Paradise Hills

Year 13, Day 302 - 10/29/21 - Movie #3,965

BEFORE: Emma Roberts carries over from "The Hunt".  She should do well in my year-end countdown, because actors who appear in both specialty months, February/Romance and October/Horror usually do.  A couple of other actors here will also make the countdown, one was in two horror movies that I moved from October to August to make "Black Widow" and "Hellboy" happen, she'll get a year-end nod too.  I don't move horror films out of October lightly, only when absolutely necessary to maintain the chain - and then I have to make sure that the October linking will still work without those films.  Fortunately that was the case this year, and all roads seemed to be leading to my final Halloween film, and then of course this one was a highly favored lead-in to that.  

But still, there was much debate over "Is this a HORROR film?"  IMDB just called it a "Thriller" in the keywords, and that maybe didn't feel like enough.  I don't want to just go ahead and read the whole plot summary on Wiki, because then that removes the need to, you know, watch it.  But I think I learned just enough to justify keeping it here in October, as the intro to my final film, and not the outro.  Sometimes I just have to follow my instincts, though - I went through the same thing with the "Fantasy Island" movie, which also got moved from October, but to March.  Once again, it's a very strange year. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Fantasy Island" (Movie #3,787)

THE PLOT: Uma is a young woman who wakes up in an apparently idyllic reform school for young ladies. But a dark secret lies within its walls.  

AFTER: It's another slow burn tonight, this one plays pretty straight for a good long time - about an hour in, I was screaming at the computer screen, asking, "But WHERE is the dark secret I was promised?"  I just had to keep telling myself it was on the way - such as it was with "Fantasy Island" and also "A Cure for Wellness".  Bottom line, these vacation resorts are sometimes just not all they're cracked up to be, I think this goes all the way back to Camp Crystal Lake, right? 

All you really need to know is that this takes place in the near-future, when society has been split into two classes, the "uppers" and the "lowers", and the uppers have tried very hard to bring the fashions of European royalty back into style. It's not a good look, though. The time shift seems to be necessary to justify the use of holograms and other technologies in the plot that, well, we just don't have yet IRL. Some screenwriters thus made things very easy for themselves my moving everything a couple decades ahead, then any tech needed to make the plot happen is thus readily available. 

But in the future, it seems that women's rights maybe haven't advanced as much as one might think - so still, we're dealing with a bit of "The Handmaid's Tale" here, perhaps.  Imagine "The Handmaid's Tale" mixed with "A Cure for Wellness" and maybe a bit of "Fantasy Island" mixed in, and you're certainly in the ballpark.  Or maybe that's just me, because those are three films that I've watched this year, so for me it's a lot like tying some common threads together from different films that all were (or could have been) part of the October chain.  Jeez, here I thought that the future would be female, but it turns out that any "difficult" teen girls who don't want to do what their parents want, or marry who their parents want, get sent away to an island resort for two months, and when they come back, they tend to be a lot more agreeable.  Hmmm....

Uma is one of the more difficult guests on the island, she insists on thinking for herself - how DARE she, what kind of world would that be, if women didn't marry the right man to advance her family back into the uppers class.  Chloe is a teen girl who's not as skinny as her sisters, and Yu is Asian, so even though we never really learn WHY she's there, we can assume she's got helicopter parents and she's disappointing them in some way.  (My guess is she's a closeted lesbian, you'd expect to see at least one of those in a film like this, but I wonder why they couldn't just come out and say that.). Amarna's a famous pop star who's been labeled "difficult" by her management, does that sound like any (every?) famous pop star we know?  

Escape from the island is impossible, or so the girls are told - better to just give up and change their ways, accept the future that their family wants and then they can return to their life.  But that doesn't stop Uma and Amarna from planning an escape, also the Lower boy that Uma likes (not the Upper one her parents want her to marry) manages to get a job on the island as a gardener, so he's got an escape plan of his own in the works.  But all these plans fail to come to fruition, because the girls get so tired every night, shortly after drinking their milk.  Hmmm....

It's not terribly difficult to figure out what's really going on here, when you put their situation against the framework of that class system, you should be able to put the pieces together before the characters do.  And yeah, in that sense it's exactly what you think.  OK, it's exactly that plus a little more, I got the gist of it pretty early, but then, I had the advantage of watching "A Cure for Wellness" and those other films not too long ago.  Other people might view this as some bizarre combination of "Alice in Wonderland" and "Labyrinth", but that's not what I saw.  As always, your mileage may vary, and it's up to you to decide if the payoff is worth the effort.  Making the point that women don't NEED to marry powerful men to advance themselves and should live their own lives for themselves, well, shouldn't that go without saying by now? 

