We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
SCREAM (2022)
Unlike some other horror franchises, Scream is not one where I'm ever anxiously waiting for a new sequel. When a Scream sequel ends, I'm satisfied with that being the end of the franchise. Maybe it's because there's a different person under the Ghostface mask in every movie and if the killer is a different character every time it's less interesting to me. I want to see Jason Voorhees again and again. A new Ghostface doesn't hold that much appeal. The only constant characters in this franchise are the heroes; Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Dewey Riley (David Arquette), and Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), and in that case I don't want to see a sequel because I don't want to see Sidney, Dewey, or Gale get menaced again. I want them to be able to live in peace. But here they are, getting menaced again in the new Scream, which is part 5 despite having the same title as the original film. At least the re-used title makes sense for the story being told.
Stepping in to take over from the late Wes Craven, who directed all four previous Scream movies, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett directed this Scream from a script by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, who are also franchise newcomers - but it's clear that the creative team consisted of Scream fans, because this movie is very much in line with what came before.
The story begins with a scene reminiscent of the opening scene of the first Scream. A teenage girl who's home alone - Jenna Ortega as Tara Carpenter in this case - answers a phone call from a stranger and finds she's talking to a homicidal maniac with an appreciation for horror movie trivia. The caller wants to talk about Stab, the slasher franchise that exists in the world of the Scream movies, the first three of them being directly based on the events we saw in the first three Screams. After that, the Stabs starting telling stories that weren't based on true events - and the most recent one, the eighth installment, was a reboot simply titled Stab. The same title as the first movie. The reboot was directed by Rian Johnson, and has some Stab fans as angry as some Star Wars fans were after seeing his Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Tara isn't a slasher fan, she prefers "elevated horror" like The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, and Hereditary, but she does okay with the Stab trivia. But not well enough to keep herself from being attacked by Ghostface and stabbed multiple times. Luckily, she survives and is taken to the hospital to recuperate. Tara's mom is oddly absent from the rest of the movie, but her older, estranged sister Samantha (Melissa Barrera) does return to their hometown of Woodsboro - the town the first and fourth Scream movies were set in - to visit her hospitalized sibling. As it turns out, Samantha coming back home is part of Ghostface's plan, because she has a secret tie to someone from the first killing spree.
Samantha isn't the only one with a connection to Ghostface murders of the past. This movie's resident horror expert, Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown), the niece of original Scream franchise horror expert Randy, is able to deduce that this Ghostface is living out their own Stab movie fan fiction, trying to replace the reboot with a requel. Or a legacyquel. (Personally, I prefer the term legacyquel.) They're stalking and killing a new generation, but everyone is connected to the original killing spree in some way. Like Mindy and her brother Chad (Mason Gooding) being the niece and nephew of Randy, for example.
While new characters like Samantha, Tara, Mindy, Chad, and their friends Richie (Jack Quaid), Amber (Mikey Madison), Wes (Dylan Minnette), Liv (Sonia Ammar), and Vince (Kyle Gallner) all appear to be in serious danger, we also get our legacy characters. Sidney, Dewey, and Gale. They're not in this one as much as they were in previous Screams, but they are present and make an impact on how the story plays out. Also returning from a previous film is Judy Hicks (Marley Shelton), who has become the sheriff since Dewey left police work behind.
Scream 3 is the only Scream movie that I find to be really weak, so it's not a knock against the new Scream to say that it was my fourth favorite movie in this five movie franchise. It's just really hard to compete with the first and second movies, and I liked the motivation of the Ghostface of the week in Scream 4 more than this "pissed off Stab fan" motivation in the new movie. I still really enjoyed this new Scream and found it to be a clever, entertaining slasher movie. It did some things I found questionable, there were some logic issues, and there's at least one thing I wish they hadn't done, but there were no deal-breakers. This movie was a good time and a respectful sequel. Or legacyquel. It's fast and fun, and there's plenty of slashing.
THE WALKING DEAD: SEASON SEVEN A (2016 - 2017)
The producers of The Walking Dead went too far. Maybe not for seasoned horror fans, but for the average viewer - people that this zombie show somehow managed to appeal to for several seasons. But then they brought in Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), leader of the group called the Saviors, and had him kill two characters in the season 7 premiere. Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) and fan favorite Glenn (Steven Yeun), whose wife Maggie (Lauren Cohan) was pregnant with their child at the time. Not only does he kill them, but he does so by bashing their heads into sludge with a barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bat he calls Lucille. They decided to show the brutal, painful, gory details on the show. And they went too far. The death of Glenn is the point when a lot of viewers gave up on The Walking Dead. 17 million people tuned in to see Glenn's head destroyed. The show would never even come close to that number again. It has been on the decline ever since - episodes will spike up here and there, but now less than 2 million people are watching each episode of the eleventh and final season.
Glenn's death came right out of the comic book source material written by Robert Kirkman. It happened in issue #100, and I remember readers reacting in shock to that issue when it was published in 2012. Viewers of the TV show were even more shocked and appalled. Showrunner Scott M. Gimple really seemed to enjoy teasing Glenn's death, too. Glenn nearly gets knocked in the head with a baseball bat while in the clutches of a group of cannibals at the beginning of season 5. In season 6, Glenn disappeared for a few episodes while Gimple and his cohorts made viewers wait to find out whether he was alive or dead. Negan swings his baseball bat into the head of a victim in the final moment of season 6, but we don't see who it is. Then his first victim in the season 7 premiere turns out to be Abraham. Has the show spared Glenn? No, they were just teasing his fate out a little longer. They seemed to be a little too gleeful about the whole thing, and I don't think they expected the response to be quite so negative. Viewers were always going to be sad that Glenn was gone, but damn. They didn't have to make his death so cruel to the viewer.
