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Synopsis: A sneak preview is held of Stab, a film based
upon the book “The Woodsboro Murders” by TV journalist Gale Weathers
(Courtney Cox). Among those attending are Phil Stevens (Omar Epps)
and Maureen Evans (Jada Pinkett), although the latter is reluctant
due to her dislike of horror movies; a feeling not abated by the
discovery that the film is being promoted by the handing out of
“Ghostface” masks, robes and glow-in-the-dark plastic knives.
Maureen goes for popcorn and on the way back is startled by Phil,
who has donned his mask. The unimpressed Maureen returns to the
auditorium, while Phil goes to the men’s room. Entering a cubicle,
Phil is puzzled and amused to hear muttering from the next stall. He
leans closer, trying to make it out, and a knife plunges through the
wall…. Shortly afterwards, Maureen takes little notice as a masked
figure slides into the seat beside her – until, after clutching its
arm, she finds blood on her hands. The figure draws a knife and
stabs Maureen repeatedly, and she staggers towards the screen before
collapsing in a bloody heap. No-one in the excited audience takes
any notice…. At nearby Windsor College, Sidney Prescott (Neve
Campbell) is tormented by crank callers as the opening of Stab
draws near. Sidney’s roommate, Hallie McDaniel (Elise Neal), turns
on the TV just in time for Sidney to be confronted by the sight of
Cotton Weary (Liev Schrieber) being interviewed. Moments later,
another dorm-mate breaks the news of the murders. Sidney goes
looking for her friend and fellow Woodsboro survivor, Randy Meeks
(Jamie Kennedy), and is immediately set upon by a pack of reporters.
She evades them, and heads for Randy’s film theory class, which is
debating the influence of entertainment upon real-life violence, and
the natural inferiority of sequels. Randy meets Sidney outside, and
insists that the murders are just a coincidence. Sidney accuses him
of being in denial. More reporters arrive, including Gale Weathers.
Gale is bailed up by admiring local newshound Debbie Salt (Laurie
Metcalf), but brushes aside the woman’s fulsome compliments, and
proceeds to dominate completely the news conference called by Chief
Hartley (Lewis Arquette). As Randy goes to take a closer look at the
conference, Sidney suddenly spots Dwight “Dewey” Riley (David
Arquette). Limping towards her, Dewey tells Sidney that he’s come to
look after her. Shortly afterwards, Gale corners Sidney and forces
her into an on-camera meeting with Cotton Weary. Sidney lashes out
in anger, while Cotton abuses Gale for misleading him about Sidney’s
willingness to co-operate – and for not getting him his promised
airtime. Gale is startled when she suddenly runs into Dewey, who
speaks bitterly of her depiction of him in her book. That night,
while doing solitary “designated driver” duty at her sorority house,
CiCi Cooper (Sarah Michelle Gellar) receives a frightening phonecall
– and then discovers that she is not alone after all…. The news of
another murder swiftly breaks up a college mixer. Sidney’s new
boyfriend, Derek Feldman (Jerry O’Connell), offers to take her home,
but when she goes back into the house to get her jacket, she is
attacked by a masked, robed figure. Derek rushes to her rescue, and
chases the killer through the house. Dewey arrives moments later. He
finds Derek with his arm slashed open, but there is no sign of the
killer. At the police station, Gale learns that CiCi’s real first
name was Casey. Putting together the names of the three victims –
Maureen Evans, Phil Stevens and Casey Cooper –
Gale makes the horrifying discovery that someone is trying to
re-enact the Woodsboro murders….
Comments:
Call me a rebel – call me an iconoclast – or call me an idiot,
whichever you prefer – but the fact is, this is one instance, Randy
Meeks notwithstanding, where I much prefer the sequel to the
original. Of course, this hardly constitutes praise of any great
magnitude. Considering how thoroughly underwhelmed I was by
Scream, it’s rather like saying, “Gee, I’m so glad I contracted
smallpox instead of the Ebola virus.” I was left to wonder just how
much the pre-conceptions I had of these two films had to do with my
reactions to them. I went into Scream with very high hopes,
having heard little but praise of it, and came away bitterly
disappointed; whereas I expected nothing at all from Scream 2,
and found myself – for about two-thirds of its running-time, anyway
– thoroughly entertained by it. This double inversion of expectation
led me, in turn, to take another look at Scream, to see
whether I had misjudged it in the first place. Consequently, this
review is going to be almost as much about Scream as it is
about Scream 2; and it might save time for all of us if you
hopped on over to my review of the former, just so that we’re all on
the same page when I start my blatherings. Go on, off you go. Won’t
take you that long. In the meantime, I’ll just wait right here….do a
bit of writing….play a game of Freecell….maybe even answer some
e-mail! (Pah! Who’m I kidding? That’s not going to happen.)
[Insert soothing musical interlude]
You back? Good.
Narky when I wrote that, wasn’t I? I suppose that’s not too
surprising since, as I recall, it came out of the very first flush
of my disappointment with Scream. Anyway, as I mentioned, I
was inspired by circumstances to take a second look at the film; and
having done so, I admit to being more impressed by certain aspects
of it than I was on my initial viewing; probably, ironically,
because Scream 2 had made me more sensitive to them. Yet I
didn’t like the film any more than I did before (it doesn’t
help that a second viewing negates the – alleged – whodunit aspects
of the story that string the audience along the first time); so I
did what I usually do in such a situation: I read numerous other
reviews of the film, positive reviews, to see what those people were
seeing that I was missing – and vice versa.