I usually can't stand this actress, Awkwafina - for a while they were constantly running those commercials for "Nora from Queens" or whatever her show is called, and she's just a bad actress, she over-emotes EVERYTHING and I don't dig it.  I learned she was in "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Whatevers" and that took away most of my incentive to watch it - I'll probably get to it next year, but just like with "The Eternals", it's based on a Marvel comic I never read, so I don't care.  (There are still many, many Marvel comics I do read that aren't movies yet, like "Moon Knight" and "Champions" and "Alpha Flight", why do they have to adapt the sucky ones first?).  The best thing I can say about Awkwafina in "Paradise Hills" is that her character is unconscious for almost the whole second half, and I think that's a smart way to go with her. 

Also starring Danielle Macdonald (last seen in "Bird Box"), Awkwafina (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Eiza Gonzalez (last seen in "Bloodshot"), Milla Jovovich (last seen in "Monster Hunter"), Jeremy Irvine (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Arnaud Valois, Daniel Horvath, Joey Sordyl, Julius Cotter, Edward J. Bentley, Johnny Melville, Nick Dutton. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 yoga classes

The Hunt

Year 13, Day 301 - 10/28/21 - Movie #3,964

BEFORE: I'm not all that sure about this one, it doesn't really scream "Halloween" movie, but it's part of a trend in the last two years - if you can call two movies on the same theme a trend - about people hunting people.  The other film is called "Ready or Not" and was released in 2019, a year earlier than this one, but both movies popped up in my cable listings, and I tend to notice that sort of thing, two different movies on the same topic.  When I was making my links for the Halloween chain I realized it could fill a slot, and I thought, "Well, I've got movies this year about people stalking people, I've got movies this year about people killing people for no reason, maybe a film about people hunting people would fit right in."  I guess we'll find out - but there's no obvious link to "Ready or Not" so I'll have to save that for another time. 

(Actually, that's not true - there was a link from "Scream 4" to "Ready or Not", and it was Adam Brody, but then I had nowhere to go after that.  Actually, that's not true either, I could have gone to "Jennifer's Body" and from there to "Black Christmas" or "A Nightmare on Elm Street", but then I'd be finishing up with a different set of horror films, and then I wouldn't get to THIS one.)

Hilary Swank carries over from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer".

THE PLOT: Twelve strangers wake up in a clearing. They don't know where they are, or how they got there. They don't know they've been chosen for a very specific purpose - The Hunt. 

AFTER: I've seen other films on this topic, "Ten Little Indians" leaps to mind first, of course.  There's always somebody who thinks that the most dangerous game of all for man to hunt would logically be other people, right?  Yeah, I'm still thinking that polar bears or tigers would be a lot more dangerous to hunt, even if they don't think like humans do.  Google's now suggesting a bunch of movies to me that I've never heard of, like "Surviving the Game", "Beyond the Reach", "Race with the Devil" and so on. Yeah, thanks, maybe later.  

But since this movie is very politically charged, it kind of reminds me of "The Handmaid's Tale", in that some writer back in the 1980's looked around at the political scene, the Moral Majority and the anti-abortionists, and projected all that rhetoric into the future, thinking about what a couple of decades of stamping out women's reproductive rights might cause someday.  Here some writer looked around at the deep, DEEP divide between liberals and conservatives here in the U.S., and come on, we all KNOW there are people out there stockpiling weapons, living in the woods, and training for the zombie-pocalypse, or perhaps the liberal-pocalypse.  To them the COVID vaccine is the seventh seal, the final sign that either God or Trump is coming back to rule the world and throw the heathens into the fiery pit of doom.  Or something like that. 

Honest to God, as soon as I finished this movie I switched over to MSNBC, which I usually watch for a few hours while composing my daily limerick (yeah, I know...it was a pandemic coping mechanism) and playing some phone games in order to make myself tired.  And on MSNBC I saw a real American at a conservative rally out in Idaho, asking with complete sincerity, "We're living in the age of medical fascism, but how many more elections are we going to let them steal?  When do we bring the guns out?"  I don't know about you, but guys like this scare the crap out of me - he clearly lives on a diet of MRE's and misinformation, he's got his bomb shelter filled with crackers and beans and he's just waiting for the Proud Boys to tell him to show up with guns and ammo to "take our country back".  Not all the nutcases showed up on January 6, there simply have to be more pockets of them out there, and that's certainly cause for concern. 

