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Scream Films

• The Scream Trilogy
• Scre4m (Spoiler Review)
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Oh, how I loved the Scream movies when there were Scream movies around. I wasn't much of a horror fan growing up; I was, as they say, a "sensitive child" - an unsupervised screening of Nightmare on Elm Street 3 at a friend's eleventh birthday party was enough to fuck me up for life - though, to be fair, that remains the most horrific horror movie ever made (he puppeteers that guy using his ligaments! His ligaments!!). But something about the Scream movies just brought me up to emotional speed on the thing, and suddenly I was a slasher film fanatic. I spent the back half of the '90s pretty much wanting to watch and make nothing but movies like this.

I am therefore quite pleased at the notion of a Scre4m, and figured I oughta take another look at the Scream trilogy before the new movie hits. It's been a decade at least since I've watched any of them, and my suspicion is that they haven't aged well; but then, movies like this aren't meant to age well, as they are so specifically rooted in the time and place in which they were made. In fact, if you were to select a series that defines the '90s, I'd argue for Scream. The '90s were when it simply ceased to be cool to be into anything, and the Scream movies were the direct result: post-modernism lite by way of smart-assed, smart-mouthed, smarmy-as-fuck teenagers. Who get killed. A lot.

I wrote one of my very, very, very first reviews for this site when Scream 3 came out; it wasn't a very good review, but then, it wasn't a very good movie, either. Scream 2 was always my favourite, and I sort of lived inside that movie's head for a year or two. What I like most about Scre4m as a concept is simply the opportunity to do a better capper on the things than what has come before... or open up a new franchise, if that's the way things are going. Horror movies have been treated pretty badly in the decade since Scream 3 - the indignities of Scary Movie, appropriating Scream's working title, to say nothing of the advent of torture porn and Michael Bay-produced, hack remakes of genre classics. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing Wes Craven and co. step back up and reclaim what's theirs. Slim chances, probably, but I'll take it if I can get it.

So, I'm going to look at the Scream movies again, and since enough has been written in prose about these things already, I figured I'd rather just live-blog my way through the trilogy. These are, after all, movies about watching movies. I don't remember much about any of them besides who ends up being the killer, and for Scream 2 I'm not even sure I remember both of the bad guys (though I do, of course, remember Timothy Olyphant). Do the Scream films still work? Let's find out:

Scream (1996)

0:00:00 - Wow, my DVD of this is non-anamorphic widescreen. What batshit times these were.

0:00:22 - Ah, the Drew Barrymore as Janet Leigh gag. I forgot about this. Of course it became formula that whoever the girl was in the first scene was gonna get killed - a lot - no matter who she was or how famous the actress was. This is why I'm hoping Neve Campbell pops up first in Scre4m.

0:00:37 - To be clear, I've no desire to see Sidney get gutted like a fish in Scre4m. I'd rather she turn out to be the killer, which was my hope for Scream 3 as well.

0:02:46 - But 5realz: who would live in this house? Even the pool is evil. And Jiffy Pop goes bonkers on the stove when bad shit is going down. It's beautifully lit, open-concept and expansive... oh right. It's a movie house. And here we have the key to our movie's design.

0:04:20 - "To see what your insides look like." Barrymore performs the hell out of this. And this movie stepped the level up significantly on (well-meaning?) nastiness in controlled movie situations. There is some brutal shit in the dialogue, which Craven meets with brutal shit in his camera and lighting design. Think of the fast-moving zombie innovation in the 2000s - Scream perfected the fast-moving, brick-through-a-plate-glass-window slasher movie killer.

0:10:30 - OH SHIT - the parents come home in the middle of the attack - I forgot about that. Cruel. And boy, they are not wimping out on the blood on Drew, either. This movie got blood and gore exactly right. Vivid, realistic, judicious and cinematic. I remember Barrymore going on Oprah and saying that the key to the film was simply the desire to make a for-real, full-on, scary-as-fuck scary movie, which (at that time) weren't being made any more. All well and good, but even on those terms, Scream was a major level-jump. I forgot how solid this entire opening sequence is. This was Wes Craven at age 56, for crying out loud. He's better at this by a mile than a subsequent decade's worth of young-and-hungry MTV dipshits.