The praise of
Scream seems to resolve itself into four or five main lines of
argument. I will deal with two of them – Scream as “comedy”,
and Scream as “scary movie” – only briefly, since they are
more a matter of taste than opinion. My feelings on these two heads
have not altered at all. It utterly mystifies me what some people
find so funny about Scream. Oh, sure, it raises a few smiles
with its movie references, but it certainly isn’t hilarious. Nor is
it particularly “scary”. (By the way – does any one out there
actually use, or know anyone who uses, that inane little phrase,
“scary movie”? Because I sure don’t.) It does have a few scenes that
are intense and disturbing, particularly the opening sequence, and
it occasionally makes me jump – no great achievement, considering my
status as unrepentant caffeine addict – but I am never at any stage
frightened by it; by which I mean, it never induces that
weird, prickly feeling that runs down my spine and then around my
body, and makes me overly conscious of my own breathing. (Trust me,
it’s freaky.) But anyway, like I said, that’s all a matter of
opinion. What isn’t, however, is the following, which appeared in so
many reviews that I can only assume that the people responsible for
distributing the promotional material for the film did a bang-up
job: Scream is “a witty spoof in which teenagers use their
knowledge of horror films to outwit a killer”. I’ve dealt with the
first half of that statement already; as for the second half –
excuse me? There’s a strange kind of myth extant that the characters
in Scream are all movie-obsessed, when actually the reverse
is true. Sure, they’ve watched a bunch of movies, but their
knowledge is the most facile kind. Consider the “Halloween”
sequence. Not only is Stu watching in expectation of seeing Jamie
Lee Curtis’s breasts, the rest of them don’t even understand the
long-term health benefits of virginity! (One thing that a second
viewing of Scream did do was make me realise that when Randy,
oblivious to the presence of the killer, calls out his warnings to
“Jamie”, he is, of course, talking to himself as well as to
Jamie Lee.) And let’s not forget that Scream opens with Casey
Becker’s famously fatal blunder, insisting that Jason Voorhees was
the killer in Friday The 13th. The only two
characters who have retained more than the usual amount of trivial
misinformation are Randy and the killer (assuming for the moment
that they’re not one and the same – mwoo-ha-ha!) and Sidney herself,
who for someone who insists she doesn’t “watch that shit”, sure
seems to know a lot about horror movies. (I assume she’s been doing
the “good girlfriend” routine, and subjugating her own tastes for
the benefit of her boyfriend.) We certainly do hear a lot about “the
rules” in the course of Scream, but I’d defy you to point out
a scene where anyone “uses their knowledge” to “outwit a killer”,
whatever the advertising department tried to tell us. Oh, and just
for the record – three characters say, “I’ll be right back” in the
course of Scream. One of them dies; two of them survive. You
tell me.
Thinking about all
this, I can’t help but wonder whether my lack of enthusiasm for
Scream is rooted in the fact that its supposed “satire” seems
like normality to me. Considering the amount of time I and my
friends spend thinking and talking genre movies, whether verbally,
online, or in written form, why would I find its use of movie
references as simile either inordinately clever or
inordinately funny? Particularly since those references are so
obvious; way too obvious to get a reaction out of someone in the
happy position of having friends who make jokes with punchlines that
require in the listener a working knowledge of the career of Cuneyt
Arkin.
(Or perhaps the
truth is that I’m simply jealous. After all, I crap on like the
characters in this film all the time, and no-one’s ever called me
a brilliant piece of satirical comedy, still less a postmodernist
masterpiece.)
Ah, yes:
postmodern. That’s the other expression that cropped up again
and again throughout the reviews of Scream – and it’s also
the word that, as you may or may not be relieved to hear, will
finally bring me back to the long-lost point of Scream 2.
“Postmodern”…. It’s one of those words, isn’t it? Those words
that people use, without ever making it quite clear what they
actually mean by them – or perhaps without truly knowing
what they mean by them. Pretentious is another one, and one
that really gets my hackles up. If I had a dollar for every time I’m
heard someone dismiss a film they didn’t like – or, more frequently,
didn’t understand – as pretentious, without providing the
slightest hint of an explanation, I could afford to own the complete
works of Cuneyt Arkin. (Such behaviour is nothing new. Consider the
scene in “Sense And Sensibility” in which a minor character tries to
express her dislike of the two elder Miss Dashwoods: “She fancied
them satirical: perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be
satirical; but that did not signify. It was censure in common
use, and easily given.”) In any case, I can attest that few
reviewers of Scream bothered to explain themselves when they
praised it for its postmodernity. To avoid falling into the same
trap – and because I am finally, if very slowly, circling around to
why I prefer Scream 2 to Scream – I will explain here
(or try to!) what I believe the word to mean in this context.
Scream is “postmodern” in its inter-weaving not just of
“life” and “art”, but also the representations of both; and in turn,
and perhaps more importantly, in the subsequent influence of
those very representations upon life and art. (Phew! I’m
beginning to understand why most people don’t try!) There is,
if you like, a triple confusion of perspective, one best represented
by the fact that within the “real” murders that occur in Scream
– “real”, that is, within the context of a movie – there is
one “fake” murder; a murder staged following the methods employed by
the makers of another movie with which the characters in
this movie are familiar, in which the “fake” blood was intended
to look “real”. The boundaries between the external and internal
events of the motion picture world have been lost; as indeed have
those between the reality of life and the reality of the
representation of life – that is, life as we see it depicted on
film. (“This isn’t a movie!” Sidney protests to her potential
killer. “It’s all a movie,” responds the killer. “It’s all
one great big movie.”) “If they’d just watch Prom Night,
they’d save a lot of time,” comments movie geek Randy, and in one
sense he’s right: the killings in Scream are being committed
according to “the rules” of the slasher film. (Up to a point: one of
my main problems with Scream is that it junks not just the
killer’s rules, but its own rules, whenever it writes itself
into a corner.) Randy himself is the very centre of Scream’s
supreme depiction of its thesis: he watches Halloween,
oblivious to the fact that the killer is stalking him; while outside
in the broadcast van, Sidney and the cameraman Kennie watch the
stalking of Randy on a remote TV, images courtesy of a small camera
that Gale Weathers has planted inside the house. As Michael Myers
raises a knife to attack Laurie Strode, Scream’s killer
raises a knife to attack Randy Meeks – and we watch as Kennie
and Sidney watch the killer watching Randy as he watches Michael
watching Laurie. “Behind you!!” shout the various
participants in near chorus – Randy with no less fervour than Kennie
and Sidney. Life and art have become the same thing.
With this blurring
of the boundaries, the participation of Gale becomes not just
important, but critical to the story: we witness the very
process by which “truth” mutates into “accepted truth”. Gale is
there initially as a reporter; she steps into the story she
is reporting when she sees an opportunity to boost the sales of her
book about the murder of Maureen Prescott – a book that consists of
an interpretation of events that conflicts with the “accepted”
version of events. The film’s climax sees Gale making the
story that, only minutes later, she will herself be reporting.
And by the time that Scream 2 rolls around, Gale will have
turned her reports into another book, and that book will have been
turned into a movie. “The truth” – what we saw happen in
Scream – undergoes no less than three separate rounds of
re-representation.
In terms of
intertextualism and self-reflexiveness, Scream 2 has it all
over its predecessor – although, granted, it does possess the
grossly unfair advantage of having Scream itself as its major
point of reference. Scream is clever, but only in fits and
starts; the rest of the time, it just thinks it’s clever.
