SCREAM
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
(Dimension) Starring: Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Drew Barrymore, Matthew Lillard, Rose McGowan, Jamie Kennedy. Screenplay: Kevin Williamson. Producers: Cary Woods, Cathy Konrad. Director: Wes Craven. MPAA Rating: R (violence, adult themes, profanity) Running Time: 105 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
In the late 70s and early 80s, theater screens were overrun by a film genre which had primarily teenage audiences filling the seats and sociologists shaking their heads. It was the golden age -- if that isn't a gross misapplication of the term -- of the slasher movie, where cutlery-wielding crazies turned every possible day on the calendar (HALLOWEEN, FRIDAY THE 13TH, PROM NIGHT, MOTHER'S DAY, MY BLOODY VALENTINE) into a stomach-churning ordeal. These films usually differed only in the manner of the violent killings, leading to a numbing predictability deserving only of parody. Wes Craven's SCREAM wants to have some fun with the conventions of the slasher movie, but not at the expense of providing a few scares of its own. That presents problems as well as opportunities, as the self-aware script sometimes diffuses the tension Craven can create as a director.
In SCREAM, the students at Woodsboro High are facing more profound problems than the usual homework and bad skin. Two students have been murdered -- stalked and disemboweled by a lunatic -- and everyone is on edge, particularly Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell). It is nearing the first anniversary of the day Sidney's mother was raped and murdered, and when the masked killer comes after Sidney, she begins to wonder if the two events are related. Tabloid TV reporter Gail Weathers (Courteney Cox) wonders, too, and she becomes determined to find out the connection between Sidney and the murders. As students gather for a party, including Sidney, her boyfriend Billy (Skeet Ulrich) and best friend Tatum (Rose McGowan), the reporter stakes out the scene, waiting for the inevitable bloodbath.
As SCREAM begins, it looks like it is going to be a fairly conventional horror film, if an unusually gripping one. A 12-minute prologue finds Drew Barrymore terrorized over the phone by the killer, quizzed on horror movie trivia to save her life. Most of the familiar tropes of the slasher movie are in place -- the absentee parents, the improbably massive house with plenty of glass, the ever-alarming ringing phone -- but the sequence is still scary stuff, with Barrymore providing an effective and convincing portrait of mounting panic. Though much of SCREAM becomes a joke at the expense of monotonously violent horror films, Craven is not about to spit in the face of the genre which made his career. Horror films in general are not the target in SCREAM -- horror films with no style or imagination are, and Craven provides both throughout the film, though nowhere as effectively as the opening.
What happens between the scares is what gives SCREAM its knowing edge. Kevin Williamson's script is loaded with references to horror films -- it seems that half a dozen are aimed at Craven alone -- and loaded with characters who have seen other horror films. Many of those references are spelled out quite literally, and they are the least interesting. When one character explains the "rules" of the slasher film, including the "sex equals death" paradigm, it seems as though Williamson believes he is the first person to have noticed them. Some of the most subversive humor is the least obvious, however. One young woman is unable to escape the killer through a doggie door because -- like all horror film ingenues -- her breasts are nearly as large as her head; another running gag finds the masked killer repeatedly knocked around like one of the Three Stooges. SCREAM also turns into something of a whodunnit, a rarity among slasher films, and Williamson and Craven trot out plenty of suspects: moody boyfriend Billy (Ulrich, looking more like Johnny Depp than Depp himself), Billy's wired friend Stu (Matthew Lillard), a repressed video clerk (Jamie Kennedy), the mild-mannered deputy (David Arquette), the school principal (Henry Winkler!) and even Sidney's father. SCREAM plays with expectations effectively, making the guessing game part of the in-joke.
The guessing ends in a climax which, while certainly surprising, isn't particularly effective. It is also excessively drawn out, as writer and director seem to engage in an ideological battle over whether it is going to be the climax to a horror film or a commentary on the climaxes of horror films. In the end it is both, which is to say that it is neither. Some of the gags are quite funny, but the suspense all but vanishes in the final fifteen minutes as the characters talk their way through a comparison of this finale to the traditional finale. The script for SCREAM is not clever enough to provide a consistently witty thriller; it is sometimes witty and sometimes thrilling, but never both. That alone makes SCREAM stand out from its genre cousins, though, as Wes Craven reminds us that terror can be fun, and not simply a grueling march through gore-spattered holidays.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 scream weavers: 7.
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