Fans of the comic were hyping the arrival of Negan for years, they were anxiously waiting for him to show up. It's ironic that when he did finally arrive four years later, he killed not only Glenn but also the show's ratings. It didn't help that season 8 would be, as far as I was concerned, the worst season in the show's history, but the ratings were already dropping by the time we got there. Even though his first appearance heralded the end of The Walking Dead's time as a ratings powerhouse (even with much lower numbers, it's still AMC's top scripted show), Morgan does turn in an awesome performance as Negan. He comes in and steals episodes right out from under the stars.
Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), the "heroic leader" the show had been centering on since the beginning, had been getting quite cocky. He ran his group like it was a "Ricktatorship", as fans would joke, and when they reached the walled-in town of Alexandria, Virginia he almost immediately began thinking of how he needed to take over as leader of the place, feeling that its residents weren't properly equipped to handle life in the zombie apocalypse. Rick was the best. He knew it all. By murdering Abraham and Glenn right in front of him, then threatening to make Rick maim his own son Carl (Chandler Riggs), Negan humbles Rick in a major way. By the end of the first episode of season 7, Rick is Negan's quivering servant.
Rick continues following Negan's orders for the rest of the first half of season 7. His significant other Michonne (Danai Gurira) doesn't convince him they need to try to fight back until the mid-season finale. In the meantime, Morgan (Lennie James) and Carol (Melissa McBride) discover another group of survivors, people who play like they're knights in the service of a King Ezekiel (Khary Payton), who has a pet tiger called Shiva and a right hand man named Jerry (Cooper Andrews), who became one of my favorite people on the show. Rick's own right hand man Daryl (Norman Reedus) is held captive at Negan's headquarters, the Sanctuary. The Savior Dwight (Austin Amelio) continues copying Daryl's style. Abraham's ex Rosita (Christian Serratos) plots revenge with his sort-of friend Eugene (Josh McDermitt). Carl also wants revenge, The character Heath (Corey Hawkins) disappears while on a supply run, and we're still not sure exactly where he is all these years later. His companion on the supply run, Tara (Alanna Masterson), discovers another community, a beach-dwelling group called Oceanside, where all the adults are women because any males over the age of 10 were killed by the Saviors.
Not as much happens during the first half of the season as you might expect, because this one takes the approach of only focusing on one selection of characters at a time. The second episode is all about Morgan and Carol learning how things work in Ezekiel's Kingdom. The third episode is all about Daryl being a captive at the Sanctuary. When Tara discovers Oceanside, that's what the entire episode is about. This is something else about the season that didn't go over well with viewers. It's an approach that allows for a lot of filler moments, because some of these stories should not have taken up an entire episode. And yet some of them are still longer than usual, and shouldn't have been. Although I have to say I enjoyed the Tara episode more than some did; it really helped cement that character as another one of my favorites.
Some better choices could have been made in the first half of season 7, but I still feel that this is a solid batch of episodes overall. The show didn't lose me at this point. I was very interested in seeing how the Saviors story would be resolved and what kind of comeuppance Negan would get.
WHO'S THAT GIRL (1987)
Back in the day, my brother tended to latch onto a movie and watch it over and over until he found a different movie to latch onto. Kickboxer, Ace Ventura, and The Karate Kid Part II were all among the movies that got a ton of views. And for some reason, so was the 1987 comedy Who's That Girl, which stars Madonna as a young woman named Nikki Finn... who comes off like the most Lori Petty character to ever not be played by Lori Petty. If Petty weren't already acting before 1987, I would have believed that she decided to lift her acting style from this movie.
Nikki has just been released from prison after serving four years for murdering her boyfriend, a crime she was framed for by people the boyfriend saw committing a robbery. Griffin Dunne plays Loudon Trott, a tax attorney whose father-in-law-to-be Simon Worthington (John McMartin) tasks with picking Nikki up at the prison and making sure she gets on a bus out of town. A sort of charity thing. So Loudon does this right after picking up a delivery for his boss Montgomery Bell (John Mills): a cage containing a live puma. Bell is going to add the cat to the Brazilian rainforest he has recreated in his penthouse apartment.
Nikki doesn't make it easy for Loudon to get her to the bus station. She's on a mission to bring the people who framed her to justice - and when she gets targeted by the killers Raoul (Coati Mundi) and Benny (Dennis Burkley), Loudon ends up in the crosshairs with her. Of course, despite how troublesome and annoying Nikki is to him, Loudon also manages to fall for her during their time together. And Nikki falls for him. Bad news for Loudon's fiancée Wendy (Haviland Morris)... but she doesn't seem to care about him very much anyway.
There's some fun to be had with Who's That Girl, and Dunne is a pro at playing a harried person with bad luck, but it's certainly not a movie I would have chosen to watch as many times as my brother chose to watch it. I don't think its entertainment value is that high, I don't see why he was drawn to it over and over. It is a fine movie to spend 93 minutes on once or twice.
Despite Madonna's popularity, not many people were drawn to see Who's That Girl even once when it reached theatres. Madonna had to convince Warner Bros. to make the movie, and she even had the studio hire her friend James Foley to direct it, working from a screenplay by Andrew Smith and Ken Finkleman. The project didn't pay off for them. It only made 7 million on a budget that was around 17 to 20.
Madonna's Who's That Girl World Tour was a massive success, though.
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