Scream 2, on the other hand, maintains its satirical edge for a
good two-thirds of its running-time – and its commentary is much
more pointed, and much more far-reaching, than that of its fairly
insular predecessor. The portion of Scream 2 that deals with
the events surrounding the premiere of Stab is both
intelligent and funny – and to a quite unexpected extent. There is a
degree of sophistication in the humour here that highlights just how
obvious the movie referencing in Scream really is. Scream
2’s privileged position as sequel allows it to comment
simultaneously upon the events of the first film in real world and
reel world terms. We see two of the scenes from Scream that
have been recreated in Stab during the course of Scream 2,
both of them – presumably deliberately, although perhaps I’m giving
Craven and Williamson too much credit here – scenes that could not
possibly have been recreated, one because there were no
survivors to describe what happened, the other because you can
hardly imagine Sidney Prescott whispering the intimate details of
her relationship with Billy Loomis into Gale Weathers’ shell-like
ear. But the viewers of Scream 2 know what happened, and
that’s what counts. The re-staging of Scream’s justly
famous opening sequence is a razor-sharp satire upon the movie
business – and upon the making and marketing of exploitation films
in particular. Assuming, and rightly, no doubt, that the audience
for this film (uh, Scream 2, that is, not Stab
– see how confusing this gets?) is shot-for-shot familiar with
Scream, Craven and Williamson proceed to play games with its
expectations. (Before the film – Stab, that is! – starts,
there is a moment to warm the heart of any genre fan of my age and
tastes: a model masked killer is floated on wires over the gathered
crowd, á la William Castle’s House On Haunted Hill.)
The camera pans down over the Becker house; it’s familiar, but not
really: it seems to have too many windows; and was that pool there
before? We meet the faux-Casey Becker a moment later, and in
place of the long pants and long-sleeved top that our Casey
wore, this Casey is clad only in a skimpy robe – which she
sheds, to the howling appreciation of the predominantly male preview
audience, prior to taking a shower. (Cue “Psycho reference”
shower-head shot.) Down in the crowd, Maureen Evans is suitably
disgusted. “What has that got to do with the plot, her being
bare-ass naked?” she demands in exasperation; her boyfriend’s broad
dopey grin is all the answer that anyone requires to a question that
need hardly have been asked. Casey’s shower is improbably situated
directly beside a big, clear glass window, and as she turns away to
answer the film’s opening phonecall – re-donning her robe, to the
disappointment of the Rialto audience – we see Ghostface outside
that window, illuminated by a flash of lightning – because
inevitably, all of this is taking place in the middle of a violent
thunderstorm. And finally, the icing on this richly textured cake
comes with a brief shot inside faux-Casey’s kitchen, which
reveals that the product placement people from Jiffy Pop had enough
marketing savvy to do a deal with the producers of Stab. I
bet their sales just soared.
(And there’s more
going on here than just pot-shots at the movie industry. Scream
was, after all, roundly abused by many slasher movie fans for
denying them what more than two decades of video watching had led
them to expect, what they considered their right: what Randy,
re: Halloween, referred to as “the obligatory tit shot”.
Clearly, the makers of Stab had no intention of making the
same “mistake”; although of course, while Stab’s audience got
its jollies, the audience of Scream 2 was again
denied.)
But it is not only we, in the external
audience, who are able to judge the accuracy, or lack thereof, of
Stab. So can the internal audience, those people whose
lives are being depicted on the big screen. A further clip from
Stab shown later in Scream 2 demonstrates that Sidney’s
gloomy prognostication from Scream has come true: she is
indeed being played by Tori Spelling (who is, we hear, getting “rave
reviews” for her performance, which seems unlikely however you look
at it). Dewey Riley, in turn, is played by David Schwimmer (someone’s
being insulted there, I’m just not sure who), while to poor Randy’s
indignation, he got “Joe Nobody” from “one episode of Dr
Quinn”. The cream of the Stab jest, however, is the
casting coups not overtly acknowledged. The opening sequence
features Heather Graham in a bob-wig, not merely playing Casey
Becker, but rather playing an actress playing Drew Barrymore playing
Casey Becker. Best of all, though, is the brief glimpse we are given
of Stab’s depiction of Billy Loomis: Luke Wilson’s dead-on
take-off of Skeet Ulrich’s own third-rate Johnny Depp routine is,
you should pardon the expression, a killer. As to how all this works
as a film--- Well, as usual, Randy gets the last word: “I’ll
wait for the video.”
The recreation of
Scream in Scream 2 is a wonderfully funny bit of
sleight-of-hand, but there is a serious point lurking behind this
comic façade; and this is one of the reasons that I prefer the
sequel to the original. When all is said and done, Scream
itself is a very limited film; like its killer, it exists
only by copying the work of others. Scream 2 operates from a
much broader and more varied palette, as the multiple
representations of the events of Scream makes clear; the
focus has shifted from the effects of copying art to the
effects of creating art. During an interview, Tori Spelling
assures us that she prepared for her starring role as Sidney
Prescott by “reading the book”. This is Gale Weathers’ book, of
course; and the degree of accuracy within her account of “The
Woodsboro Murders” has already been made quite clear to the viewer
of Scream 2. Confronted by an understandably nervous young
replacement cameraman, Gale reassures him that his predecessor “wasn’t
gutted; I made that up.” Want to bet which version of events made it
into Stab? – and which version the public ends up believing?
“It’s just a movie!” protests a teenage girl to her hesitant friend
in the lobby of the Rialto Theatre. “No, it isn’t,” returns
the other. “It’s based on a true story. All these kids really did
get killed a couple of years ago in California.” They are both
right, and they are both wrong. Stab is neither truth nor
fiction, but a strange new entity with a life and a power of its
own. It’s true, I saw it in a movie. The question that
Scream 2 raises, intentionally or otherwise, is whether, given
the extraordinary ability of the cinema to impose its version of
history upon society, film-makers have any obligation to tell the
truth? And what role does the media itself play in all this?
Instead of making
horror movies its only frame of reference, as does Scream,
Scream 2 depicts a society well-versed in all aspects of popular
culture. Maureen Evans wants to go, not to Stab, but to the
new Sandra Bullock film; her boyfriend insists on the horror film,
until it is made clear to him that a chick flick is more likely to
get him a little action. “Let’s go see Sandra!” (A lesson to the
anti-chick-flickers: they might make you nauseous, but they rarely
get you killed….unless, of course, you’re driven to cut your own
throat….) A day later, potential victim CiCi Cooper discusses the [*cough*]
complexities of Dawson’s Creek over the phone, all the time
flicking through the channels of her TV set, which finally settles
upon Nosferatu; while an aggrieved Gale explains that those
nude photos of her on the internet are really her head pasted
onto “Jennifer Aniston’s body!” More pertinently, while only Gale
represented the media itself in Scream, by Scream 2
“the media”, ad infinitum, has become almost a character in
its own right. Wherever the characters go, a swarm of reporters
follows; Gale herself is targeted as much as Sidney, even having
microphones shoved in her face while she is attempting to interview
someone else. Object has become subject. Cotton Weary, falsely
accused murderer of Maureen Prescott, reappears in Scream 2,
trying to construct himself a life as professional media darling.
Essentially, despite Gale’s book and Stab, Cotton doesn’t
think anyone will believe him truly innocent until he gets to
say so – on television, of course, and in the right forum: an
interview with Diane Sawyer. (You know, considering I’ve never even
seen Diane Sawyer, it is unnerving to reflect upon how much I
know about her – or think I know – thanks to “the
movies”….) It is not just that Cotton wants his fifteen minutes of
fame to help make up for the year that he has lost from his life;
rather, it is made abundantly clear that he considers that year lost
not too high a price to pay for his fifteen minutes. He will
get his day in the sun….and is even prepared to kill to get
it. When the motives behind the murders in Scream 2 are
finally revealed, it’s doubtful that anyone is surprised to find
“media exposure” amongst them. “You’re just in time,” says Maureen
Evans, as someone takes the seat beside her in the Rialto
Theatre, “looks like she’s about to get it.” But of course,
it’s Maureen who’s about to get it, the violent attack upon
her and her staggering bloody death taken initially by the excited
Stab audience for nothing more than unusually effective
performance art – a “publicity stunt”. And so, in a manner of
speaking, it is….
When Sidney tracks
down Randy in his film theory class on the morning after the murders
of Maureen and Phil, the discussion is inevitably centred upon the
influence of violent entertainment upon real-life violence.
Arguments are offered, pro and con; we, the horror fans, have
heard them all before. Intriguingly, it transpires that since
Scream, Randy has changed his tune – and undoubtedly speaks for
his creators, as well as for much of his audience. Rather than
claiming that the answer to all of life’s mysteries may be found at
your local video store, surviving Woodsboro has altered his
perspective: “Life is life; it doesn’t imitate anything.” Sorry,
Randy – but that’s not quite true. Not that I am by any means an
advocate of the “blame the movies” credo, but there is
something that has a significant effect upon real-life acts of
violence, particularly upon the kind of mass shootings that we are
all, sadly, all too familiar with. We’ve heard a lot in the media
about the supposed influence of movies, music and video games in
triggering these acts of violence; what we have not heard is
that research has demonstrated that one of the biggest influences
upon the perpetrators of these tragedies is media coverage of
similar incidents. This is why you tend to get two such
incidents, bad ones, occurring within weeks of one another. Attempts
to blame these events on a simplistic scapegoat like “violent
movies” rarely hold water, and are occasionally embarrassingly wide
of the mark. Following the Port Arthur shootings of 1996 – the year
that Scream was released – an initial claim that Martin
Bryant owned “two thousand violent and pornographic videos” was
hastily dropped when an inspection of his collection revealed that
most of the videos were in fact musicals and romances from the
1930s. Similarly, when British serial killers Fred and Rosemary West
were arrested, their video collection, to the disappointment
of everyone but the people at DreamWorks, consisted primarily of
Disney films. Of course, none of this actually stops the media from
continuing to point a finger when violent incidents occur; and it
certainly didn’t stop it from pointing that finger at Scream,
and at Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson, when a number of possible
“copycat” incidents occurred in the wake of the first film’s release
– which perhaps explains why in Scream 2, “the media” might
almost be considered a co-culprit. Ultimately, however, while it
does know what the issues are, and is happy enough to raise them,
Scream 2 doesn’t have any real intention of truly dealing
with them. I guess this isn’t too surprising. I mean, when all is
said and done, it’s not as if Scream 2 didn’t want as much
friendly publicity as it could get, is it?
In its early
stages, Scream 2 is an engaging piece of commentary upon the
society in which we all function – much more successfully so, I
believe, than Scream. I also find it to be funnier than its
predecessor, and far less mean-spirited. Scream tried to milk
too much humour out of its killings, and its characters’ reactions
to those killings – as if they were funny in and of themselves. (My
identification figure in Scream, Randy aside, is Principal
Himbry, who sums up most of the characters collectively as
“heartless, desensitised little shits!” Naturally, he ends up
part of the body count….) There is no such tendency in Scream 2,
although of course the cast has to try and figure out where the
various victims fit into this real-life “sequel”. For my money, the
humour of this film is much better woven into the fabric of its
story. Take, for example, our first glimpse of Sidney Prescott,
matter-of-factly disposing of yet another crank caller by –
unknowingly taking the advice of Maureen Evans – Star-69-ing his
ass. (“Who is this?” “You tell me.” “Cory
Gillis, 555-0176.” “Oh, shit!”) We know in an instant just
what the past two years of Sidney’s life have been like – and that,
regardless, she is soldiering on. Yet for all this, we – I,
anyway – don’t really care all that much what happens to Sidney;
perhaps because we know that she will be okay at the end, whoever
else bites it; or perhaps because Kevin Williamson hasn’t yet
learned the art of writing characters for whom we are really
concerned. (And the way his career is going, he’ll never get the
chance to learn, nyuck, nyuck.) There are moments
in Scream 2 that ought to be affecting, but don’t quite come
off. This is particularly true of the scene in the theatre, where
Sidney’s new boyfriend faces a terrible danger, and yet Sidney
cannot bring herself to help him – because the killer has planted in
her mind the idea that Derek, too, might be involved…. (Of
course, looked at detachedly, the reason that this scene doesn’t
quite work is because Derek is played by Jerry O’Connell – and who
honestly doesn’t want to see Jerry O’Connell get cacked?)
Conversely, some parts of Scream 2 work much better than
you’d expect them to. Imagine my astonishment when I realised that
the only characters for whose fate I felt some concern were Gale
Weathers and Dewey Riley!? – perhaps because they’re the only ones
who seem fundamentally changed by their experiences, what with
Gale’s late-blooming conscience, and indications that Dewey has
finally grown up a bit – even developed something resembling half a
brain. It’s also refreshing to see a couple in a horror movie – and
fancy having to say this! – that considers the events going
on around them to be more important than their desire to get their
mutual itch scratched. (This feeling on my part was all the more
unexpected since I certainly don’t give a rat’s ass about
Courtney Cox and David Arquette. Although while we’re on
the subject--- Easily the scariest thing about either Scream
film is the amount of weight that Cox dropped between the first
shoot and the second. Showing that much of your clavicles really
isn’t healthy, Courtney.) I also feel that Scream 2 has more
individually effective scenes than Scream, which after its
shattering opening is content to coast. Particularly memorable is an
attack that occurs while two of the characters are separated by the
glass of a soundproofed booth: one can only look on, screaming
silently, as the other collapses in a bloody heap. I also – against
my better judgement, believe me – like what we see of Windsor
College’s production of “Oedipus Rex”, starring Sidney Prescott as
Cassandra. This ridiculously overblown sequence shouldn’t work at
all, and yet – as Sidney glimpses Ghostface amongst her robed and
masked fellow actors – it somehow does. But Scream 2 reaches
its true dramatic climax with a scene that Scream, hidebound
as it was by the conventions of the slasher film, could not and
would not have pulled off: a lengthy suspense sequence set outdoors
and in the full light of day; one which culminates in something else
that Scream didn’t have: a genuine shock. Whether it’s a
shock that fans of the franchise actually wanted, well,
that’s another matter.
