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By Hook, By Crook & By the Book

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I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER

 3 Stars  1998/18/96m

“Some secrets will haunt you forever.”

Director: Danny Cannon / Writer: Trey Callaway / Cast: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., Brandy, Mekhi Phifer, Matthew Settle, Muse Watson, Jennifer Esposito, Bill Cobbs, Jeffrey Combs, John Hawkes, Jack Black.

Body Count: 9

Dire-logue: “This is the worst vacation of my life: I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m fucking horny and personally I haven’t seen one Goddamn psycho killer.”

If I Still Know What You Did Last Summer were not so ridiculously bad, it’d be two-star city for the most ridiculously named sequel going. Even after it grossed about half the original’s box office, someone involved with the production (possibly Producer Neil H. Moritz) admitted that the wrong script was chosen.

I Still Know is a collage of Slasher 101 cliches, godawful dialogue and performances most of the cast members would likely wish to forget, most of them phoning in hammy recitals as everything unfolds in the most predictable of manners. Nevertheless, upmarket production values and some saving graces still make it better than most of the contemporary Scream pretenders that surfaced around the same time (The Clown at Midnight comes to mind).

Another year has passed and Julie James (Hewitt) is back in college, struggling with nightmares that eeeevil fisherman Ben Willis is coming back for her after she escaped the slashings of his oversized, rather phallic hook on July 4th, last summer. Phallic, you ask? Look at the artwork; pointy hook slashing towards Hewitt’s much-contemplated cleavage. Anyway, her boyfriend Ray (Prinze) is acting a bit arsey and her roommate Karla is pushing her towards the affections of dorky friend Will.

When Karla wins a radio contest that rewards her with four tickets to the Bahamas, Ray continues his arsey behaviour, neither confirming nor declining the free trip but telling Julie to go if he doesn’t make it. This is an especially fortuitous outcome for The Fisherman, who has gained psychic powers in his gap year and can tell exactly what highway Ray (plus an unlucky buddy) will drive along so that he can set up a faux road accident. He also knows exactly where the truck will stop. Ray escapes the hook but is too late to stop Julie going off to the Bahamas.

At the Tower Bay resort, holiday season is over and storm season is in, meaning only the “lucky” competition winners are there along with a skeleton staff, who will naturally be laid to waste to hike the bodycount as far as it can go. However, before people start dropping like flies, Julie becomes aware that all is not what it seems. The others blame it on her paranoia, but then, how do you hack into karaoke machine lyrics and change them to a sinister message…?

Sing it girl! Whether or not this was intended to be a hallucination of Julie’s is not clear but miraculously none of the other four people present notice the sudden change from I Will Survive’s chorus to “I still know what you did last summer…” A short time later, Julie finds a body in the closet, which is magically gone when she raises the alarm. Everyone ignores her again and even she gets talked into writing it off and going for a tanning session!

Eventually, the others are convinced when bodies begin falling out of washing machines and stuff and the chase is on. I Still Know kicks into gear at this juncture with a very nicely done chase as The Fisherman accosts three women through the attic of the hotel, cornering them at various times until they escape at the last second. Yes, it’s a complete retread of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s frantic rush from the first film, complete with the “hurry up and open the door!” moment.

Much material is repeated from numero uno; the body that Julie finds which then disappears without a trace of it ever being there. One must ask how Ben Willis is able to clean up so quickly? Then there’s the scene where she gets desperate and, as she yelled “What are you waiting for, huh?” last summer, this year it’s “Come and get me, I’m right here!”

What detracts from the horror is how laughable things become. The cliches come so thick and fast that it’s like Scream never happened. Gone is all of the intelligence of the first film, replaced by naivety and annoying behaviour: Karla finds herself on top of a glass roof and tries to stand up. The glass on one panel begins to crack so what does she do? She simply brings her other foot on to the same pane of glass, doubling the weight on the already splintering surface.