But hold on a minute, this movie isn't exactly what you might think. Yes, there ARE people in this country who are ready RIGHT NOW to kill the other fellow Americans who they disagree with, or perhaps it's the ones who disagree with them.  (Some just for mask mandates and vaccine mandates, but that's ridiculous, these are things meant to keep EVERYONE safe, including the people who think they're not needed. ESPECIALLY the people who think they're not needed.  But side issue, I digress.). So naturally you might think this film is about a bunch of gun-nuts killing the liberal snowflakes who want equal voting rights for everyone, free and legal abortions, raising the minimum wage and de-funding the police in favor of more social services.  

BUT you would be wrong.  This film is REALLY about a liberal elite class who are ALSO a bunch of gun-nuts, who have kidnapped a bunch of high-profile, outspoken conservatives (aka "deplorables") and are ready to hunt THEM down. See, they flipped the script!  But this somehow simultaneously makes this film both a little more interesting and also absolutely improbable.  Liberals hunting conservatives?  We all know the other way around is probably more likely to happen, so was this just done as a fluke?  Or is the film targeting viewers in the heartland, the Red States, the breadbasket of America?  If so, I may have a real problem with that. Also, did they flip a coin to see who would be hunting whom?  Or did they try the script the other way and it just didn't work?  Now I'm curious.

Well, you got my attention, "The Hunt".  Sure, I'm intrigued, but I'm also a bit pissed off, because you're portraying people who think more like I do as the "bad" guys and I think you're trying to get me to root for the underdog, who are all different flavors of redneck conservatives.  Now maybe I don't want to see ANYBODY hunted like animals, but I suppose if I had to choose.... No, no, you're not going to lead my mind down that rabbit hole.  No hunting people, and for that matter, I'm not even really in favor of people hunting animals.  You know they sell meat in the grocery store, right?  The only P.E.T.A. organization I'd support is "People Eating Tasty Animals", but honestly I'm just too lazy to hunt and kill my own food. 

And, to be fair, the hunters here are somewhat fair - they actually provide weapons to their prey.  BUT, they also start taking sniper shots at them before their prey can fire back.  Cowardly liberals, shooting those conservatives from the safety of their bunkers.  Did they REALLY give the hunted people a fair chance, or come on, was that all for show?  Now I don't know WHICH side to root for here, the sneaky sniper-rifle wielding liberals or the plucky panicky conservatives running for the hills.  I guess it's a toss-up if you frame it like that. 

There's apparently some controversy that was stirred up by this film - Gee, ya THINK? - but I'm not going to read up on that until I finish my review, just to be fair.  The poster makes the bold claim that apparently nobody talking about the film has actually SEEN it, and I'm not sure how that particular situation comes about.  I certainly wouldn't talk much about a film I haven't seen, and then I don't end up talking too much about most films that I DO see. (EDIT: they said that nobody saw this movie because it got rescheduled once because of a mass shooting in the news, and a second time because of the pandemic theater shutdown.)

But I think even more interesting than the whole liberal/conservative face-off here is the riff on the whole Q-Anon conspiracy thing, where "liberal CEOs hunting people" is kind of equivalent to "politicians and Hollywood celebrities are drinking baby's blood in DC pizza parlors".  Is it TRUE, or is it just a rumor that somebody said, somebody else repeated and the whole thing just got out of hand. 

That being said, a LOT of people still go missing every year, and I don't think we as a society have gotten even close to figuring out where they all go.  Nobody will ever know for sure until they find themselves tied up in the back of a van, and then of course, it's too late - you're about to find out what happens to the missing people, but you're probably not going to like the answer. 

As for the movie, I'm going to give this one the benefit of the doubt, because it's got a lot of stuff I haven't seen before, but then, on the other hand, a lot of that stuff is just new ways to kill other people, and that doesn't go TOO far by my measuring system. 

