Scream (2022): A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A dull blade, short on scares, devoid of the winking wit, wisdom, vibrancy and vivacity of the original.

The original Scream, directed by horror master Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson, hit movie theatres in 1996 and revolutionized the form with its giddy self-awareness of its genre after a cavalcade of inane ‘Halloween’ and ‘Friday the 13th’ sequels had drained slasher movies of all signs of life.

Now, twenty-five years and three sequels later, and for the first time without the brilliance of late director Wes Craven and sans writer Kevin Williamson, Scream is back to take another stab at the box office with the new, aptly yet oddly titled movie, Scream.

You see, even though Scream is the fifth movie in the franchise and is a direct sequel to 2011’s Scream 4, it is not titled Scream 5, which to quote Spinal Tap, is a mystery “best left unsolved, really.”

The original Scream was a breath of fresh, blood-soaked air and a box office bonanza back in ’96, as it brought in $173 million on a measly $14 million budget. Not surprisingly, over time the budgets for the sequels grew and the box office haul shrunk, with the most recent film, Scream 4, bringing in $97 million on a $40 million budget.

This new Scream, which is written by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick and directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, has a manageable budget at $24 million, and in spite of potential audience hesitancy born by the Omicron surge, it hopes to be the first blockbuster of 2022. There’s a very strong possibility it earns enough in its opening weekend to be the first film to knock the juggernaut  Spider-Man: No Way Home out of the top spot of the weekend box office for the first time in a month.

Scream defines itself, through the franchise’s formula of slasher movie self-awareness, as a “requel”. It’s not a reboot and it’s not a sequel, but instead it’s a “requel” that features fresh new characters but also connects back to the original movie in order to revitalize the franchise.

Back in supporting roles for the fifth installment of the franchise are original cast members Neve Campbell, David Arquette and Courtney Cox reprising their roles as Sidney Prescott, Dewey Riley and Gale Weathers respectively.

They join the main cast of Scream newcomers, including star Melissa Barrera as Samantha Carpenter, Jack Quaid as Samantha’s boyfriend Richie, Jenna Ortega as Samantha’s sister Tara, Mikey Madison as Amber and Dylan Minnette as Wes, among others.

The storyline for the new Scream is like all the other Scream movies. In the unfortunate town of Westboro, there’s a killer on the loose targeting a group of friends, who dons a ghost face mask and calls to torment his victims before brutally stabbing them to death.

The original Scream was vibrant, vivacious, incredibly clever and as sharp as a serial killer’s blade. But after beating, stabbing and shooting this dead horse to near dust, the franchise on its fifth outing is as dull as a baby’s plastic spoon by which they feed their audience this thin gruel of watered-down nostalgia.  

The movie tries desperately to re-ignite the fire from the original, but it just cannot, for the life of it, find a spark anywhere. The new cast are a bunch of unappealing dullards and even the return of David Arquette, Neve Campbell and Courtney Cox falls flat and feels like a sign of the franchise floundering rather than flexing.

In an attempt at being coolly self-aware, Scream admits its creative bankruptcy when it has characters discuss how “Hollywood is out of ideas”, but admitting you’re out of ideas isn’t actually an idea.  

And when the film has characters muse “how can fandom be toxic?” and declare that “this time the fans are gonna win!”, it feels pathetically patronizing because the fans aren’t winning when they shell out their hard-earned money to see this tired, unoriginal old retread.

While I found some of the more subtle, inside jokes regarding the Halloween franchise and particularly Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to be mildly amusing, the truth is they aren’t exactly insightful and they’re certainly not worth the price of admission.

Scream labels itself as a slasher-whodunnit, so I won’t give away any twists and turns, but let me assure you, after sitting through this dull and derivative, two-hour mess of a movie that in its final third descends into an orgy of utter incoherence, I’d say it’s less a slasher-whodunnit than a blood-stained-who cares?

The greatest sin of Scream is that unlike the original film, it isn’t smart, it isn’t clever, it isn’t fun, and worst of all, it isn’t scary. Scream isn’t a horror movie, it’s just a horror of a movie.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2022

Friends: The Reunion

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 49 secodns

The one they shouldn’t have made: Friends’ pointless, self-aggrandizing reunion delivers neither nostalgia nor laughs

The long-waited reunion of one of TV’s most successful shows is a missed opportunity. The aging cast should have been brave enough to reprise their beloved roles instead of just reminiscing about their glory days.

The often-delayed and much-hyped ‘Friends: The Reunion’ finally premiered on HBO Max on Thursday. The end result of this rather slick, self-aggrandizing, hour and 43-minute long commercial for itself was a bevy of ambivalent shrugs and a collective “who cares?”.

