dylan minnette

5cream (2022)

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Every time there’s news about a new Batman, there’s a new wave of “[Actor] is my Batman” discourse (Kevin Conroy is mine, for the record). For me, a more important question is: Who’s your Final Girl? There are a lot of good contenders, but mine has always been Sidney Prescott, followed very closely by Nancy Thompson. I was so excited to hear about 5cream after it had been so long since Scream 4, and was eagerly looking forward to seeing it as if Sidney were actually an old friend of mine with whom I would be getting the chance to catch up. So, it’s a bit of a disappointment that it takes so long for her to show up here, which is further underlined by the fact that we never get to see the three main characters of this franchise reunite for, well, one last time. Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) gets scenes with both Dewey (David Arquette) and Sidney (Neve Campbell), and Sidney and Dewey talk briefly on the phone, but the three of them are never on screen together. That’s kind of weird, right? 

It’s been twenty-five years since Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) and Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) killed seven people within a series of peculiar homicides that were modeled after murders in slasher films. In the decade and a half that followed, there were three copycat sprees: one based around the “rules” of sequels, another those rules pertaining to trilogies, and in 2011 at the height of remake mania, a murder bender pertaining to sequels, reboots, and the like. But it’s been a quiet ten years, and all of our favorite characters aren’t where we left them. Dewey and Gale split up and he’s living in a Woodsboro trailer park, mooning over Gale still as she hosts a NY-based morning show. Sidney’s as far as she can be from Colorado, living her best life, presumably, since she has no trouble going for a healthy jog without fear of being watched; and she even answers her phone when she gets a call from an unfamiliar number (I can tell you one thing, if I were Sidney Prescott, I would never have owned or answered a telephone any time after 2002). All of that changes when a young girl named Tara (Jenna Ortega) is attacked in her home by Ghostface, and we’re introduced to our conceit for this time around. 

You see, Tara likes scary movies, but only “elevated horror”: things like It Follows, The VVitch, and Hereditary (her favorite, she says, as it’s a “meditation on grief and motherhood”). But Ghostface doesn’t want to talk about that; he’s more interested in what she knows about Stab, the film series within the film series that began life as a “ripped from the headlines” horror flick about the killings in the 1996 original, and which had, by Scream 4, bloated to a seven-movie franchise which had long ago stopped pretending to be based on true stories. Aligning with tradition, Tara is forced to participate under threat of violence to someone she cares about, and she gets through the first couple of questions but gets tripped up by the third. Just as Barrymore’s Casey Becker fumbled and said that Jason was the killer in Friday the 13th (it’s actually Mrs. Voorhees), Tara says that the killer in the original Stab was Billy Loomis, as it’s a trick question—she forgot about Stu. In a break with tradition, Tara actually survives this attack, if barely; this leads to the return of her older sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) to Woodsboro, but as it turns out, that might have been the point. As it turns out, Tara and Sam have a connection to previous killings, and they’re not the only ones. Several people in Tara’s tight-knit group of friends are, as it turns out, with Heather Matarazzo returning for a cameo as Martha Meeks, Randy’s younger sister from Scream 3, now the mother of twins Chad (Mason Gooding) and Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) with whom Tara is friends, as well as a reappearance of Judy Hicks (the always-welcome Marley Shelton), now sheriff of the town after having previously served as Dewey’s deputy in Scream 4, and her son Wes (Dylan Minnette) is also among their group. That’s not all, though, as we also have Amber (Mikey Madison), Tara’s best friend, as well as Chad’s girlfriend Liv (Sonia Ben Ammar). 

The biggest of the film’s flaws—beyond how little our legacy characters get to do and how late some of them appear in the screenplay (Gale doesn’t appear in person until nearly an hour in)—is that there are simply too many characters, and you can even see it in the poster. Consider the poster for the first Scream, which had five characters in total, including the three we would come to know as our principal characters in this series, but hyping up the appearance of Drew Barrymore, whose pre-titles murder is still the franchise’s defining moment. Then came Scream 2, which likewise limited its poster to five characters: the core three, Sidney’s new boyfriend, and (once again) the decoy lead who is killed off in the film’s opening. Scream 3‘s poster followed this trend with five characters, and then Scream 4 featured the first cast expansion to feature six: the three leads, and the would-be new Sidney, her boyfriend, and the new Randy Meeks. But the poster for this one has a full dozen people on it, and it’s just too many. 

I don’t want to be the one to complain that Kyle Gallner is here, since he was in both one of the most original horrors of the aughts and the most derivative remake of the same relevant time period (Jennifer’s Body and the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, respectively), so he feels like a genre acknowledgement that belongs here; but he’s also the most frivolous presence, existing only to provide cannon fodder for Ghostface and cement the theory that the killers are targeting people connected to the original killings when it’s revealed that he’s the son of Stu’s (I believe) heretofore unmentioned sister. When Dewey recounts “three attacks” at the 30-minute mark, I legitimately turned to my friend and asked if there was an assault I was forgetting other than Tara’s attack and “the one at the hospital,” and had to be reminded that he had been there at all. Liv’s also the worst kind of red herring, in that though it’s true that she always seems to be conveniently elsewhere when a killing occurs, she also is such a non-presence that when she’s not on screen; you forget that she exists. It is a bit of a narrative catch-22, though, since there need to be killings of people outside of this friend group to provide clues about the killer’s selection process, but if you change the story a bit and have, for instance, Dewey gathering potential victims who aren’t as familiar with one another to protect them from Ghostface, then you kinda lose the friend group Screamness of it all. And, despite all of that, the first two people I first and most immediately suspected, which is both satisfying and a little deflating. 