Also starring Betty Gilpin (last seen in "Isn't It Romantic"), Ike Barinholtz (last seen in "Late Night"), Ethan Suplee (last seen in "The Trust"), Emma Roberts (last seen in "Scream 4"), Wayne Duvall (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), J.C. MacKenzie (ditto), Chris Berry (last seen in "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back"), Sturgill Simpson (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Kate Nowlin (last seen in "Young Adult"), Amy Madigan (last seen in "Streets of Fire"), Reed Birney (last seen in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), Sylvia Grace Crim (ditto), Glenn Howerton (last seen in "Two Weeks"), Justin Hartley, Steve Coulter (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Teri Wyble (ditto), Tadasay Young (ditto), Dean West (last seen in "When We First Met"), Vince Pisani (last seen in "Irresistible"), Jason Kirkpatrick (ditto), Steve Mokate, Macon Blair (last seen in "I Care a Lot"), Hannah Aline, Jim Klock (last seen in "Project Power"), Usman Ally, Walker Babington (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven" (2016), Ariel Eliaz, Alexander Babara (last seen in "Triple 9")

RATING: 6 out of 10 bottles of Heidsieck champagne recovered from a shipwreck

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Year 13, Day 300 - 10/27/21 - Movie #3,963

BEFORE: OK, I decided in favor of this film over watching "Dune" later this year.  It was a bit of a toss-up, but 

a) I can always get to that film later

b) I don't know enough about the linking for October 2023 to know if I'll really need this film then and

c) I realized this sort of fits in with many of the other horror films I've watched this month, namely that it takes place in a school setting, like "Scream", "I Know What You Did Last Summer", "The Rage: Carrie 2", and even "The New Mutants".  (I think the kids from "The Witch" and "Marrowbone" were home-schooled.)

I didn't have much of a "back-to-school" chain in September, (just "The Prom" and maybe "Brightburn") so maybe this all makes up for that, in a weird way?  High-school horror films can be a theme, right? Anyway, just three more horror films after this one, then I don't have to worry about it until the wrap-up in December. I tend to keep looking forward and not back, so if I've screwed up future linking by watching this one tonight, I don't even want to know about it. 

David Arquette carries over from "Scream 4"

THE PLOT: Flighty teen girl Buffy Summers learns that she is her generation's destined battler of vampires. 

AFTER: Even though I've never watched the "Buffy" TV show that followed this movie - with different actors, that is - I think I can see, for once, WHY a movie got turned into a network show.  This film ran for under an hour and a half, and it feels like the start of a story, without much follow-up.  After Buffy learns of her powers and heritage, there's just enough time for one big battle with vampires outside the school dance before the end credits roll.  There's no third act here, there's barely a second act, even.  

The show ran for seven seasons, from 1997 to 2003 (I know, it took Buffy seven years to get through three years of high school...), and of course I was semi-aware of it at the time, because I was taping TV for work, but it just didn't seem like my bag, so unless it made the headlines for having prominent lesbian characters or that all-musical episode, I didn't pay much attention to it. Still, it's a bit weird that it took me nearly 30 years to watch the film it was based on - talk about having a film fall between the cracks!  Year after year I've ignored this one, and now I've finally crossed it off the list.  It took me so long that several lead actors have passed away in the last year, like Luke Perry and Rutger Hauer.  Thankfully, Donald Sutherland is still in good health, right?  

Jeez, how can you not love Paul "Pee-Wee" Reubens camping it up as a vampire? (camp-ire?) And I've sort of come full circle here, I started Shocktober with a vampire film, "Salem's Lot", and now I'm back where I started with another one - and vampire lore didn't change THAT much between 1979 and 1992, both films featured teen vampires floating outside their best friends' bedroom window, asking to be let in.  That's a common trope, I take it. But the whole point here was to flip the vampire-hunter character concept on its ear, why does it have to always be a strong, male, white hero figure who's pure of heart and just KNOWS something's wrong with the town?  Why can't it be a blasé, jaded, socialite cheerleader who enjoys hanging out at the mall with her friends and is, like, so OVER high school?  Hey, she's got gymnastic skills, those could come in handy fighting vampires...

Sutherland plays the mysterious figure who doesn't hunt vampires himself, but is fated to find each generation's "hunter", and it took him a long time to find Buffy, simply because as the modern Valley Girl cheerleader, she's nothing like the vampire hunters from the past.  Honestly, it's a bit unclear WHY his character, Merrick, doesn't hunt vampires himself, and how old is he, exactly, is he many centuries old, or is he descended from a long line of vampire-hunter finders, what's his deal, anyway?  Instead he keeps sneaking up on Buffy as she's working out, or in the gym's showers, and he kind of comes off like a big perv here, or is that just me?  