Add to this, there’s a sort of weird narration in the dialogue. Karla (again) goes to a door and sees it’s chained. She’s alone so why say aloud “damn, it’s locked”? Then Will appears, scaring the girls, steps into the light and utters a line of dialogue. Then Julie says; “it’s just Will.” FFS. Shouldn’t this be consigned to the commentary track?

So The Fisherman, now with a hook in place of the hand he lost at the end of the first film, is not only psychic but can teleport to precise locations around the hotel locus using his prior knowledge. When someone finds themselves alone, they tend to pause and listen for something (what they expect to hear is a question that’ll die with them) and the killer simply opens the nearest door over their shoulder and creeps up for the kill.

A half-decent twist is revealed at the end (though someone told me what it was before I saw it) and Ray and Julie are reunited to take on Willis, who advises a gun-toting Ray: “Think about is boy, you’re no killer – that’s my job.” Jesus wept.

Needless to say, I was left with questions:

  • Are we to believe the killer shelled out for four plane tickets plus accommodation just to get Julie to the island?
  • Why would the hotel accept guests during storm season and why does the ‘season’ last only about 18 hours?
  • When Julie is stuck in the tanning bed, why don’t they just turn it off – or at least down – before smashing it open with a barbell?
  • Where do the 50-odd other tourists all vanish off to minutes after the group arrives?

A film baren of any insight or intelligence but fun all the same with some nice visuals and that great chase scene. Prinze is given little to do and what he does get isn’t done very well; Brandy is surprisingly tolerable as the loyal BFF but talks as if she’s trying to hawk her latest album by reciting the lyrics and saying “girl” a lot. But the cast list is good with Jack Black in a bizarre uncredited role, pretty much playing himself. Hopes for a (related) third film effectively died along with the hotel staff and so unless the surviving characters sign on for a “15 years later”-style opus, their fates are uncertain. Instead we got I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer.

Blurbs-of-interest: Jeffrey Combs was in Frightmare and Castle Freak; John Hawkes was in Night of the Scarecrow and Identity.

If you, like me, think the title sucks, other reported working titles for this film included:

  • I Know What You Did Last Summer 2 – ok.
  • I Know What You Did Last Summer… The Story Continues – uuh…
  • I Know What You Did Two Summers Ago – yikes!

Second time’s a charm

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SCREAM 2

4.5 Stars  1997/18/115m

“Someone has taken their love of sequels too far.”

Director: Wes Craven / Writer: Kevin Williamson / Cast: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Liev Schreiber, Jerry O’Connell, Jamie Kennedy, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Timothy Olyphant, Laurie Metcalf, Elise Neal, Jada Pinkett, Omar Epps, Lewis Arquette, Duane Martin, Portia De Rossi, Rebecca Gayheart, Tori Spelling, Heather Graham, Roger Jackson, Christopher Doyle, Philip Pavel.

Body Count: 10

Dire-logue: “Is that the best you can do? ‘Cos Billy and Stu were much more original.”

With slight improvement on the original, Scream 2 is my favourite in the series …so far. Who knows what the fourth movie will have in store? Well, we all will this time next month.

A year or maybe two after the events of the first movie, a trashy slasher flick, Stab, based on Gale Weathers’ book, The Woodsboro Murders, sees its opening weekend thwarted by the gruesome double murder of a couple in the cinema. The scene brings back memories of the prologue from He Knows You’re Alone but is ultimately ruined by the frankly hilarious death-face of Jada Pinkett who manages to make her character one of the most annoying in little more than a few minutes on screen.

Turns out that the dead kids went to the same college as Sidney Prescott and also film geek extraordinaire Randy, who find moving on with their lives difficult with all the attention garnered by the book, the movie and now the murders, which sucks in Gale Weathers, Deputy Dewey and also Cotton Weary, he who served time for the murder of Sid’s mom before it was revealed he was innocent. And now he wants compensating.

It becomes apparent that the killer – or killers – is keen on picking up where Billy and Stu left off, taking out college kids, eventually cutting closer to Sidney. But who? And why? And who?

Scream 2 was released at the very peak of the genre resurgence, quick on the heels of its predecessor to keep the various other high-budget slasher flicks trailing behind, rapidly building a name for itself by upping the ante rather than merely replicating the formula.

The schtick they pedal this time is all to do with sequels, follow-ups and such, from Randy’s explanation of how horror sequels work (during which he drops a subtle hint at who the killer actually is before we even know), to Sidney’s drama production of Cassandra of Troy – Troy of course being famously built of the remains of the destroyed city just as a sequel is built on the foundations of the previous film.

Craven and Williamson flourish here, both in content and presentation, giving Scream 2 the same sort of zenith as Final Destination 2 and Friday the 13th Part 2. Not to say those films are necessarily the best of their respective series’ but they both represent their franchises finding their beat, although very few film series’ manage to retain the quality of their better output. In the case of Scream 2, everything is on point, almost perfectly pieced together in a big slasher flick jigsaw of numerous suspects, red herrings, heroes and villains; the body count is liberal without going ballistic and it’s sufficiently grisly and occasionally scary.

Great scenes that play about with bits from the first film include select moments from Stab – which Craven himself said was supposed to represent how a hack director would’ve approached Scream – the best part doubtlessly being when, after Sidney quipped to Tatum and Dewey that a film of her life would end up with Tori Spelling cast as her, who else should turn up in the role but Tori Spelling? Excellent.

Clocking in at five minutes short of the two hour mark (almost unheard of in these parts), there’s lots of time for various sequences to be slowly drawn out, like Gale’s cat and mouse chase through a studio, that massively tense escape from the totalled cop car and, of course, the unmasking ceremony, when Sidney faces up to what the killer, or ers, have in store for her as a motive this time.

The finale is good n’ strong. The revelation concerning the murderers was a wonderful homage to a very influential slasher film of olde and while I smugly guessed one part of the outcome, another part had me going “oh yeah! Duh!” Sidney puts up a good fight, using the props of the Cassandra stage we saw earlier to fight back and is eventually caught up in a bizarre stand-off between unlikely characters.

Of course, lots that happens can be boiled down to huge creative license: how people end up in particular places at just the right time is something that we get used to in any horror film but here it’s not so much that characters make stupid mistakes like splitting up to search for someone or going to find out what that scraping noise outside is, they’re jockeyed into position by the killer and are played, some of them throughout the entire film, by the sociopath.

As before, cameos come thick n’ fast from Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, in an almost throwaway part as ‘the sorority victim’ – it was difficult not expecting her to whip out a pointy stick and kick ass; Joshua Jackson is in the film class scene and not-then-famous Portia De Rossi and Rebecca Gayheart (the latter turning up in the following year’s Urban Legend) are a couple of dizzy sorority chicks – or are they?

Ultimately marred by the fact that you can’t really see it without knowing the first film, there’s little else to criticize: defenders of the old school had already prepared flimsy arguments against big-budget horror ‘bastardizing’ the legacy of a gazillion skid row projects from fifteen years ago but the fact is that if there was no Scream and Scream 2, slasher films would’ve simply faded away altogether, save for the odd shot-on-camcorder shelf filler and for that they should be lauded rather than lamented.

Girl power!

Blurbs-of-interest: Sarah Michelle Gellar was Helen in I Know What You Did Last Summer; Lewis Arquette was also in The Horror Show; Christopher Doyle was in the Toolbox Murders remake; Rebecca Gayheart was also in Santa’s Slay and had a cameo in Urban Legends: Final Cut; Heather Graham was in From Hell; Elise Neal was in Holla; Omar Epps was the lead in Trick; Joshua Jackson was in Urban Legend.

Please shut down your genre and reboot

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SCREAM

4.5 Stars  1996/18/107m

“Someone has taken their love of scary movies one step too far.”

Director: Wes Craven / Writer: Kevin Williamson / Cast: Courteney Cox, Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Skeet Ulrich, Rose McGowan, Matthew Lillard, Jamie Kennedy, Drew Barrymore, Joseph Whipp, Henry Winkler, W. Earl Brown, Roger Jackson, Linda Blair.