‘Friends’ burst on the scene on September 22, 1994 and with its beautiful and talented cast of Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc and Matthew Perry, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRXVQ77ehRQ

Like some sort of sitcom Beatlemania, ‘Friends’ became part of the cultural zeitgeist, with its catchphrases (how YOU doin’?), storylines (Ross and Rachel) and style (the ever-present Rachel hairdo) dominating mainstream entertainment discourse for a decade until its finale on May 6, 2004.

The show was enormously successful as the top-rated television comedy for six of its 10 years, averaging a whopping 25 million viewers an episode in America.

Even after it rode off into the sunset and was relegated to reruns, the show still garnered much attention, as it was consistently among the most streamed programs on Netflix, and has been watched over 100 billion times over all platforms over its lifetime.

The staying power of ‘Friends’ is why WarnerMedia were so keen to get their hands on the show in order for it to be the cornerstone of their new streaming service HBO Max, and shelled out $425 million for the privilege.

The ‘Friends’ reunion, only the second time in 17 years the cast has been in the same room together, was meant to be the big draw to HBO Max when it opened for business in May of 2020, but due to Covid, the filming of the reunion was pushed back not once but twice. And now it is now finally here.

The idea of a ‘Friends’ reunion where the characters Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and Joey returned had the potential to be pretty great.

The opportunities were endless for the show’s creators. They could have opted to have Ross and Rachel bitterly divorced, Monica addicted to meth, Chandler embracing his true trans nature, Phoebe homeless playing guitar on the subway, and Joey facing homicide charges, and it would’ve been interesting if not entertaining. ‘Friends’ could have been daring and deconstructed, if not self-destructed, its rather monotonous middlebrow milieu.

Instead, the new episode is like a reunion at a high school you didn’t attend, where you’re left out of the conversation and have to watch the cool kids reminisce about their awesome lives.

The problem with the reunion is that fans only care about Aniston, Schwimmer, Cox, Perry, Kudrow and LeBlanc because they were Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and Joey. But Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and Joey aren’t in the reunion, only Aniston, Schwimmer, Cox, Perry, Kudrow and LeBlanc are. A ‘Friends’ reunion only has power if it’s bringing those characters back together, not just bringing the cast back together.

Watching them sit around and recount funny stories and do some minimal table reads isn’t the slightest bit interesting or entertaining. It’s sort of like reassembling a famous band and having them talk about when they used to play music together, as opposed to actually having them play some music together.

To make things worse, the show is sometimes hosted by James Corden, and the only good thing about James Corden is when Ricky Gervais makes fun of him. For instance, at the 2020 Golden Globes Gervais gloriously quipped, “this year the world got to see James Corden as a fat pussy…and he was also in ‘Cats’!”  Sadly, the ‘Friends’ reunion has no Ricky Gervais, only James Corden.

Also unfortunate is having to watch David Beckham, Kit Harrington, Malala Yousafzai and Mindy Kaling tell us their favorite episodes, or Lady Gaga sing ‘Smelly Cat’, or Justin Bieber, Cara Delevingne and Cindy Crawford model silly ‘Friends’ costumes, or a relentlessly ‘diverse’ and ‘inclusive’ bunch of ‘Friends’ fans share how much the show means to them. All of which is just as awful and self-congratulatory as it sounds.

Ultimately, the ‘Friends’ reunion isn’t so much a testament to its greatness as it is a monument to the ravages of age. Father Time is still undefeated and proof of that is on the bloated, surgically supplemented faces of the cast. Lisa Kudrow aside, the entire cast has aged dramatically and dreadfully.

Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston were two of the most luminous beauties on television during the show’s heyday, but now if you saw them and their contorted faces in your bathroom at four in the morning, you’d think your house was haunted.

Both women constantly dabbed the corners of their eyes with tissues throughout the reunion, but it seemed less like they were crying and more like they were leaking from a deficient surgical seam.

In addition, Matt LeBlanc looks like he’s eaten a whole Joey and Matthew Perry looks like something is very wrong with him. I don’t mean that as a joke, Perry looks genuinely ill to the point of it being very disconcerting.

Regardless of the ravages of age on the cast, people have always watched ‘Friends’ for the escapist dopamine hit of some soft sitcom humor, but ‘Friends: The Reunion’ doesn’t have that, and is also shockingly devoid of even the dopamine hit of nostalgia.

In conclusion, ‘Friends’ hasn’t done anything interesting or worthwhile since the show ended in 2004, and some would argue the same was true during the show’s run. Rest assured, the unimaginative ‘Friends: The Reunion’ keeps that streak resolutely intact.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021