Scream (1996)

Ooh, Meta before Meta was a thing.

I saw this one years ago, and while I'm not a horror movie guy, I remember liking it a bit at the time because it was clever, and there was some funny stuff going on. Is my opinion higher or lower years later? It almost always changes with this length of time between viewings.

Lower. I'll give it a respectable three star passing grade, but I find the whole thing a bit distasteful now.

One of the coolest things about Ghostface back in the day is that he (or rather they) were mortal, and could be tripped up, or even stopped, with a good kick to the shins. That was a very cool and refreshing facet in a horror movie in the late 90's. Now? I think the idea of perfectly normal teenagers going around murdering their classmates out of a sense of boredom hits a little too close to home. The mundane and nonexistent motivations were the point in 1996. The idea itself was ridiculous and unrealistic back then. Now it's Dylan Roof's Tuesday. There is now a reality to how stupid and pointless the killings are. I mentioned I'm not a horror person. So I don't apparently understand how you are supposed to process that. What I saw was a movie with an okay (but imperfectly) structured mystery, a satisfying conclusion, and reasonably happy ending. As far as I'm concerned that makes the movie okay. But is the movie necessary? Are ANY horror movies necessary? I'm not sure. All I know is teenage psychopaths aren't actually funny. It's sort of funny that Stu is so mind-numbingly stupid considering how well-thought out Billy's plan seemed, but that just makes them getting as far as they did seem far more outrageous and unfair.

My favorite bits were with Gale Weathers. I like that Sydney hates her for calling her a liar for saying she witnessed Cotton on the night of her mother's murder. I love that because it turns out Gale was right the whole time. I liked the fact that it turns out the unlikable, pushy, ambitious reporter actually did her homework there, and still gets a second chance at the hero moment at the end.

This is the late 90's, the era both Kevin Williamson and Joss Whedon ruled teenage TV and movies. Both those guys basically made Aaron Spelling look like the utter chump hack he was when they came along. Rewatching the first three seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer however says Whedon is an overrated storyteller whose work doesn't hold up too well upon a rewatch. Williamson has the same problem of toxic masculinity in the male characters, but because it's a horror movie, and most of them are the bad guys, that's the point. Making Xander Harris Patient Zero of the entitled Incel movement while saying he's a hero is much more problematic. But just based on this, it turns out Williamson is a better screenwriter than Whedon is. By far.

He's not perfect. I used to love the fact that kids in Williamson and Whedon stuff used to talk like New York psychoanalysts going through their midlife crises. It made for some funny jokes and pop culture references (although as seen here, some of them, like this movie's Tori Spelling slam are unbearably mean). But it means there is no realism attached to the characters or their situations. I don't necessarily believe that characters need to do believable things or be in believable situations for a project to have value. But if they don't speak like real people, it takes me out of it faster than any chintzy special effect or unlikely plot-hole ever could. They become fiction, or worse, cartoons. And frankly, this mindset of mine is much more recent than most of my earlier Live-Journal and Toon Zone reviews would indicate. It's something I've come to recently demand and expect, and as such, often when rewatching stuff I liked when I was younger, I don't like it as much anymore, if at all.

While I'm on the subject of real-world events making the movie's subject matter distasteful, seeing Harvey Weinstein and Rose McGowan's names in the same credits for the movie gives me the chills. Obviously, crap behind the scenes of this movie sucked.

Speaking of which, in the end credits, there is a card offering "No thanks whatsoever" to the Santa Rosa School Board District Council. There is an interesting story there, I'm sure of it.

Was it scary? Sort of. Was it horrifying? Sociopaths gotta sociopaths. Was is GOOD? It was all right. Holds up better than Buffy The Vampire Slayer at any rate. ***.