Buffy's got a boyfriend, but she ends up bonding with the lower-class mechanic kid, Pike, after Pike's friend Benny got turned into a vampire.  Fighting the undead together can really put two people on the fast-track to forming a relationship bond, it turns out. And then one of her ex-boyfriend's friends gets vamped up and decides to play in the big basketball game anyway, which feels like a reference to "Teen Wolf" perhaps.  But they forgot to include the scene where the referee scours through the rule book and determines, "Well, there's nothing in here that says a vampire teen CAN'T play basketball..."

At that big dance, Buffy finds out that her boyfriend has dumped her, in favor of one of her friends.  Or maybe he didn't like the fact that she hunted and staked his basketball-playing friend.  Either way, it's a chance for her to re-connect with Pike, just as the vampires surround the school and demand that Buffy come out and face them.  And this pits her against the biggest, most powerful vampire around, Lothos.  Her training with Merrick can only take her so far, and at some point she has to fight the vampires her own way, with her own Valley Girl-weapons and skills. 

The only NITPICK POINT I have tonight concerns the scene when Merrick takes Buffy to the graveyard, so she can see the fresh vampires rising up out of their graves after being dead for three days.  (Wait, was the resurrected Jesus a vampire? No, he was a zombie, that's right.)  The problem with this plot point is that after a person dies these days, there's a wake, then a funeral, sometimes they wait for the weekend so more people can attend, and very often it takes more than three days to organize all that stuff, so it's often a week or more before they bury people.  And then in a small town like this, where there's been a sudden rash of vampire-related deaths, you might imagine that the town coroner and funeral director were swamped, so it could take even longer.  But all those new vampires, who died on the SAME day, apparently, and they all got buried right away?  Yeah, that seems quite unlikely. There could have been a coffin shortage that held up some of the burials, right? 

That's it, roll the credits, movie's over just a bit too soon, there's no real time here to explore what it all means in the grand scheme of things.  Writer Joss Whedon went on to create the "Buffy" TV show, among other things like "Firefly", "Angel" and a little movie called "The Avengers", before missing out on "Wonder Woman", screwing up the "Justice League" movie and then falling victim to cancel culture.  The last project mentioned on his IMDB page is a proposed reboot of "Buffy", but between the pandemic and various accusations from stars about Whedon's workplace harassment, who knows if that can even happen now.  Right or wrong, I can't say, I wasn't there - but again, right or wrong, it seems these days that if enough A-list actors say you're a problem, then it's probably going to be hard for you to keep working in Hollywood. 

Unless there's anything else, this is going to wrap up my horror-meets-high-school programming for the month - which almost seems redundant in a way, because isn't high school generally horrifying ENOUGH before you add vampires and killers to it? No? Just me? 

Also starring Kristy Swanson (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Luke Perry (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood"), Rutger Hauer (last seen in "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Donald Sutherland (last seen in "The Calling"), Paul Reubens (last seen in "Matilda"), Hilary Swank (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Paris Vaughan, Michele Abrams, Randall Batinkoff (also last seen in "Higher Learning"), Stephen Root (last heard in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Natasha Gregson Wagner (last seen in "Wonderland"), Sasha Jenson, Thomas Jane (last seen in "The Predator"), Candy Clark (last seen in "Blue Thunder"), Mark DeCarlo, James Paradise, 

with cameos from Ben Affleck (last seen in "The Way Back"), Seth Green (last seen in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Ricki Lake (last seen in "I Am Divine"), Alexis Arquette, Slash (last seen in "Lemmy"), Liz Smith (last seen in "Everything Is Copy")

RATING: 5 out of 10 pointy ears

Scream 4

Year 13, Day 298 - 10/25/21 - Movie #3,962

BEFORE: Saw this one coming, did you?  That reminds me, I should consider the "Saw" films for some future October chain - next year's already booked up, though, so I'm going to keep my eyes open over the next 12 months to see what other horror films come my way, either on cable or streaming, so I can try to put a chain together for 2023 - more on that later. 

Courteney Cox and David Arquette carry over again from "Scream 3"

THE PLOT: Ten years have passed and Sidney Prescott, who has put herself back together thanks in part to her writing, is visited again by the Ghostface Killer. 

AFTER: Well, I think this series clearly demonstrated the Law of Diminishing Returns - did there NEED to be a third sequel?  No, there did not, especially if each new one tended to be a little worse than the last one, not when they had nothing to add to the story of Sidney's mother, which seemed to be the thing motivating all the murders decades later. There's barely a mention here of Sidney's mother OR father, so then how can you say these new murders are even connected? 