0:13:07 - And here she is. People complain about Neve Campbell a lot. Looking at her in that nightie, though, I can't honestly imagine why.

0:15:15 - I remember a lot being made about lines like "the underwear rule," and the whole lingo-hip take on teen sexuality that runs through Williamson's writing. The '90s were such an awesome decade to become sexually aware in. AIDS was in the open, gay rights were in the open, people actually waited till their late teens sometimes to lose their virginity. It felt like we were taking control of the thing for the first time. Yikes, Sidney totally just flashed Billy her boobs. That's gonna get her damn near killed later.

0:19:20 - David Arquette never had a damn clue what he was doing in these movies, but I'll go to the mat for Courteney Cox. Way better, in all three films, than she ever got any recognition for. The lime-green outfit isn't helping her in the getting-taken-seriously-department, though.

0:22:29 - Marco Beltrami's Sidney theme makes its first appearance in the score. It's solid, effective stuff, and gets a hell of a payoff at the end of Scream 3.

0:24:59 - Ringing phones in this film are akin to shots of the water in Jaws. Actually, let's give the whole sound team a solid thumbs-up here: this movie is built, bricks-and-mortar, on its sound design. It's beautifully photographed and cut, too, of course... but boy, the little bits of sweetening done to the sound edit really sail the ball over the fence. The sharp cut of the phone ringers, the purring barritone of Ghostface's voice... delicious. These decisions drive the suspense like a train engine.

0:28:28 - Look, Neve Campbell's whole assignment here - besides running from people dressed like reverse-Klansmen - is to vacillate intensely between a kind of lingering melancholy and a full-on, eyes-glistening horror. She nails it in every scene. If you actually compared her against Final Girls like Langencamp or Curtis, Campbell would wipe the floor with them.

0:33:14 - "Lemme ask you this - what are you doing with a cellular telephone, son?" Oh, 1996.

0:36:39 - Hey, Sidney just punched Gale. That's all right. Suddenly I really hope Scre4m is good. Well, I guess I was already hoping that. But now I'm really hoping it.

0:38:45 - Is Liev Schreiber really only in this movie for four seconds? Caught a lucky break on that one, per the sequels.

0:40:56 - And I just noticed that W. Earl Brown is playing Gale's ill-fated, put-upon cameraman Kenny. He is the awesomeness.

0:44:37 - And now Henry Winkler is delivering a rather magnificent little diatribe, armed with the biggest pair of scissors I've ever seen. Scream was notable in another unsung regard - it was a solid whodunit built within a slasher movie frame. The trick with Billy and Stu being the killer in two places at once genuinely keeps the wheels spinning in the second act, even though Billy's stunningly me-centric, sexually-demanding dialogue should, in any justifiable universe, have sent up red-light warning signals that he was the bad guy. I can't remember: where were we in the battle of the teen sexes in 1996? Was the phrase "expected to put out" still being used?

0:47:50 - I always loved the reveal of Ghostface in the bathroom stall right there - the slow drop of the feet, the way the shroud drips down the body to complete the frame. The idea of taking the design of the killer in such an unadorned direction was another real innovation in this movie, as proven in the previous scene, where some high school kids dress up like the killer for a scare. The costume is a Hallowe'en mask and a piece of fabric; cell phones were starting to be everywhere, and suddenly you had a bad guy who could fit inside the backpack of any of the characters, and disappear just as easily. This is terrorism.

0:50:50 - The sun's going down on Final Night and we're less than an hour into the picture. That's some economy.

0:54:54 - Matthew Lillard's tongue. What is with that thing. It is, at least, eleven inches long.

0:55:45 - And here it comes: the thesis, by way of Jamie Kennedy's Randy. Boy, this character did not age well at all - but neither did Kennedy's career. But regardless, this is the moment when Kevin Williamson lays all his cards face-up on the table: we know what's going on, and it's okay to acknowledge it. Having one's cake and eating it too is a tricky thing, but Scream managed to take the piss out of the genre completely, obliterating forever the preexisting set of "rules" - and yet, it managed to be an outstanding entry in the genre at the same time.