Still, when all is
said and done, Scream 2 is a slasher film; and in the final
assessment, not a very good one. It seems that Kevin Williamson took
his own speech about the inferiority of sequels as permission to
turn in some abysmally sloppy writing. In fact, Scream 2 is
fairly remarkable inasmuch as you can pinpoint the exact
moment when – if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor – it runs off the
rails and plunges down the toilet. It happens at the eightieth
minute mark, as Sidney and Hallie are conducted to a “safe house”
under the so-called protection of two law officers so competent,
they make Dewey Riley look like Elliott Ness. (Some people believe
that Scream 2 goes to the bad at the sixty-second minute
mark; and while I can see their point, I don’t necessarily agree
with it.) Let me describe what happens next to you in some detail,
because it encapsulates everything I believe to be wrong about this
franchise, which holds itself up as inherently “superior” to the
films it references (read: mocks), yet commits artistic sins
you wouldn’t forgive if they occurred in any old Friday The 13th
knock-off.
Sidney and Hallie
are in the back of a police car, enclosed by automatic locks,
reinforced glass and metal mesh between them and the front seat –
okay? The car gets held up for an unnaturally long time at a red
light – no other traffic or people in sight, of course – and
suddenly Ghostface manages to Off-Screen Teleport©
himself right next to the car. He smashes a front window and
disposes of Cop #1. Cop #2 then fails to shoot Ghostface despite
having two opportunities to do so, and ends up being carried along
on the hood of the car until it crashes. Cop #2 is fatally impaled
by a stray metal rod, although his gun stays clutched in his hand,
and Ghostface is knocked unconscious. So – what do the girls do?
They can’t get out either through their windows or their doors, so
they have to think of something else. Sidney sees that the mesh has
been partially dislodged, and tugs it back far enough to make a gap
big enough for herself to squeeze through, which she does – ending
up in the front seat, right next to the motionless Ghostface. The
door on her side is blocked, so to get out, she has to climb over
the – apparently – unconscious killer….
Rather than moving,
Sidney starts reaching out, slowwwwly, for the killer’s mask
– only to have Hallie shriek for no good reason, “No, don’t!” And
she stops!! And then climbs out after all. She tries to get
Hallie out the back, but can’t, so Hallie has to copy Sid’s journey.
They start to run away. Then Sid stops, deciding she’s going to
unmask him after all. She heads back, despite Hallie’s pleas that
they just go, and finds the killer gone. A second later, he leaps
out from nowhere and murders Hallie.
Now, let me be
quite clear about this: this scene is played out absolutely dead
straight. There’s no hint of satire here. When Hallie stops Sidney
from unmasking the killer, there’s no jokey “Gee, Sidney, you can’t
unmask him now, there’s still thirty minutes to go!” vibe
about it. We’re supposed to take this crap seriously! “No,
don’t!” The hell - !!?? Yes, do, Sidney! Take his damn
mask off! Or take off an article of clothing, a belt if you have
one, and tie his hands together. At least take his knife away
from him!! Or pick up something heavy from that construction
site you’re near, and pound him around the head with it. Or take the
gun from the dead cop, and put a few bullets into him. Or, if you’re
not comfortable with shooting someone who’s unconscious, how about
one of you holds the gun on him – Sidney, preferably, she’s had some
experience in that sort of thing – while the other goes for help? At
any rate – do SOMETHING!! Don’t just stand there doing nothing
like every big-breasted idiot heroine of every stupid cheap crappy
slasher film ever churned out by every hack director who thinks tits
+ blood = HORROR!!!!
I swear – I have
seen a lot of stupid behaviour in slasher films over the years, but
this ranks right up there with the most contrived, the most idiotic
things I have ever suffered through. And I haven’t even
mentioned the subsequent disappearance of Ghostface, which ranks as
one of the most shameless pieces of Off-Screen Teleportation©
ever perpetrated: given where Sidney and Hallie are standing, the
killer could not possibly have got out of the car without the
girls seeing and hearing him; and nor did he have time to circle
around to where he could leap out at Hallie.
So what are we
supposed to make of this stuff? It’s not suspenseful. It’s not
scary. It’s just stupid. As Sidney herself once said, it’s
insulting. And it jerks you right out of the story and reminds
you that, yep, this is just another piece of formula crap, in spite
of its budget – and its pretensions.
And it gets worse!
Sidney flees the site of the latest murder and ends up back on
campus (where, by the way, there seems to be no increased
police and security presence!). Does she head for the brightest,
loudest, most crowded spot she can find? She does not. Instead,
hearing music from the darkened college theatre, she heads over
there. And just as well, too, really, because if she’d behaved
sensibly instead of like a complete moron, the whole final showdown
between herself and the killer couldn’t have happened, and several
lives would have been saved. And that would have been an
embarrassment for all concerned, right?
Of course, once
we’re brought to this point, it’s easy to see that the earlier
murders were just as illogical and contrived. It’s just that in
those cases, Scream 2 did a better job of disguising the
fact. But looked at after the event--- Gale puts together the names
of the first three victims, and deduces that someone is re-enacting
Woodsboro. And the moment she does so, the re-enactment murders
stop, even though – and I don’t think I’m giving anything away
by saying this – the killer doesn’t know this
deduction/realisation has been made. Moreover, the killing of CiCi
is no longer a random act. The pattern required that someone called
Casey be alone and vulnerable right at the most appropriate moment,
and hey presto! (They can try all they like to tell us that “CiCi”
stands for “Casey Cooper”, but they’ll never convince me it
doesn’t really stand for “Celebrity Corpse”.) Scream 2’s “van
murder” is one of its most memorable scenes – until you realise that
it required the killer to walk to the van carrying the Ghostface
outfit, break in, get changed, wait until the designated victim,
conveniently enough, came close enough to be grabbed, commit the
murder, change clothes again, and walk away, all without being
spotted, getting any blood on his street clothes, or the owners of
the van returning to it prematurely. Still more ludicrous are the
opening murders. So, two people called Maureen and (kind of)
Steven just happened to attend the premiere of Stab
together? Right. And while I can accept the circumstances of
Maureen’s own murder, Phil’s is almost as staggeringly dumb as the
car sequence, since it asks us to believe that someone with the
required name just happened to go the men’s room and just
happened to enter the cubicle next to the one where the killer
just happened to be waiting and just happened to put
his head where the killer just happened to need it. What on
earth would serial killers do, I wonder, if their victims refused to
behave in this obliging manner? The other thing to remember is that
if the murder of Phil Stevens doesn’t happen, then the killer’s
entire plan collapses at the outset. I don’t know about you, but I
find it hard to be impressed by a Grand Plan that depends wholly
upon a potential victim’s degree of bladder control. And can’t you
just picture what would have happened if Phil had thought to go to
the bathroom before heading out to the cinema? – an increasingly
panicky killer, hunkered down in that toilet cubicle the whole
night, finally driven to tap on the wall every time someone entered
the cubicle next door. “’Scuse me – your name Steven? No? Know
anybody named Steven? Oh, no reason….”
