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Grand Inquisitor
Not Screaming over Scream 3
Armando Valle
The horror fan in me is pissed off. I sit here on my rocking chair and
reminisce on the fright flicks from long ago (the 80's--seemingly eons ago) and the
kittie-mulch which is considered spinetingling these days. Let'see. The Blair Witch
Project? God*****d overrated teaser of a film. The Sixth Sense? Can't comment
since I haven't seen it. Spring is the black-hole season of the film world and in the
middle of this dissafected time comes Scream 3 and predictably becomes the
"hit film"...which is sad considering how half-cooked and unthrilling it is. Let
me kick the s**t out of something.
Days before I saw it I couldn't hear enough from friends and the
media how good the film is. It was unprecedented bull-ass hyping. I didn't pay to see
it--instead I sneaked into it after having caught the excellent Magnolia for the second
time. I couldn't bring myself to actually pay to see this obvious cash-cow of a flick
which squeezes the very last drops out of the trendy hip-teen-horror craze started by the
original Scream film about three years ago. Having seen Scream 3 I've
finally come to realize I must be from another world in terms of my film taste. Scream
3's gotta be one of the most derivative, un-horrific Horror films I've ever seen.
Blame Kevin Williamson, his Scream brought back the
slasher horror film to the foreground from the dump of stinky movie genres by marrying
horror elements with hip, self-referential humor. The first film was a surprising
phenomena when it became a success on the winter of 1996. I held myself back from seeing
until half a year later when I caught it at a midnight movie screening. Full of irony,
self-referential wit and inventive stalking sequences it was an outstanding flick. But
knowing how film studios and blockbuster logic works, it was all downhill from there--the
sequel was an out-of-steam affair with an inplausible ending. This third outing doesn't
even have Williamson at the screewriting helm--he who singlehandledly drove the entire
trend has left the stage leaving behind one smart horror film and several shameless
knockouts (I Know What You Did Last Summer, Halloween:H20, Teaching Mrs
Tingle). Perhaps the best thing Williamson did was creating the far-from-horrific
Dawson's Creek TV series.
The really annoying thing is how everyone rallies behind a film so devoid of any real
dread. The backdoor irony and thinking-man cracks of the first film have gone missing in Scream
3, leaving behind downright moronic, disposable characters and predictable outcomes.
Anyone with two brain cells can tell who will be dead by film's end and the psychological
improbability revealed by the film's killer is ludicrous, lacking any iota of real malice.
The death scenes are uninvolved and skimped upon due to the studio's insistence that the
film be bloodless in the face of the sick-as-hell Columbine Massacre (if there's a subject
loaded with true horror elements is that real life story). And since when is Wes Craven
considered a master of Horror? Come on: Deadly Friend? The New Nightmare? Swamp
Thing? Fright film aficionados will tell you by looking at the past 30 years of Terror
in film that Craven's a hack in comparison to the talents of John Carpenter, George
Romero, and David Cronenberg.
So it's beyond me why Scream 3 is making such a killing at
the box office--it's a castrated flick lacking the cojones to push its audience. Perhaps
it's because there's nothing truly worth seeing out there. I tried to go the movies last
week but had to give up on the face of such hollowed-out stuff as the Wall-Street-knockoff
Boiler Room and the incoherent, Leonardo DiCaprio flick, The Beach. All that
people like me, consumers of finely calibrated dread, can do is watch, think fondly of Old
School films like The Evil Dead and Hellraiser and shake our heads at the
pathetic case of how Scream 3 became a hit with oh-god-goshin'glowing reviews.
Armando
Valle
(Feb/24/00)
copyright 2000
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