Oh, right, we're back in Woodsboro, when Sidney, now an author herself of a self-help book, comes back to town to do a book signing, and basically show up Gale Weathers, who hasn't written a hit novel in years.  But the "Stab" franchise is still going strong (how can there be SEVEN "Stab" movies when there haven't even been FOUR "Scream" movies?) so I guess Gale is still seeing a piece of that action, as the writer of the original novel.  Gale and Dewey are having difficulties in their marriage, which of course predicted the real-life break-up between Cox and Arquette.  And every year around this time, the high-school kids in Woodsboro put Ghostface costumes on all the town lampposts and also host a secret underground "Stab-a-Thon" screening of the infamous movies-within-the-movies. 

This would be a terrible time for a new person to adopt the Ghostface mantle and start killing again - but really, is there ever really a GOOD time for that?  Sidney comes back to town, people start getting killed, it's almost like she's causing the killings to happen.  (You don't suppose...nah!).  Once again, it's probably someone who hates Sidney and wants to get back at her by killing her family and friends - you'd think she'd be used that that by now.  

There was an 11 year gap between "Scream 3" and "Scream 4", which might be good in a way because a whole new crop of teen-ish stars became available, but also might be bad in another way because it looks like such a blatant cash-grab, an attempt to resurrect the franchise, but without staying true to the spirit of the original.  And this is NOT a good sign for "Scream 5" (or whatever they'll call it) which is due out next year.  

I forgot to mention that "Scream 4" starts with a series of fake-out beginnings, which apparently are part of the films-within-the-film "Stab 6" and "Stab 7", so it's honestly a while here before the REAL story starts, and that all feels like another cheap ploy.  Plus, one of them puts forward the notion that it's OK to stab your friend in the gut if she talks too much during a movie, and that's really not a good notion to put out there for the susceptible youths.  

The whole endeavor's not really sending a great message out to the kids, I get that - it always seems to be that someone's under the impression that if they're the last person alive in their social circle, that they've somehow "won" something, but have they?  Sure, they get a few years of everybody feeling sorry for them because all their friends are dead, but wouldn't they rather have living friends?  Why design your movie to make murder look trendy?  Besides, teens are already doing enough damage to themselves with drugs, alcohol, skateboarding and taking the TidePod challenge, you don't have to hurry them along with a knife in their back.  

At the point this was made (unlike the first "Scream" film), telephone and voice-changing technology had progressed to the point where the killer could literally be anybody, calling from anywhere, still sounding like the infamous killer from the first film.  Still, it's odd that the voice-changers all seem to have that as the default setting.  But when the revelation comes this time about who's behind it all, I'm not sure that I found it all that satisfying, it sure didn't explain as much as that same knowledge did in the previous films. 

Now, my dilemma for tomorrow is whether to continue with the chain as planned, or make an alteration.  Tomorrow's originally planned film is optional, in that if I drop it from the chain, "Scream 4" also links to the next film in line, and the chain would close up around it.  This, however, would cause me to be one film short for the remainder of 2021.  I could drop tomorrow's film and re-add the last film I dropped, or I could make room for something else, like "Dune" - I've got two Oscar Isaac films planned for right after Thanksgiving, and I COULD slip "Dune" in between them. But, on the other hand, I'll have plenty of opportunities to watch "Dune" next year, and I'm not sure if I'll get another chance to watch tomorrow's planned film.  I've got a feeling that it could help with my linking, not next year but maybe in 2023 - ah, but that's a lame excuse, I should just watch it and dealing with future linking in the future.  Better to cross off a classic film, as that's the reason I'm doing this blog in the first place.  So that settles it - or DOES it? 

Also starring Neve Campbell (also carrying over from "Scream 3"), Emma Roberts (last seen in "Little Italy"), Hayden Panettiere (last heard in "Dinosaur"), Anthony Anderson (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Adam Brody (last seen in "The Last Blockbuster"), Rory Culkin (last seen in "The Chumscrubber"), Mary McDonnell (last seen in "Blue Chips"), Marley Shelton (last seen in "Just a Kiss"), Alison Brie (last seen in "Save the Date"), Marielle Jaffe, Nico Tortorella, Erik Knudsen (last seen in "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio"), Anna Paquin (last seen in "The Irishman"), Kristen Bell (last seen in "Like Father"), Lucy Hale (last seen in "Fantasy Island"), Shenae Grimes, Britt Robertson (last seen in "The Space Between Us"), Aimee Teegarden, Dane Farwell (last seen in "The Onion Movie"), Gordon Michaels (last seen in "This Must Be the Place"), John Lepard, Mark Aaron Buerkle with another cameo from Nancy O'Dell (also carrying over from "Scream 3"), archive footage of Simon Pegg (last seen in "The Reckoning"), Nick Frost (last seen in "Fighting with My Family") and Heather Graham (last seen in "Scream 2"), and the voice of Roger L. Jackson (also carrying over from "Scream 3")