It isn’t only the
murders that suffer from incredulity overload in Scream 2.
The good-humour and satirical edge of the first half of the film
make the impossibility much easier to swallow, but the reality is,
in this day and age, there’s little chance a film like Stab
could be made in the first place, still less promoted the way it is
here – not to mentioned premiered in the very town where the
survivors were living! And just between you and me, I frankly doubt
that the Jiffy Pop people would have touched Stab with a
ten-foot pole….
Finally, the
revelation of the killer’s identity all but ruins Scream 2.
This is one thing about being a sequel that really does suck:
you can’t pull the same trick twice. Scream got away with as
much as it did because viewers had not had the chance to, so to
speak, figure out the rules of the game; as Randy Meeks so rightly
put it, everyone was a suspect. Watching the sequel, however,
the same audience was only too well aware of two things: (i) that
there were particular characters who almost certainly weren’t going
to turn out to be the killer; and (ii) that while there would be
hints and indications that would gain meaning after the event, there
would be nothing in the film from which you could logically deduce
the killer’s identity. Robbed of any internal clues, viewers
therefore were forced to look for the killer by external
logic; and once that is done, the killer’s identity, if not
motive, becomes really quite painfully obvious….
Now – I said this
would be as much about Scream as about Scream 2, yes?
And so it is, because I’m about to do what I didn’t do before, which
is discuss the endings of both films. Horrifying truths
revealed! Shocking twists explained! The works!
So if you don’t
want to know, run away now. I’ll insert a little leaving
music – maybe the outtro from The Bugs Bunny Show – to help
you on your way….
[Dah-dah-dahhh---
Dah-dah-dahhh--- Dah-da-da-da-da-da-dah-dah-dahhh----
Da-dah-dah-dah-dah-dahhh--- Dah-da-da-dah-da-da-dahhh---]
Okay – you’ve had
your chance.
As all the world
knows now – and probably knew way back when, when I was so nobly
refusing to give up the names, even under threat of torture – the
twist at the end of Scream is that there are two killers, not
one: Billy Loomis and Stuart Macher. Many people seem to have been
caught off-guard by this, but as true horror buffs would know, it’s
hardly original. Most famously, perhaps, the same twist was used in
a very influential Italian film of the 1960s – and no, I’m not
going to tell you what it is. Even under threat of torture.
I suppose you kind
of have to admire the audacity of the double bluff that Scream
pulls, in having two patently psychotic characters turn out to be,
well, psychotic. I mean, come on: look at those two! Just look
at them! Have you ever in your life seen two guys more
skin-crawlingly creepy!? (The fact that two bright, level-headed
girls like Sidney and Tatum see nothing the matter with their
respective boyfriends is just….just….wrong. Maybe it was
intentional, an attempt to “sell” Billy and Stu to the audience. Or
maybe it’s just one more mystifying example of a man’s idea of What
Women Want.) I imagine the reasoning was that no-one would believe
the film-makers capable of anything so transparent: Billy and Stu
are the obvious suspects, therefore, ipso facto, they aren’t.
Unfortunately for Wes and Kev, though – and perhaps for myself, as
far as getting a bit more enjoyment out of Scream goes – I
wasn’t prepared to buy into that assumption; and besides – being a
true horror watcher, not just the kind of mainstream groupie
that Scream was apparently aimed at – I’d seen plenty of
films in the past where the heroine’s boyfriend/husband turned out
to be the guilty party. And I’d also seen a couple where two
perpetrators provided alibis for one another. And since Kev seemed
to be as intent as Billy Loomis himself on copying others, following
“the rules”, rather than producing anything original, well, let’s
just say I didn’t see any good reason to take my suspicious eyes off
Billy and Stu – not even after Billy’s “murder”…. I mean, c’mon! –
who hasn’t seen that stunt before?
(See the trap you
fall into, Kev, when you start “referencing” other films?)
The revelation of
the guilty parties provides plenty of reason to reassess events from
another angle – and doing so highlights just as many contrivances in
Scream as there are in Scream 2. Take the Neil
Prescott subplot. He has to leave town for the weekend, of
course, because otherwise he couldn’t be set up as a red herring.
(And how, exactly, did Billy and Stu manage to abduct him?) But once
you know he’s not guilty, then his leaving Sidney at home alone on
this of all weekends, business commitments be damned, is a piece of
unbelievable callousness. And while we’re on the subject, how
convenient that Stu’s parents be missing in action on just the
weekend that their son needs them to be – and how lucky that news of
the murders didn’t bring them back from wherever they were! (I
wonder how Stu was planning to explain the corn syrup spilled all
over their bedroom?) How lucky, too, that everybody concerned with
this story lives in a big isolated house miles from anywhere: just
one near neighbour, and the whole convoluted plot would have been
dead in the water! And then there’s the world’s slowest police
force, unable to answer an emergency call in under twenty minutes –
despite how rapidly they answered Sidney’s call when she was first
attacked. You’d think a string of murders would make them go faster,
not slower….
Well, I suppose
most whodunit-ish films suffer from shortcomings like these – at any
rate, I’d bet that would be Kevin Williamson’s defence – so let’s
move on to examine what Billy Loomis swears he doesn’t have – the
motive – and the role in all of this played by the late Maureen
Prescott.
Just for the
late-comers: Sidney’s mother, Maureen, was supposedly raped and
murdered by Cotton Weary, who was convicted of the crime because of
Sidney’s testimony against him. TV reporter Gale Weathers, however,
believed Cotton’s story that while he had been having an
affair with Maureen, he did not kill her – and wrote a book saying
so, thus earning her Sidney’s deep enmity. Just under a year later
(and may I say, justice is awfully swift in Woodsboro! – a murder,
an investigation, an arrest, a capital trial, a conviction, a book
written and published, an appeal, all in one year!?), Casey
Becker and Steven Orth are murdered. The next day, Sidney herself is
attacked. She is subsequently taunted over the phone by the killer,
who describes her mother’s death, and the framing of Cotton Weary….
I want to do now
what neither Scream film ever does. I want to consider
Maureen Prescott. She was, it seems, a serial adulterer – but we
never find out why. Was she unhappy in her marriage? Did Neil
Prescott treat her badly? Did he cheat on her? Was she bored?
Lonely? Resentful? Frustrated? We never find out. Like Billy Loomis
herself, Maureen didn’t seem to need a motive. She was just “the
town slut”.
Except, as it turns
out, Billy did have a motive: Maureen. “Your slut mother
was fucking my father,” he finally tells Sidney. Note the
wording. Not “My father was fucking your mother” – the other way
around. Furthermore: “She’s the reason my mom moved out and
abandoned me.”
