything I learned about the films when they were first popular, when I probably read some reviews and took in some spoilers along the way. Everything at the right time, right? So now I'm (more or less) going in to these films cold, if I knew who the killer turned out to be, I've pretty much forgotten, so that means it's OK to proceed. BUT, once the killer is revealed, typically what came before in the movie should make some kind of sense, right? And I'm just not sure that's what happens here, it literally could have been ANYBODY dressed up as the Ghostface Killer, the film makes that pretty clear, so there were perhaps "multiple outs" here, there just needed to be a motivation for WHY and an explanation for WHO. I think we get that, but tomorrow's sequel's probably going to be another crap shoot, all over again.
Even looking at the cast list for tomorrow probably reveals too much - at the very least I already knew who was going to survive the first movie, and that already counts as spoilers. It's an unavoidable consequence of linking films together via my system, sometimes it reveals too much of what's serving as a "plot". The loose plot here involves the lead female character's mother, who was murdered a year ago, and a local TV reporter, who believes that the man imprisoned for that murder is innocent, and wrote a book about that. When another killing takes place in the same town, could it be a copycat killing, or perhaps was the real killer never found?
There are like a hundred little in-jokes and Easter eggs here, from the director's cameo as a school janitor dressed like pre-accident Freddie Kreuger, to the appearance of Henry Winkler as the school principal, with Fonzie's leather jacket from "Happy Days" seen hanging in his closet. I'll try to find a list somewhere, because I do dig this sort of thing.
I'll stick it out through this series as best as I can this week, but I really hope the sequels get smarter, not dumber. Guess I'll find out - and another reason to clear this franchise from the books this year is that they've announced a new "Scream" film in the franchise for 2022...not sure if it's a sequel or a re-boot or maybe a bit of both.
Also starring David Arquette (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Venice"), Neve Campbell (last seen in "Skyscraper"), Courteney Cox (last seen in "Springsteen and I"), Matthew Lillard (last seen in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Rose McGowan (last seen in "Planet Terror"), Skeet Ulrich (last seen in "The Newton Boys"), Jamie Kennedy (last seen in "The Last Blockbuster"), W. Earl Brown (last seen in "The Highwaymen"), Joseph Whipp (last seen in "Magnum Force'), Liev Schreiber (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Henry Winkler (last heard in "Scoob!"), Frances Lee McCain (last seen in "Gremlins"), Kevin Patrick Walls, Lawrence Hecht, Lynn McRee, David Booth, Carla Hatley, Lois Saunders, C.W. Morgan, with the voice of Roger L. Jackson, cameos from Linda Blair (last seen in "The Exorcist"), Wes Craven (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), and archive footage of Jamie Lee Curtis (last seen in "Knives Out").
RATING: 5 out of 10 gallons of fake blood
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