RATING: 3 out of 10 lemon squares

Scream 3

Year 13, Day 297 - 10/24/21 - Movie #3,961

BEFORE: I fell asleep early on Friday night (busy week, for sure) and Saturday I had to work, it was the last night of an LGBTQ film festival at the theater, so my viewing of "Scream 3" has been delayed, but that's OK, I've got just enough days left in October to get all my movies watched, even if I have to work a couple more nights, which I do.  Cutting the October list down was a smart move and then cutting it down AGAIN to move one film to next year were smart moves, and now I can finish the month right on time. 

Same link as last time - Courteney Cox and David Arquette (and a few others), carry over from "Scream 2".

THE PLOT: While Sidney and her friends visit the Hollywood set of "Stab 3", the third film based on the Woodsboro murders, another Ghostface killer rises to terrorize them. 

AFTER: It's another murder spree taking place within a VERY self-referential universe, one where it seems maybe all the characters KNOW that they're in a slasher movie, so none of them really take it all very seriously, and perhaps they shouldn't, because they are. But shouldn't murder be a more serious business?  Shouldn't they be just a bit more afraid of getting killed? Nah, they're not real, what does it matter?  

Things have progressed within this universe so that the movie "Stab", based on the killings that took place in their small California town, was a big hit, and is now filming its second sequel, "Stab 3" - but they sort of missed the opportunity here to base "Stab 3", the film-within-the-film here, on the events we saw in "Scream 2", which to them were REAL, but just a movie to us. So what the hell was the plot of "Stab 2" about?  Now, within the "Scream" universe there's the real town of Woodsboro, and also a FAKE town of Woodsboro, which is built inside a sound-stage, which the cast visits at one point, and it's really hard for the home viewer to tell the difference, the set is THAT good.  If not for the fact that the houses are prop-houses and not decorated inside, you might mistake it for the real town.  Now, NITPICK POINT here, the houses used for exterior shots almost NEVER contain real rooms, or even the fake rooms used to shoot interiors, but that's they way these houses are done up, as if the shoot's bedrooms are inside the fake houses - nah, that's just not the way it's done.  Just look at "The Brady Bunch" show, the house used for the exterior shot just could not have contained the interior architecture of the Brady's living room and bedrooms, they're just two different houses.  

(My wife's Facebook memories popped up recently from our October 2017 visit to Southfork Ranch, where the TV show "Dallas" both was - and wasn't - filmed. When we visited, of course she recognized the exteriors, the swimming pool scenes were shot there, and if the show called for other Dallas landmarks to be referenced, then the actors were flown to Dallas to shoot them, but the vast majority of the show's interiors were filmed on sets in Los Angeles.  This seemed very inefficient to me, to shoot half the show in Dallas and the other half in L.A., plus it shows that actors are just like living props to producers, they don't care that an actor might have to fly back and forth ten times over the course of a season to get the show made.  Of course, maybe they shot all of the interiors for a season at once, then flew everyone to Dallas ONCE to shoot the exteriors, but that means that the whole thing had to be written in advance, continuity in wardrobe and make-up needed to be maintained, and there was no improvisation allowed in script or plot. Either way, it's a logistical nightmare - and by the time the series run was over, and they made some follow-up TV movies, I think they realized this and used the Southfork Ranch for both exteriors AND interiors.  Isn't that just much simpler?  But really, every show from "Cheers" to "Frasier" did something like this, with select exterior shots filmed in Boston or Seattle, just to add some local color to the shows shot in L.A.)

Anyway, this time the killer is knocking off the cast of "Stab 3", roughly in the same order as the killings seen in "Scream", in that the killer is finding actors with the same first names, or something like that.  This was pretty confusing, if you ask me.  And then Jay and Silent Bob showed up for some reason, and who thought that a crossover with the View Askew-niverse was warranted?  That didn't really add anything to the movie at all, so why the hell did it even happen?

But this I found funny - at the studio that's filming "Stab 3", there's a character named Bianca working a menial, thankless job in the records department who supposedly looks a lot like Carrie Fisher, and she claims that she was up for the part of Princess Leia in "Star Wars" back in the day, but she didn't get the part because she refused to sleep with George Lucas, so the part went to Carrie Fisher, that whore. This studio worker, of course, is played by Carrie Fisher.  