The only thing more
remarkable than how much the scripts of Scream and Scream
2 manage to blame on Maureen Prescott is how completely, at the
same time, they manage to refrain from uttering a breath of
criticism of Hank Loomis, who you’d think would be at least
as culpable as her. But apparently not. Maureen broke up the
Loomis marriage, all on her own; and Maureen sent poor Billy
Loomis crazy….
Crazy, yes. Not
depressed. Not angry. Not alcoholic. Not drug addicted. Out and out
Looney Tunes. Enough so to plan and carry out the revenge murder of
Maureen Prescott, and to plot an even sicker revenge against her
daughter: his girlfriend, Sidney. (I complained in my review of
Scream about the fact that Sidney starts getting over what
happened to her mother when she finds out for sure that she’d been
having an affair. It’s actually worse than that: Scream
clearly implies that Billy’s “good” mother walking out is far more
traumatic than Sidney’s “bad” mother being butchered.) But of
course, to carry it out, he needed an accomplice…. Scream
never does bother to provide a motive for Stu, beyond a wisecrack. I
guess he was just crazy too. Must be something in the air
around Woodsboro. Or perhaps the opportunity to kill both his ex-
and his current girlfriend was too good to pass up – there’s
always some bullshit reason to kill your girlfriend, right,
guys? This aspect of the plot is not well integrated at all, but you
can almost forgive that for the sequence in which Billy and Stu, as
part of their plan to clear themselves, take turns stabbing one
another. This is the one moment where Scream really does
strike a note of psychological authenticity: you can honestly
imagine these two young sociopaths coming up with such an idea,
never stopping to consider that there might be blood, and pain, and
even death….
But the point of
all of this is, and always was, Billy’s campaign against Sidney; and
it is here that Scream turns seriously unpleasant. Billy is
intent upon carrying out his killings according to “the rules” of
the films he loves so much – and that means that by his own
declaration, Billy cannot kill Sidney until she is no
longer a virgin. Her seduction is the centrepiece of his plan.
From the very first moment we see Billy Loomis, he’s putting the
pressure on Sidney – from the moment, in fact, that he first
announces, “I’m not trying to rush you.” Almost every word he speaks
to her is intended to play upon her feelings of guilt. (When Billy
compares his mother’s departure to her mother’s death, that slap on
the forehead and the “Stupid!” indicate that he knows he’s made her
feel angry rather than guilty, not that he’s sorry for what
he said.) He’s been “so patient” – he’s “put up with so much” – I’m
“sexually anorexic,” says Sidney, regurgitating every thought that
Billy has deliberately planted in her mind, and ignoring her best
friend’s counsel that her “intimacy issues” are perfectly natural
under the circumstances, and nothing she should be stressed about.
(“Billy and his penis don’t deserve you,” insists Tatum who, not
coincidentally, is dead a scene or two later.) Nastily enough, the
true motive behind Billy’s behaviour remains concealed because a
teenage boy pulling every dirty trick in the book in order to get
into his girlfriend’s pants is generally considered “normal”,
“acceptable” behaviour. And finally Sidney gives in – not, plainly,
because she wants to, but because she feels she ought
to. “Fuck you!” Sidney spits at Billy, when he later
describes her mother’s death to her. “No, Sid,” smirks Billy. “We
already played that game – and you lost.” There is, truly,
some profoundly ugly stuff going on here, all the more so since it’s
buried in a film that wants to pass itself off as “just a spoof”.
Now, I’m certainly not a believer in “a fate worse than death”, and
I’m not going to try and tell you that Sidney is punished for having
sex as badly as her cinematic sisters, most of whom end up
gruesomely butchered for allowing even a thought of S-E-X to
cross their minds; but at the same time, anyone who says Sidney
isn’t punished at all simply hasn’t been paying attention.
And you know what?
When I watched Scream again this time, an even worse
inference occurred to me: that Sidney’s punishment is, in a sense,
self-inflicted. Her sexual surrender occurs, after all,
immediately after she is forced to come to terms with the truth
about her mother’s behaviour, and with the fact that her inability
to do so earlier resulted in an innocent man spending a year in
jail. (Neither Scream film ever really deals with Sidney’s
culpability with respect to the false imprisonment of Cotton Weary –
she’s too much the Designated Heroine© for any actual
criticism of her actions to seep through – and in the end, they
dismiss the issue in Scream 2 by making Cotton a king-sized
jerk, so that we’re not obliged to feel sorry for him. For myself, I
would have preferred a backstory that had a much younger Sidney – at
fourteen or fifteen, perhaps – testifying against Cotton, then
slowly growing into her knowledge of the truth. But of course, such
a scenario would also mean a much younger Billy and Stu; too young
to be “acceptable” Hollywood killers, despite what the real world
teaches us.) Sidney never really believes that Billy is not guilty –
from the moment the cell phone drops, she knows on some
subconscious level that he is guilty – and yet she sleeps
with him anyway. Furthermore, almost the second the act is over, she
starts grilling him again about the night of the original attack on
her – even comes up with a way he could have called her,
despite being in jail…. I wonder whether Sidney has recently
been aware of a familiar, and deeply unwelcome, sensation within
herself? – has realised that she feels about Billy the same way that
she felt about Cotton; only this time, instead of forcing herself to
believe in Cotton’s guilt, she’s forcing herself to believe in Billy
Loomis’s innocence.
Or maybe I’m just
putting way more thought into this than either Wes Craven or
Kevin Williamson did….
Scream does
end on essentially jokey note: with the revelation that you can’t
kill Dewey Riley no matter what you do (to the great disappointment
of some people I know!); with survivor Randy’s fervent
declaration, “I never thought I’d be so glad to be a
virgin!”; and with Billy’s inevitable, if brief, resurrection, which
happens because it always does, because Randy just said
it would – and because every convention you can name dictates that
it be Sidney, not Gale, who ultimately takes Billy Loomis down….
….which brings us
to Scream 2, and the discovery that the issues that looked
resolved at the end of Scream are anything but.
When I said that
the identity of the killer in Scream 2 was painfully obvious,
brother, I meant it. You can always write a girl into a
slasher sequel, because the presence of a girl needs no
justification: she can just be there to die gruesomely, as do CiCi
Cooper and Hallie McDaniel. But you cannot, cannot, write in
a guy, give him little or nothing to do with the plot, and then
expect the audience not to know that he’s the killer – which
is exactly what happens in the case of Mickey Altieri, Randy’s
fellow film class geek. (Hence his constant insistence that sequels
are better than originals.) And since Killer #1 obviously has an
accomplice, let’s look around for Killer #2. Sidney’s new boyfriend?
Nah, too passé. How about the name guest star who also has
little or nothing to do with the plot? – Laurie Metcalf’s Debbie
Salt.