It may seem like I have a lot of complaints, but I actually thoroughly enjoyed this one. It vaults over Scream 3 handily and lands just behind Scream 4 in the rankings. The reinvention here may actually be mpre clever, but it doesn’t feel as clever. The opening of Scream 4 alone was a fun, bizarre ride that really shook things up to the point where you weren’t really sure what the rules were anymore. The motive of the killings is fantastic; we learn early on that the previous year saw the release of Stab, which is actually Stab 8 (get it?), and that fans hated it—and from what little of it we see, with good reason. Stab has become a cultural phenomenon in Scream‘s world, and that world has now entered the era of The Snyder Cut, wherein groups of fanboys feel that the media belongs to them, so they want to course correct back to the “original concept” by enacting a new series of murders in Woodsboro to inspire the Stab franchise to return to its roots. It’s not as clever as “movies made us do it,” but it’s just as cohesive, and allows for one of the killers to deliver great lines like “How can fandom be toxic?” while holding a bloody knife.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Open House (2018)

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Warning: Spoilers ahead!

A Netflix Original thriller set in a big, spooky house deep in the mountains seemed like the perfect first 2018 film for me to watch. I made a cup of hot chocolate with whole milk just for the occasion. For the majority of The Open House, I was on the edge of my seat. My anxiety levels were at an all-time high as I waited for the killer to be revealed so I could get some closure. Unfortunately, that never happened. Not only was the killer’s face never shown, but the two individuals being hunted by the killer both die in the end. I’ve never been more disappointed in the ending of a film in my entire life. Concluding a film with unanswered questions is quite common and even enjoyable if done properly, but The Open House doesn’t leave many clues for viewers to come up with their own version of who the killer was or why was he/she so set on killing our main characters. It’s a damn shame because everything leading up to the ending was actually entertaining.

The Open House gets its cheesy title from its setting: a mansion in the mountains that is on the market. After the sudden death of her husband, Naomi (Piercey Dalton) and her son Logan (Dylan Minnette) are forced to move into her sister’s mountain mansion until it sells due to financial reasons. From the moment they settle in, strange things start to occur. The pilot light turns off while Naomi takes showers, Logan’s phone goes missing, the basement door randomly opens, etc. Their creepy neighbor, Martha, makes an appearance a handful of times, and each one is more peculiar than the next. There’s even a scene where Dylan is in the pitch black basement and Martha’s face appears behind him. For a good while, it seems as though Martha is responsible for the mysterious happenings, but then Chris (Sharif Atkins), the friendly salesman Naomi meets in town, randomly shows up at the house. He claims that he noticed the open house sign in the front of the road, and he is interested in taking a look inside. Naomi lets him in, and while she isn’t looking, he disappears into the basement with a unsettling look on his face. At this point, he becomes a suspicious character as well.

The film’s pace picks up quickly when Naomi is out on the town and receives a call from her sister informing her that someone broke into the house. Once the police arrive, they aren’t much help and basically blame the break in on local kids pranking around. Chris is then invited to spend the night to provide some comfort to Naomi and Logan since there scared shitless. Because Chris had this artificial kindness to him, I really thought that he was going to reveal himself as the person responsible for all the strange activity, but Logan ends up finding him with a slit throat in their family SUV. Was Chris’s character purposely supposed to seem suspicious or was Sharif Atkins a crappy actor? We may never know.  Logan then gets his head bashed into the window and is doused with water while passed out in freezing temperatures by what appears to be a man. With Chris scratched off my suspect list and the killer not matching Martha’s physique, I assume that this person may be Martha’s son or husband.

The unknown killer then gets into bed with Naomi with his hands in prayer position across his chest. This was probably the most bone chilling part in the film for me. Naomi gets up to use the bathroom and gets back into bed with him! I’m assuming this is a California king size bed for her to not even flinch before getting in. As soon as she realizes the creep in the bed, he captures her, ties her up, and breaks her fingers one by one. Frozen Logan makes it back into the house, and accidentally stabs his mother, which then led me to believe that he was going to get Final Boy status because one of them would need to survive in the end, right? Nope. Just when I thought Logan escaped, he meets his death by the still unknown killer, and the movie comes to an abrupt end.

The ending just felt so lazy. There were so many cool elements in this film that could’ve been used to create a jaw-dropping conclusion, but all the buildup in the film’s last 20 minutes led to nothing but disappointment. I feel like I’ve been ripped off, even though the film is available on Netflix. Watch The Open House only if you enjoy frustration and disappointment.