Body Count: 7

Dire-logue: “She wants to kill herself but then she realises that teen suicide is out this year and homicide is a much healthier therapeutic expression.”

Gazillions of people around the world have reviewed Scream so what am I supposed to write that makes a difference? Probably nothing I can write really. It’s influence is undeniable and it was thankfully not a cheap, transparent product that pissed off a generation of horror fans.

What I could knock Scream for is not its fault, more the society that received it. All manner of critics lined up to heap praise on the film for intellectualising dumb slasher films, used a lot of big words in doing so, happy that they were able to say that the genre sucked when, quite apparently, they’d never seen more than a handful of slasher films in the first place.

Post-modernism was the key term linked to mucho reviews of the film when it came out and, yeah, okay, it’s a slasher film where the characters know how slasher scenarios work, but in spite of what everyone said at the time, it certainly wasn’t the first horror movie to be self-aware. Even forgotten gutter dwellers like Blood Sisters had one-liners along the lines of “and just like any horror film, the van won’t start!”

What Kevin Williamson achieved with his screenplay was toying with the audience’s expectations: unlike most critics, they knew more about how these films worked and it was they who the film set out to impress. This was achieved largely by a series of homages to the dead teenager movies of yore, dismissed by many and likely cluttering the resumes of several big Hollywood stars who didn’t want to be associated with that trash. Scream reconciled the genre to this effect, giving it a geek-chic makeover and rendering it cool to like, underscored by the presence of Jamie Kennedy’s Randy – a video store clerk who lectures the teens of Woodsboro on the ‘rules’ of the scary movie. Yes, it was now cool to talk about Prom Night in the light of day. Of course cool defined in a sort of Central-Perk-irony way…

Aided no end by the harvesting of several important players; Wes Craven hadn’t had a box office hit in some while but was still able to surf his I-made-Freddy wave into the directors chair and a horror film that can nab Drew Barrymore for a 12-minute cameo also put bums on seats.

Williamson and Craven adorned their film with young actors plucked from various TV shows, gave them dialogue more substantial than “quit screwing around” and a modicum of intelligence that is fair to say was missing from most of the campers at Crystal Lake. Again, in the wave of films that followed, the Dawson’s Creek-style verbosity of the youthful casts became occasionally annoying, wheeled in to replace the exploitation elements of the 80s – it’s worth noting that in the big studio slasher films of the 90s movement, there was hardly any skin on show at all.

Neve Campbell, then on Party of Five, was cast as the put-upon final girl, Sidney Prescott, whose mom was raped and murdered the previous year. With the case shut and bolted, Sid’s happy to get on with her life until a ghost-masked killer begins playing with her and laying to waste random townsfolk, including some of her friends, eventually causing her enough grief to question the truth about her mother’s death…and life.

Almost every character who appears is a suspect to some degree: Sidney’s nemesis, cheesy reporter Gale Weathers (Cox, borrowed from Friends) is back stirring up shit she doesn’t want to face and her ‘bubble-butt’ boyfriend Billy (Ulrich) is handily on scene to rescue her after the killer takes his first swipe – coincidence? Even ancillary cast members employ suspicious expressions here and there, wear boots that look similar to the killer’s and say things, meaningless things, that cast the smallest of shadows over their trustworthiness.

suspects-2
The climax may look like standard fare now but at the time was something new, down to the exposition and the why’s, how’s and when’s that fill in all the blanks neatly and it’s then down to Sidney to survive. And survive she does, with more grit and gusto than most final girl’s since Heather Langenkamp rigged a whole Home Alone full of tricks to hurt Freddy Krueger.

The end of Scream is especially interesting in comparison to its 80s ancestors, where the victims were interchangeable clones of those from the previous sequel. Here it was the survivors who moved intact from film to film while the killers identities were altered, although always related to earlier events. Scream was the first slasher flick in a long time to allow more than one female character to survive, ushering in a new breed of heroines who were smarter, harder and always more personally involved with the killer than before.

There was no doubt Scream would be successful: it had stars, bankable production talent and a budget large enough that would’ve made half a dozen indie films of the same ilk. But even cumulatively they would’ve grossed only a fraction of the box office if they’d made it past video releases at all. Besides Barrymore’s turn at the beginning, there are cameos from Linda Blair as a pushy news anchor and Henry ‘The Fonz’ Winkler as Sidney’s high school principal.

Beyond the ka-ching of its big screen run, Scream has become synonymous with almost every slasher film that’s followed it. Dusty old scripts were soon dug out of vaults and flung into production; I Know What You Did Last Summer appeared only months later, more traditional in its plot but taking on board much of the formula. Halloween was resurrected; Urban Legend pulled together every cliche in the book and gave them a good varnish; and as movie magazines declared teen horror ‘out’ around the release of Scream 3 – which, for the time being, wrapped it up – Final Destination appeared and started its own cycle.

The good done by the film far outweighs the bad, which, to some was a kind of cover-up of embarrassing old cliches in favour of trendy dialogue and depth of character where there sometimes didn’t need to be, but also its ongoing position as “the only slasher film you need to see” is detrimental to the myriad of great flicks around, even if they might not take a trip down self-referential alley but the paradox is that if it hadn’t been for Scream they probably wouldn’t have been made in the first place!

And that irksome little thing about referring to horror movies as “scary movies”, as if the former is a dirty word that one does not utter in high society – what’s with that?

Blurbs-of-interest: Cox, Campbell, Arquette, Kennedy, Jackson, Craven and Williamson all returned for both sequels (in some form or another); Arquette and Cox were in The Tripper (which he directed); Drew Barrymore had previously taken on final girl duties in 1989’s Far From Home; Matthew Lillard was previously in Serial Mom; Joseph Whipp was one of the cops in the original Elm Street; Linda Blair was in Hell Night.

Guttenberg Lives!

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CORNERED!

3 Stars  2009/18/83m

“The face of evil.”

Director: Daniel Maze / Writers: Maze & Darrin Grimwood / Cast: Steve Guttenberg, James Duval, Elizabeth Nicole, Peter Story, Eduardo Antonio Garcia, Ellia English.

Body Count: 6

Dire-logue: “Are we playing cards or sucking dick here?”

A zipper-faced slasher is hacking up convenience / liquor store patrons in LA. There’s a $500,000 reward on his head that a group of employees at a dead end store discuss at the end of their day, including how they’d choose to do away with the psycho if they ever crossed paths with him.

There’s Steve the a-hole boss, his cold-turkey suffering nephew, Jimmy, donut-obsessed Donny, supersized phone-sex operator Mona and local hooker Jess. Steve Guttenberg is Morty, the delivery guy.

An altercation with a local hobo breaks the front door, which is quickly boarded up, thus locking the group in for their late night poker game and soon locking the killer in with them…

In true generic style, each person finds a reason to go downstairs into the store and gets murdered in the same way that they suggested they’d do away with the loon. Ironic. The killer must’ve been listening into their conversation…!

Cornered! has pleasant echoes of 1988’s Intruder, though the run-down store is a lot smaller than Walnut Lane Supermarket and has fewer weapons for the killer to pick from, though he does do away with one schmuch with a pair of Cornettos! It’s as predictable as they come but putting a little effort into the photography and characters makes the world of difference between this and, say, Somebody Help Me, where I just wanted the cast to die quickly and neatly.

Going against it, the identity of the killer is evident from the off but it allows for lines almost as corny as those in Intruder: “Clean up in aisle 3!” There’s also a thick wad of conveniences (well, it is a convenience store) and dumb reasons for people to split. When one guy finds a lengthy blood trail where the previous victim’s corpse has been dragged away, he calls out: “I see you shithead… I followed your trail of ketchup!”

A nice one-off with the is-it/isn’t-it appeal of seeing Guttenberg back on screen, you could do a lot worse than this. And I have.

Blurb-of-interest: James Duval was in The Clown at Midnight and May.

Hippie Hippie Shake n’ Slash

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THE TRIPPER

3 Stars  2006/18/94m

“Move over Jason. Look out Freddie. Heeere’s Ronnie!”

Director: David Arquette / Writers: Arquette & Joe Harris / Cast: Jaime King, Lukas Haas, Thomas Jane, Paul Reubens, Jason Mewes, Balthazar Getty, Marsha Thomason, Stephen Hrath, Paz de la Huerta, Richmond Arquette, Rick Overton, Redmond Gleeson, Chris Nelson, David Arquette, Courteney Cox.

Body Count: at least 23

Dire-logue: “Sir, will you spank me? My father never spanked me. I’m in desperate need of discipline.”

As actress Marsha Thomason points out in one of the DVD extras, being British, we have limited knowledge of American politics. Furthermore, while I have clear memories of Ronald Reagan being President, all that he did or didn’t do was eclipsed for us by what Maggie Thatcher was doing here.

Therefore, I may have entirely missed the point David Arquette was trying to make with The Tripper, which is essentially about the hippie revellers at a Free Love Festival being indiscriminately chopped up by an axe-wielding loon in a suit and Reagan mask. The why and what-are-you-getting-at? is what prevents things from making total sense – for Marsha and me at least.

Three peace-lovin’ couples in an old Mystery Machine-type van rock up to the event expecting to have the drug-fuelled time of their lives, but shy newcomer Samantha is paranoid that her controlling Republican ex may have followed them there, while her new beau Ivan keeps getting off his face and the others just want to have sex and get fucked up. Meanwhile, local Sheriff Thomas Jane is battling with the corrupt mayor and bogus organiser Paul Reubens and a growing stack of dead hippies. Are they being done away with by the now-grown little kid who went apeshit with a chainsaw in the prologue? Yes. Yes they are.

While Arquette (who has a small role as one of a trio of rednecks) may have mastered his character of Dewey in the Scream films, as a director he’s quite noticeably unfocused, erratically going from scene to scene without any cohesive plotting: we don’t know where characters are or what they’re doing most of the time and many of the scenes appear to be constructed around a target joke rather than have it appear incidental.

That’s not to say The Tripper fails, it’s still quite funny, liberally bloody and doesn’t shy away from jabbing at errors Reagan evidently made during his time in charge but the whole project lacks clarity. Is the objective to underscore the evils of Republicans? To try and reassert the point of the Free Love movement? A comment of capitalism, that nobody can really be trusted? Or is it just a simpleton slasher flick?

Where The Tripper unquestionably succeeds is in its cast rota: Arquette ropes in family and friends who gleefully make the best of their roles: Jane is great as the beleaguered man in charge and getting Jason Mewes to do what he does best (having cameoed as Jay in Scream 3) is always good; Courteney Cox has a small bit as an animal loving flower child. Only Lukas Haas and Balthazar Getty seem wasted (not in that sense) by the slim nature of their parts. The latter’s red herring status is completely screwed up by the fact that we pretty much know who the killer is from the outset.

I’ve watched the film three times since I picked it up and each time I’m reminded of how gorgeous California is and how awkward The Tripper plays out. It’s a bewildering film with context perhaps too upfront and deep-rooted for a bodycount pic but serves as a sort of rest-stop between Screams 3 and 4. But then maybe I just don’t get it and when somebody makes a sequel about Thatcher offing miners up north I’ll have an epiphany and give it another go.

At very least, it’s worth watching just to prove that sometimes, sometimes you get full frontal male nudity in these things.

Blurbs-of-interest: Lukas Haas and Marsha Thomason were in Long Time Dead together; Jaime King was in My Bloody Valentine 3D; Jason Mewes played a stoner (again) in RSVP; Paul Reubens was in Pandemonium; Chris Nelson was leter in ChromeSull: Laid to Rest 2; Paz de la Huerta was in The Editor.

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