And of course, David Arquette and Courteney Cox were a real-life couple during the first three "Scream" films, and their characters definitely seemed to have a thing going on, though by "Scream 3" their fictional counterparts had broken up, and Arquette's former cop Dewey began dating the actress playing Gale's part in "Stab 3".  But in real life, the couple stayed together for a few more years, and then split up in 2012.  Did life imitate art here, or was it the other way around? 

There's more, because as Sidney is tracking down the secret history of her mother, whose murder took place before the first "Scream" movie, her search leads her to a horror-movie director who employed her, and was infamous for his "casting couch", and parties where women were expected to pimp themselves out to Hollywood moguls to get better roles, and this was treated as a common practice - a disgusting one, but still a common one.  And what company produced the "Scream" movies?  Miramax, of course, with executive producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein - you might recall Harvey got into a bit of trouble for this, and it's one reason why the "Scream" films weren't shown for a while, because the legal battles made the distribution of Miramax's films all screwed up.  But the "clues" about Hollywood producers and their kinks were on display here, there's a mansion with all kinds of sliding bookcases, secret screening rooms, two-way mirrors and, well, it's all implied kinky sex stuff.  

This also leads to what are essentially two versions of the same characters, both the "real" people who survived the Woodsboro killing spree and the "fake" versions of them being played by the "Stab 3" actors. Not all actors believe that they should meet the real-life people who inspired their characters, but hey, some do - and this leads to a bunch of extra characters who can be killed off by Ghostface, so it's another plus for a horror plot that's relying on a high body-count. 

No spoilers here, but there are obviously more revelations about Sidney's mother, which lead to more motivations for yet another killer - this film series treats murdering as if it's some kind of virus, this year's murders and the secrets they reveal are just going to inspire NEXT year's killer to pick up that knife and go on a spree of his (or her) own.  And nobody seems to be asking, how do we STOP this crazy train?  Is there a way to solve one killing spree without accidentally causing another one?  

Plus, they never really gave us the goods on Cotton Weary, did they?  He went from incarcerated murderer to exonerated patsy, and at the start of this film, he's a successful talk-show host (Oh, like that's SO much better?) with his hit show, "100% Cotton".  But he still came off as a guy who was probably guilty of SOMETHING, even if we didn't know what. I guess we'll never know for sure. 

Sidney is out of college in this one, and she's working as a crisis counselor, but she lives in seclusion - just in case there's yet another potential killer out there who still have a (literal) ax to grind with her.  She's very prescient on this point, of course, but by living off the grid, isn't she just putting her family members and friends in danger, because any potential killer's bound to start with them to find out her location, right?  This seems very selfish of her - but at least it does provide proper motivation for Ghostface, something that the previous films didn't always provide. So let's call that a "push". 

One of the previous "Scream" victims comes back and makes an appearance via video-tape, which also lets us all know that the "rules" for a third horror film in a trilogy are different (gee, it's almost like he KNEW a third film was coming...) and everyone is at risk in the third film, even the main character(s) can die.  But that's crazy, I think this just represented regret for that actor, he wished that his character wasn't among the victims in "Scream 2" (or...was he?) because after a year or two, he stopped getting hired for parts. 

Also starring Neve Campbell, Liev Schreiber, Jamie Kennedy (all carrying over from "Scream 2"), Patrick Dempsey (last seen in "Made of Honor"), Scott Foley, Lance Henriksen (last seen in "Dead Man"), Matt Keeslar, Jenny McCarthy, Emily Mortimer (last seen in "Chaos Theory"), Parker Posey (last seen in "The Con Is On"), Deon Richmond, Kelly Rutherford, Patrick Warburton (last seen in "Playing It Cool"), Josh Pais (last seen in "Arbitrage"), Heather Matarazzo (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), Carrie Fisher (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Lynn McRee, Lawrence Hecht (also carrying over from "Scream 2"), C.W. Morgan (last seen in "Scream"), with cameos from Kevin Smith (last seen in "The Last Blockbuster"), Jason Mewes (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Roger Corman (last seen in "Swing Shift"), Wes Craven (also carrying over from "Scream 2"), Nancy O'Dell (ditto), and the voices of Roger L. Jackson (also carrying over from "Scream 2") and Matthew Lillard (last seen in "Scream"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 script pages received as faxes (kids, ask your parents)