-Britnee Lombas

Don’t Breathe (2016)

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EPSON MFP image

fourstar

Don’t Breathe is quite the experience. It’s being touted as a return to form for the horror genre, and while it’s certainly memorable, tense, and well-acted, there’s a fine line between well-earned praise and overhype, and the promotion of this film may have already crossed that event horizon.

The film follows Rocky (Jane Levy), Alex (Dylan Minnette), and Money (Daniel Zovatto, of the strangely similar It Follows, but more on that in a moment), three Detroit teenagers whose varying levels of desperation to get out of their dying city lead them to theft. Using Alex’s father’s private security company connections to get in and out of homes without setting off any alarms, the trio land on the idea of robbing the home of a blind military veteran (Stephen Lang) who was given a large civil settlement when the daughter of a rich family was found not guilty of vehicular manslaughter of his only child. Once they make their way inside, they find that the Blind Man is more than they bargained for, and is hiding secrets that they could not have imagined.

I went into the film mostly blind, for lack of a better term. I knew very little about the plot from the outset other than that the film was supposed to be the best horror flick of the year, and I was expecting something along the lines of an inverted Wait Until Dark. I was also excited in the very first scene, as it reminded me of Hans Weingartner’s 2004 flick The Edukators, of which I am a big fan. The film quickly shifted tone, however, and although there are elements of Wait Until Dark at play here (most notably in a scene in which a blind individual turns off all of the lights to put themselves on equal footing with the people invading their home), this is a very different film.

We recently discussed in the roundtable for our September MotM outing The Box that it was hard to sympathize with the protagonist family and their need for more income because of their relative place of privilege, and Don’t Breathe is certainly more identifiable on that front, but the characters never quite reach a point where we can fully sympathize with them. The only main character of color, Money (Zovatto is Costa Rican), is the least fleshed out and has the least characterization; his character is the least likable of the three mains, and Zovatto seems to be playing an exaggerated version of the same sleazeball he played in It Follows. Further, Don’t Breathe seems to take place in the same alternate universe Detroit as It Follows, by which I mean both films are nearly devoid of black people. It’s understandable that director Fede Alvarez chose not to cast actors of color for these roles; having black actors play Detroit thieves would have unfortunate implications of their own, but since I only counted two extras of color (one in the overhead flyby at the start of the film and one getting coffee at the station at the end), there’s a lot of missed opportunity here. The film effectively portrays Detroit as a dying city with homes full of broken windows and empty streets, but focusing on the economic problems of (mostly) white teenagers creates an incorrect perception both of the city’s real problems and of the people who are usually victims of economic inequality.

The scene we see of Rocky’s family (including the deadbeat mother’s unsubtly swastika-tattooed boyfriend) attempts to communicate in a very short time frame the reasons why Rocky so dearly desires to leave Detroit behind, but it’s a little clumsy in its overtones and fails in comparison to a later scene where Alex talks about her childhood in a much more effective demonstration. And we learn the least about Alex, except that he seems to have a fairly decent home life, and his investment in the thefts is largely because of his romantic interest in Rocky, which the film never states is either problematic or loving. It’s also not the only problematic thing in the film other than the whitewashed Detroit, as there is a scene near the end that uses the ol’ rape-as- drama cliche, although not in the way you would expect. It’s effectively unsettling, but I’m not sure if the “I’m no rapist” line is meant to show off the blind (sorry) self-deception of the character saying it or an attempt to head off any attempted interpretation of the line (which it obviously has not, based on some of the think pieces emerging in the wake of the film’s release). I’m hesitant to say more than that for the sake of retaining the film’s surprises. It’s enough to sour the experience somewhat but not enough for me to say the film should be skipped, although I definitely recommend a big trigger warning for those viewers sensitive to sexual assault.

Even with all of its flaws, Don’t Breathe is a delightfully wicked and taut horror thriller with great influences from other films in the same genre and outside of it. Beyond the “blind person fends off home invaders” similarities to Wait Until Dark and the superficial similarities to The Edukators, there’s a lot of The People Under the Stairs in Don’t Breathe’s DNA (minus that film’s exploration of the race-related nature of economic disadvantage, which, as noted, is lacking here). There are also minor elements that are reminiscent of this year’s earlier horror film 10 Cloverfield Lane, particularly in one of the fake-out endings and the scene of a woman climbing through an air vent in a desperate escape attempt (this scene is also evocative of my favorite horror film, Alien, from which 10 Cloverfield borrowed some of its imagery). Alvarez’s beautiful cinematography and lingering camera work elevate what could otherwise have been a fairly run-of- the-mill horror movie. There’s an attention to detail that bespeaks a greater knowledge of the language of film, and Alvarez is obviously well on his way to being a master linguist. I can’t remember the last time, other than The VVitch, where I felt so much tension in my spine  while taking in a fright flick, and I was haunted by the movie for hours after walking out of the theatre. If you have a strong stomach and can handle the anxiety, Don’t Breathe gets a“recommended” from me.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond