Amazon.com video review:
When Randy the video geek rattles off the rules of surviving a horror
movie in Wes Craven's Scream, he speaks for a generation of filmgoers
who are all too aware of slasher movie clichés. Playfully scripted by
Kevin Williamson with a self-aware wink and more than a few nods to its
grandfathers (from Psycho to Halloween to the Friday the
13th dynasty), Scream skewers teen horror conventions with loving
reverence while re-creating them in a modern, movie-savvy context. And so
goes the series, which continues the satirical spoofing by tackling (what
else?) sequels while sustaining its own self-contained mythology. Catty
reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) turns grisly murders into lurid
bestsellers, a cult of killer wannabes continues to hunt spunky
psycho-survivor Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell) for their 15 minutes of fame, and a
cheesy movie series (Stab) develops within the movie series.
Scream remains the high point of the series--a fresh take on a genre
long since collapsed into routine, but Scream 2 spoofs itself
with witty humor ("Why would anyone want to do that? Sequels suck!" opines
college film student Randy), and delights with more elaborate set pieces and
all-new rules for surviving a horror movie sequel. The endangered veterans of
the original film reunite one last time for Scream 3, which plays
out on the movie set of Stab 3. (It's a trilogy within a
trilogy!) With Williamson gone, replacement screenwriter Ehran Kruger tries
to mine the formula one more time. It's a little tired by now, and pale
imitations (Urban Legend, I Know What You Did Last Summer) have
further drained the zeitgeist, but the film bubbles with bright humor, and
director Craven is stylistically at the top of his game. As a trilogy, it
remains both the most consistently entertaining and self-aware horror series
ever made. --Sean Axmaker
Amazon.com Essentials:
With the smash hit Scream, novice screenwriter Kevin
Williamson and veteran horror director Wes Craven (A Nightmare on
Elm Street) revived the moldering corpse of the teen horror
picture, both creatively and commercially, by playfully acknowledging
the exhausted clichés and then turning them inside
out. Scream is a postmodern slasher movie, a horror film that
cleverly deconstructs horror films, then reassembles the dead tissue,
and (like Frankenstein's monster) creates new life. When a serial
killer starts hacking up their fellow teens, the media-savvy
youngsters of Scream realize that the smartest way of sticking
around for the sequel is to avoid the terminal behaviors that
inevitably doom supporting players in the movies. They've seen all the
movies, and the rules of the genre are like second nature to them. One
of the scariest/funniest setups features a kid watching John
Carpenter's seminal Halloween on video. As Jamie Lee Curtis is
shadowed by Michael Meyers and the kid on the couch yells at her to
turn around, Craven reverses his camera and we see that the kid should
be taking his own advice. The fresh-faced young cast (including Drew
Barrymore, Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Courtney Cox, and David
Arquette) is fun to watch, and their tart dialogue is sprinkled with
enough archly self-conscious pop-culture references to make Quentin
Tarantino blush. The digital video disc includes an audio
commentary by director Craven. --Jim Emerson