0:58:45 - The Tori Spelling joke. Remember Tori Spelling jokes?

1:06:15 - It's a long, hard setup to get from a shot of an automatic garage door with a cat-exit in it, to Rose McGowan being ensmushed in said garage door with cat exit, but as a three-minute vignette this ain't bad. Not least because it gets rid of Rose McGowan.

1:10:46 - "But this is life. This isn't a movie." "Sure it is, Sid. It's all a movie. It's all one great big movie. Only you can't pick your genre." Well that's clunky and self-congratulatory as hell, but not without its lightning bolt of truth. I have trouble believing that Kevin Williamson was writing for teenagers rather than just he's at about a teenager level of writing, but either way, this dog hunts.

1:13:00 - The Rules Speech, with heavy emphasis on the Virgin Rule. The admission of the Virgin Rule might have, single-handedly, created a sea-change in the ownership of female teen sexuality in cinema. (Might.) Meanwhile, Sid's upstairs, boinking psycho-boy. It wasn't till Buffy that someone really got this metaphor exactly right, but as a prototype, Scream ain't bad.

1:20:35 - Ah! The Billy death fakeout! Another one I forgot about. Made all the awesomer later, when Billy, re-enlivened, licks his own corn-syrup blood. As of this moment, though, all bets are off in the audience's mind regarding the identity of the killer. We're around the corner into the third act.

1:21:53 - This movie is just so goddamn physical. There's no stylization or artiness to any of the action, per Nightmare on Elm Street or any of Craven's other slasher films. It's just stuntwork, running, punching, kicking, slashing. Good stuff.

1:30:30 - And there's the deuce. The Ulrich is outta the bag, and Lillard too. I have to admit, Jamie Kennedy has grown on me (again). As I recall, he was meant to die here. Good news for the sequel that he didn't.

1:32:27 - IMPORTANT NOTE TO SKEET ULRICH: YOU ARE NOT JOHNNY DEPP

1:35:54 - "Movies don't create psychos! Movies make psychos more creative!" The film's big fuck-you to a generation of scapegoating. Billy and Stu are into the main crazy now. Thank goodness they avoided the obvious temptation to go full Brokeback with these two, because I don't think 1996 could have handled it. Lillard's gone to the next level on this thing, and this climax goes the full-11 with blood-soaked, crazy-as-hell shenanigans. The screen is covered in crimson and feathers. (Feathers?!)

1:41:40 - Boy. This movie is violent.

1:43:44 - Classic. Elemental. Sort of a perfect film, for what it's trying to do.

Scream 2 (1997)

0:00:00 - Here we go with the Scream 2 live-blog. This was my favourite of the series, back then.

0:00:29 - The movie-within-a-movie setup was a good idea. Look!: it's black people talking about how whitewashed the first movie was. But doing it in meta-textual movie code. If both Jada Pinkett-was-she-a-Smith-yet and Omar Epps here weren't about to get totally killed, I'd call this a significant step in the right direction.

0:05:31 - How do these audience members know they like the Stab movie enough to buy Ghostface costumes and knives, if they haven't seen it yet? And if you were at a theatre to see a movie you were really looking forward to, enough to be wearing the costume, would you be out in the lobby less than five minutes into the film?

0:08:18 - Through the goddamn cheek while taking a piss, he stabs him. Yikes.

0:10:13- I've often thought that a movie screening would be a pretty solid place to commit a murder. In this situation, given how lunatic the crowd is acting, and what kind of movie they're watching, it's not just reasonable to think that Jada could be easily slaughtered in front of them, but it's actually unreasonable to think the audience would ever notice it wasn't fake. Which goes a long way towards justifying why Jada can get away with doing the full Shelley Long two-minute swan-dive here. Ugh.

0:12:20 - It's possible my entire fondness for this movie is based on how awesome Neve's hair is throughout. And that sports bra, right now.

0:13:55 - Wow, the African-American roommate. What could possibly happen to her later?

0:14:40 - Sid's first reaction to the murders is to put on her costume and makeup from The Craft, and go find Randy. I do enjoy this film's tone.

0:15:10 - BUFFY IN THE HOUSE

0:15:44 - And young, impossibly boyish Timothy Olyphant, leading us into the thesis scene, wherein Randy, with the aid of Olyphant (and Pacey Witter), lays out the framework for sequels in general, including which ones are good (Jim Cameron's) and which ones are bad (everyone else's). Randy is strangely hot in this movie, which I suppose is true to life. Characters like that guy get left alone in high school and then come into their own in uni... though I suppose being a celebrity survivor of the Woodsboro murders doesn't hurt.

0:18:35 - Wow - Gale's hair is even better than Sid's. It might be the key to the success of the whole thing. Scream 2: Awesome Hair.

0:20:55 - "Be kind, she saved our lives." Campbell throws that line away beautifully, it's goddamn creepy. WHOA - Portia De Rossi and the actress who never got to play Inara just showed up and made a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon reference. This movie was before everything.

0:22:14 - Marco Beltrami employs a really weird thematic piece for Dewey in this movie. It genuinely seems to aim for making Dewey seem like a mentally disadvantaged 14-year-old. It's a big misstep in Beltrami's otherwise solid scoring for the trilogy. At least Dewey is way less annoying in this movie than in the last one, and Arquette is way better at playing him. (Well, maybe not "way.")

0:25:25 - Does Sidney hit Gale in the third movie (or the fourth movie)? Because I'm loving those.

0:29:11 - Buffy was just talking about Party of Five but Neve Campbell is from Party of Five and oh my god I can't even believe I remember Party of Five let alone the name "Bailey!"

0:30:51 - So Sarah Michelle Gellar would have shot this movie after finishing Buffy's first season, right? Did she realize she was in the process of recontextualizing this entire notion of the "defenceless teen girl" for genre movies forever after? Certainly, in light of everything that followed, it's hard to buy SMG as the damsel in distress right now, no matter how much she's milking the bug-eyed terror. In Joss Whedon's universe, Cici doesn't go out that window; she pulls a stake out of her sweater and stabs Ghostface in the eye. We live in a better world than the one this movie was made in.

0:34:43 - For all the degree to which I'm enjoying this, Craven's commitment on Scream 2 doesn't seem to be anywhere near the level it was at on Scream 1. It's not that he's shooting the movie badly per se, just a bit lazily. Everything is getting communicated, but there isn't much bite to the staging.

0:36:27 - Jerry O'Connell sucks. He just sucks.

0:37:31 - Laurie Metcalf was a really good call for this. It's clever, deceptive casting, and she goes a long way with it.

0:38:28 - And here's that moment, right there, where Sidney realizes that whoever is doing all this is killing his way up the pyramid to get to her. The story - and saga - escalates nicely at this point. The notion of a copycat killer, mixed up with all the outright sequel razzle-dazzle in the storyline, was a natural and enjoyable frame for the sequel to Scream to exploit. It's when things had to carry along into a third film that I started wondering why the hell so many pairs of people wanted to kill Sidney Prescott.

0:43:34 - Blackboard scene! Blackboard scene!

0:47:34 - Oh no... oh nooooooooo.... stop... stop!! STOP SINGING JERRY O'CONNELL GOD DAMMIT NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

0:49:21 - Olyphant's in this a lot more than I remembered. I guess this is where I fell in love with him. A love that continues to this day...

0:51:02 - Sequel Rules. Including the incomplete Rule #3, "If you want your sequel to become a franchise, never, ever..."

0:51:55 - This movie effectively presents Randy as being in a bubble of total safety, which ups the ante significantly when he finally bites it. The third movie falls down, in part, for not being willing to kill another one of the Scream 1 survivors, settling instead for offing dozens of unmemorable guest-stars.

0:55:00 - They brought in David Warner to do a quick drama-professor therapy session for Sidney - who is apparently an aspiring actress now? - and convince her that she's a fighter. I don't find this kind of device charming any more. Sidney is playing Cassandra in a school play - subbbbbtexxxxtttt! - and the stagey-ass rehearsal scene that follows is pretty terrible. Leaving aside the fact that no person in their right mind would ever actually put themselves in this position, the opportunity for Craven to go opera-nuts on Sidney was just self-indulgent. This is a classic example of a movie underestimating not only its audience, but its lead character and actress as well. "Fate's vengeful eye is fixed, on me." Yes, we know - we've been watching the movie, guys.

1:01:32 - Gale's new cameraman is, quite possibly, the blackest token funny black guy in the history of token funny black guys.

1:02:29 - Craven steps things up with Randy's death scene. As Randy talks to Ghostface on a cell phone in the middle of the quad, Gale and Dewey run around trying to sort out where the killer might be calling from. It's funny, it's scary, it's taking the piss out of itself even as it's building up to a monumental shock when Randy bites it. It's a fitting end to the character - the ending our movie nerd would have wanted.

1:15:57 - And we're into Final Night. This movie lacks the tight focus of its predecessor. Scream 1 was a clockwork, all the gears tightening perfectly towards the end-point. This is more like a building ball of chaos rolling down a hill. It's not ineffective, just different. Louder and dirtier. Bloodier, and not just in the corn syrup way.

1:18:50 - I was in film school when this movie came out, and the fun of staging horror set pieces in that environment was not lost on me. Dewey's silent "death" on the dubbing stage is one of the better bits executed by Craven in this one.

1:27:15 - Ghostface joyride! Crash! The quivering remains of Agent Whatsisname sure are gross. And the "how long will the killer be unconscious while we try to get past him to get out of this car?" gag is highly effective; visceral and tactile. Sidney reaching out to try to unmask the killer: seriously shiver-inducing. Whatever Scream 2 loses in its first hour, I must admit, it cranes up to a magnificent back half, obeying Rule #2 ("Death scenes, much more elaborate") and then some.

1:33:08 - That said, the grand finale on the opera stage is pushing it.

1:35:59 - Yep, Ghostface Timothy Olyphant is the only Ghostface that I wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley.*

(*Unless it was for sex.)

1:38:05 - "I've got my whole defence planned out. I'm gonna blame the movies."

1:38:55 - And, quite possibly, the best line in the whole trilogy, in both writing and scary-as-fuck Neve Campbell delivery: "Yeah? Well you're forgetting one thing about Billy Loomis: I fucking killed him."

1:39:25 - God damn this ending is good. I can see why I adored this one so much, back when the trilogy was still fresh.

1:40:02 - OK, so it's Mickey and Billy Loomis' mother; fine. But how did those two meet?

1:50:18 - Gale and Sid opening fire on Mickey simultaneously puts the whole thing into another realm entirely. Another awesome realm. And Cotton's "WHOA!" remains one of my very favourite things. Liev Schreiber really pulls out all the stops at the end here; having him along from Scream 1 was a major bit of luck.

1:52:42 - "Like shrimp, I shall rise, she said." What the hell were the lyrics to this song?

Scream 3 (2000)

0:00:00 - If I remember correctly, this film was going to be called Scr3am before they wussed out on that. Nonetheless, we can credit the film with kicking off my very favourite trend in sequel naming, so Scre4m comes by it honestly. Now Scream 3, as is the case for every single person who ever saw it, was my least favourite of the series. It's also the one I remember the least. I remember Parker Posey is in it.

0:00:14 - But boy, that's a good opening shot. Give it to 'em big in the first frame. Tell 'em where they are.

00:02:21 - As soon as you get the tiny hint of that girl's bare ass, the mood in the room changes. The movie ceases to be a parody of dumb slasher movies and becomes one - and stays one for the remainder. And it isn't scary. It even looks uglier than its predecessors. There's no finesse in the lighting design at all. After Drew Barrymore and Jada Pinkett-Smith, miss whoever-this-is doesn't make for a very compelling opening.

0:09:22 - Whoosh, whoosh, slash! Love the title design.

0:09:54 - Here's living-in-reclusion Sidney, with her big dog and general Sarah Connorness. Hair: still excellent. Having given up her sideline as a college student / aspiring actor, Sidney is now a womens' crisis counselor, a job she can do over the phone. This movie really just never found a way to be fun, did it?

0:12:33 - McDreamy's in this? Why?

0:13:59 - But Lance Henriksen is in the movie! And Roger Corman! This endears me to the project. God, Noel from Felicity reminds me of a guy I went to school with.

0:14:44 - So here we have the movie's big metatextual gamble, which is to directly implicate the cast and crew of Stab 3 in the events of Scream 3, and thereby have movie-within-the-movie counterparts for the principal characters, alongside doppelganger sets from the first Scream, and all sorts of other circular toss-backs. Back in the day, I believed (and still somewhat believe) that if Kevin Williamson had been able to write the script instead of handing it off to Hack Kruger, this big spinning wheel might have been made to work, but who knows. It's a big, complicated idea and would have required a gifted writer to really make it sail. As it is, everything is just too sloppy and ramshackle. Good idea, big reach, inadequate payoff. Didn't they know they were making a Scream movie?!

0:19:05 - How many goddamn times do they have to set up and tear down the stupid Gale/Dewey romance? Enough is enough.

0:19:23 - Jay and Silent fuckin' Bob. Fuck.

0:21:00 - And here's the other big gamble, which feels stupendously awkward and out of place, even for this franchise: the business with Sidney's mom. As Ghost Randy will remind us at some point in the movie, the function of the threequel plot is to come back around on, and reframe, the original root of the whole story, so yes, Maureen Prescott must be addressed. But doing it through hoary hallucination sequences, along with the is-she-crazy-or-not? routine and a long-lost twin brother for Sidney, is just the sort of woolly non-thinking that brought down the neo-horror boom within a few short years of its (Scream 1-initiated) rebirth. These shenanigans are far and away the worst thread in the movie, and should have been excised.

0:25:45 - Which brings me back to my other main contention, quite entirely unfair: as preposterous and nihilistic as it would have been, I would have loved to see Sidney come out to be the killer in this one. There's a while here where you can make the case that she might be, but as soon as Sidney steps on the Hollywood set of her childhood home, the game's up.

0:28:01 - I don't even know who I'm watching get killed right now. Jenna Elfman? There's nothing particularly interesting or cinematic about the set piece, either. Oh, it's Jenny McCarthy. I forgot she existed.

0:31:13 - Parker Posey is in a whole other movie from everyone else, and whatever movie it is, it's hella better than what I'm watching. Patrick Warburton's in it with her. She just jumped into his arms. It's beautiful there.

0:33:10 - "The old killer-playing-with-the-cops routine. Very Hannibal Lecter. Very Seven." There was a time in this series where references to other movies were somewhat more sophisticated than just mentioning their titles.

0:34:24 - One good thing about the MacGuffin in this one is how effectively they hide the killer in plain sight. Noel from Felicity is never the center of any scene, never gets any big moments with the lead characters. He leads into scenes or out of them, usually with in media res, self-obsessed, ADHD babble. You pretty much never see him coming when the mask comes off, because he always just seemed like a runner, not a character. (That's a weakness, too, of course.)

0:46:55 - At this point the movie's gone completely into looney town. A house has exploded, Dewey has emptied a gun into Ghostface (who has nonetheless easily vanished), and Parker Posey is still soooooooo much better than this movie.

0:50:17 - Sidney has joined the fight, anteing up with the gang at the police station. As I recall, Neve Campbell's involvement in this film was far from assured, and there were script versions without her at all, along with one where this scene is the first time we see her. For whatever else is going on, the chemistry between the three originals from Scream 1 is a pleasure to watch at this point.

0:54:19 - "If you find yourself dealing with an unexpected backstory, and a preponderence of exposition, then the sequel rules do not apply, because you're not dealing with a sequel. You're dealing with the concluding chapter of a trilogy." So, if they knew enough about that problem to write this line, why didn't they just fix the problem? Actually, deux ex Randy notwithstanding, the Rules scene in Scream 3 is the best in the trilogy, at least in terms of the canniness of the analysis. Why they couldn't heed their own advice is going to haunt us till our graves.