Truly, if you
haven’t figured out that these two are responsible for the latest
outbreak of killings by the halfway point of Scream 2 at the
latest, you really haven’t watched enough movies. You might
not have figured out the exact motive, of course – although as Randy
pointed out, in this kind of situation, the motive is
incidental….except that, as in Scream, it really isn’t.
Mickey’s motive?
Well, like Billy and Stu, he’s just plain nuts. Unlike them,
however, he wants to be caught – and tried – and given lots and lots
of publicity. He already has his defence all planned: “I’m
gunna blame the movies!” he informs Sidney gleefully – and
suddenly Scream 2 is skating on the same thin ice that
Scream did, trying to prevent itself from being included amongst
those entities that are “to blame” for people like Mickey. I argued
in my earlier review that Scream was guilty of more than a
little hypocrisy, essentially adhering to the “blame the movies”
credo while holding itself blameless. Scream 2 pulls
more or less the same stunt, but broadens its range of targets,
conjuring up a scenario in which “the lawyers, Bob Dole and the
Christian Coalition” all come running to Mickey’s defence, and also
finding a co-defendant for “the movies”: “the internet”. That’s how
they met, you see, Mickey Altieri and Debbie Salt – a piece of
background information that conjures up an irresistibly funny vision
of aspiring serial killers advertising themselves in banner ads.
(“Your first five killings for only 49c! Click here for
details!”) But as if embarrassed by the very lameness of its own
explanation, as it should be, Scream 2 then disposes of
Mickey as swiftly as possible, having him shot by his own fellow
conspirator. It is Debbie Salt who is actually the prime mover in
the story, because Debbie Salt has a secret: she is really Billy
Loomis’s mother….
Well, I told
you the whole “Maureen Prescott” thing wasn’t over, right?
The makers of
Scream 2 pushed their luck much too far with this one, writing
themselves into a corner with no possible way out. You can see the
bind they were in, of course. On one hand, they didn’t dare have one
of their killers just appear from nowhere at the end of the film,
even though logically, the mastermind of such a plot would have done
everything in her power to remain concealed until the penultimate
moment. (Intriguingly, the Kevin Williamson penned I Know What
You Did Last Summer, released the same year as Scream 2,
suffers from precisely this: the young protagonists spend
about half the film playing detective, and then the killer turns out
to be someone neither they nor we have ever heard of.) But on the
other hand, how idiotic is the notion of a woman with a secret
identity running around right out in the open, despite the fact that
recognition would ruin her entire elaborate scheme, and that any one
of four other characters could have recognised her at any
moment? Okay, maybe Randy and Dewey didn’t know Mrs Loomis well
enough to pose any real threat to her; and maybe Sidney’s instinct
to flee the media kept her safe in that direction too; but what
about Gale, into whose face Mrs Loomis sees fit to thrust herself at
every possible opportunity? Say what you will about Gale, she’s
thorough. Are we honestly expected to believe that in the writing of
her second book, she didn’t dig deeply enough into the Loomises’
dirty laundry to recognise the long-absent Mrs Loomis when she saw
her, even if only on a, “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?”
level?
Of course,
Scream 2 does eventually see fit to provide an “explanation”, of
sorts, for why Mrs Loomis isn’t recognised….and I’ll have more to
say about that later.
Debbie Loomis
swiftly disposes of her puppet accomplice (whose tuition fees she
was paying: shades of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer!),
and then reveals her own motive: “good old-fashioned
revenge!” You might remember that in Scream, Billy Loomis
declared that Maureen Prescott was the reason that, “My mom moved
out and abandoned me.” Incredibly, it turns out that Mrs Loomis
holds the same opinion! “You want to blame someone, why don’t you
blame your mother? She’s the one who stole my husband and
broke up my family!” she snarls at Sidney. (Which seems a bit
unfair: Maureen may have been into husband boffing, but hardly
husband stealing.) I have never understood what’s
going on here. In the first place, we yet again have Maureen
Prescott shouldering 100% of the blame for her affair with Hank
Loomis; even Hank Loomis’s wife doesn’t utter a breath of
criticism of him! I guess he was just sitting there, minding his own
business, when…. But regardless, why would Mrs Loomis have
walked out the way she did? If she was that hurt and that angry, why
wouldn’t she have tossed her cheating husband out on his arse, taken
him for everything he had in court, and retained custody of
her son? Or if she couldn’t face the humiliation of sticking around,
why didn’t she leave with her son – whose sympathies were
obviously with her? It makes no sense – particularly not if
the relationship between mother and son was intense enough to turn
Billy himself into – in the immortal words of Randy Meeks – “a
rat-looking homo-repressed mama’s boy”, and for its rupture to
induce homicidal psychosis in both. How flimsy, then, the
contrivance upon which the plots of two entire movies ultimately
rest!
But there is
something else going on here – and there was something else going
on, too, at the time of the Prescott/Loomis affair – which brings me
back to the point of no-one recognising Mrs Loomis prior to her
self-revelation. Many a true word is spoken in jest, they say; and
personally, I believe that many a true word is spoken in throwaway
smartarsery, too. Let’s consider what happens when Sidney finally is
face to face with her adversary. “Mrs Loomis?” she utters
slowly, as if not quite sure of herself. Gale, too, is astonished.
“Mrs Loomis!?” she repeats. “It can’t be! I’ve seen pictures---”
“That was sixty
pounds and quite a lot of work ago,” says Sidney.
Now – setting aside
for a moment the fact that Sidney is confronting the person directly
responsible for the taking of nine human lives, including those of
three of her closest friends, and yet she can find nothing worse to
say than to make a crack about that person’s former weight problem
(although, I guess if you’re talking to a woman, there is
nothing worse you can say, is there?) – let’s consider the full
implications of that remark, shall we? To put it another way, when
Sidney last saw Mrs Loomis, Mrs Loomis was overweight; which was
presumably just before she left Woodsboro; which was the time of her
husband’s affair with Maureen Prescott.
See where I’m going
with this?
And at long last,
the reason that both Scream and Scream 2 manage to
discuss that pivotal adulterous affair without anyone uttering a
single word of blame for Hank Loomis becomes crystal clear. After
all, if a man’s wife puts on weight, he’s perfectly justified in
cheating on her, right?
A staggering amount
to ascribe to a casual bitchy remark, granted; but still, if you
take the events of the two Scream films step by step, the
inference is clear. While Maureen Prescott’s adulterous behaviour is
made the proximate cause of all that happens across the two stories,
the ultimate cause is Debbie Loomis’s weight problem.
Everything that we see, everything that is implied – the slaughter,
the terror, the ruination of countless lives, all of it – happened
because a married woman let herself go.
So there you have
it, ladies. You’ve been warned….
Footnote:
Special thanks to correspondent Ashley Lane, whose intelligent
discussion of these two films was an enormous help in getting my own
thoughts in order. |
Director:
Wes Craven