0:57:47 - Oh dear. It's Princess Leia.

0:58:28 - There is certainly something to be said for Posey playing an actress who thinks she understands Gale Weathers better than Gale Weathers - that she, in effect, has more claim to the Gale Weathers persona than the actual person. The same conceit doesn't work anywhere near as well with Sidney and her double, but the Gale thing is a buddy road movie waiting to happen.

1:03:59 - The little call-back to the "PG-13 relationship" conversation in Scream 1 just made me realize: there is no sexuality in Screams 2 or 3, at all. What's up with that? The filmmakers were onto such useful things, the first time around. The implication by extension is that Sidney's experience with Billy basically stole her sexuality from her, ending her life as a sexual being. Has she ever even had an orgasm? A disappointing absence in a franchise otherwise so clever about stereotype reassignment.

1:05:19 - A little of the old Ghostface vs. Sid action, and in Sid's (fake) old house, no less. At last, this movie is starting to feel like a Scream movie, in no small part because of the meta-pretzel logic driving this sequence. You can certainly see why someone woulda thought this movie was, in principle at least, a good idea. Check out that stunt where Sidney goes through a door in a house she thinks she knows, and there's no floor on the other side! I need more stuff like that, and less verbal mintzing about how fake Hollywood is.

1:10:35 - Is Lance Henriksen playing Wes Craven? If I was Wes Craven, that's who I would cast as me.

1:15:56 - Are we finally into Final Night? Thank goodness. And here's the most obnoxious Haunted House setting for a final third of a movie ever. They shoulda just got the mansion from Clue: The Movie and been done with it.

1:23:02 - It's nice to have Ghostface just show up for a throwdown with a bunch of people all at once. Eliminates that "safety in numbers" trope, breaks up the dynamic of the hunt-and-kill final third here.

1:24:55 - Huh. I thought Parker Posey survived this one.

1:33:05 - "It's your turn to scream, asshole!" If it weren't for the fact that for no reasons other than the mysteriously-powerful "rules of cinema," Ghostface is at this point nigh-invincible, this moment would have been a nice little turn of the tables. Which raises a key point: Roman-as-Ghostface has a nearly impossible level of awareness of the events of the first two murder sprees, augmented by an impeccable insight into how his victims will react: particularly, that they will expect the circumstances of this spree to be identical to the ones before (two interchangeable killers, cell phone voice box, etc.), and that their error will allow him to accomplish a lot more with a lot less. It's not actually impossible, under the rules of the story, and it does eventually add up within the frame of the Roman/filmmaker character - one can see him "directing" this entire sequence of events as a scary movie, far easier than one can see Mrs. Loomis putting everything together in Scream 2 - but at this point in the film, before Roman's unveiling (and after his faked death), it seems far-fetched.

1:37:19 - There's actually a cut between Ghostface reaching up to take his mask off, and Scott Foley taking it off. And Foley's subsequent rant is all shot in a single. Did anyone on set know who the killer was this time around, save for a few key individuals?

1:38:21 - "I'm a director, Sid. I direct."

1:41:07 - Whatever else might be going on in this movie, the final throwdown between brother and sister is sensational, starting with them screaming "Fuck you!!" at each other before busting out the Superman punches, and accelerating when Roman puts a bullet in Sid's chest.

1:45:33 - How many people does Sidney personally kill over the course of these three films?

1:46:50 - I remember the audience roaring with laughter when Roman makes his last jump-scare, taking dozens of shots to the chest, and refusing to go down. For all the times Scream has made us laugh, I doubt that was the intent.

1:47:29 - Oh look! Sidney, Dewey and Gale all live together now with McDreamy, in heaven!

1:48:59 - Tacked-on though it may be, the little resolutions for the three main characters do play nicely. This is largely aided by Beltrami's final piece of scoring, which modifies Sidney's theme's minor key to a major, and sort of sounds like a lifetime of asskicking is in store for Sidney J. Prescott. I guess we'll know soon.