A Return To Greatness For Slasher Films

Rating: 9/10 (14 November 2015)

Scream directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson, the film that brought slasher films back from the brink.
Nearly one year after her mother's murder, Sidney Prescott ( Neve Campbell ) is stalked by a man in a ghost mask who is obsessed with horror films.
The movie starts off with a high school girl (Drew Barrymore) preparing to watch a scary movie when she receives a phone call from a person who appears to have the wrong number. The call starts off innocent enough, until the man on the phone has kidnapped her boyfriend and tells her that she has to answer horror movie trivia if she wants to live. This man is revealed to be none other than.... another random guy in a mask, who (surprise, surprise) kills her.
This may sound like almost all slasher films, but I assure you that there is something different about this film. The Scream series is most well-known for its self-awareness. Since all the classic horror films exist in Scream, the characters makes a lot of references to horror films. A character name Randy (Jaime Kennedy) who works at a video store, only exists to point out all the clichés in horror films for some laughs.
Neve Campbell gives the best performance as Sidney. Sidney has been a depressed teen ever since her mother died a year ago and so she is not the most cheerful character around. When her mother was murdered, Sidney got Cotton Weary arrested.Now that a killer is going after her, she is beginning to think she might have made a mistake. The anger and is Campbell's performance gives Sidney an intensity that is good for a final girl archetype. The Scream Series is about Sidney and not the killer, which makes the Scream series unique in that way. Sidney is also smart when it comes to running from Ghostface and uses her brain in the chase scene. Most of the time...
Ghostface himself has two different sides to him. Phone Ghostface (Roger Jackson) sounds like a genuinely threating character. However once you see him in action, he is really clumsy. I guess you can't have that great of vision with a mask like that, so not being perfect adds a sense of realism to the film. It is just disappointing when you hear this menacing voice and then there is this guy in a cheap Halloween costume that is just not good at killing. Ghostface wears a black cloak with a hood and a white ghost mask. He also does this really cool knife cleaning trick.
The other characters are pretty good. Randy is the best supporting character, being the movie geek of the group and all his movie references really make the movie. Matthew Lillard plays Stu, the goofy class clown and Skeet Ulrich plays Billy Loomis (Sidney Prescott's boyfriend) who seems like he just wants to do it with Sidney. There is also Sidney's close friend Tatum (Rose McGowan) who really is just there so Sidney has someone to talk to.
Deputy Dewey (David Arquette) and Reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) have a romance going on in this film, but it is not explored much until the sequels. Dewey is not very good at his job and does not really protect anyone from the killer. Gale Weathers is a pushy news reporter, who is always trying to get a news story out of Sidney and just comes off as annoying.
Craven does a good job imitating Carpenters style, making the ordinary seem sinister and mysterious. This tactic however makes some shots look lazy, like when Sidney is in a car and Ghostface tries to strangle her from the backseat. This shot is exactly the same as the car strangling scene in Halloween, and although some people would call this homage, I think that it is just a rip-off.
The music score by Marco Beltrami does its job in making the viewer uneasy and has a mystical quality to it. The score is not nearly as iconic as other horror themes like Halloween or Friday the 13th, but it sound really good.
The movie does not have that big of a body count like other slasher films. Only 6 characters die and there roles are very minor, this is because Scream was written to be a trilogy, so only certain characters are expendable. Unfortunately, because of so few kills in the movie, there is a lack of interesting kills. The only kill that is particularly memorable is the garage door kill.
The movie ends with a party at Stu's house, and there the killer kills and injures some people. Sidney is chased around a bit, ending with the killer being revealed as Billy AND Stu. It turns out that Sidney's mother had a thing going on with Billy's dad and when Billy's mother found out, she moved away, leaving Billy behind. So Billy and Stu killed Sidney's mother and pinned it on Cotton Weary, and now they are planning on blaming these new murders on Sidney's father. The mess up this plan and get themselves killed, ending the movie.
Billy has a pretty simple but good motive, but Stu has no real reason for going along with this plan. It is stated that he dated Drew Barrymore's character, but why would he have killed Sidney's mother in the first place? Or why would he stake out in a bathroom, hoping that Sidney would go in there, when there plan hinged on her death being on the next day?
No matter the flaws that this movie has, it is still a great film. It makes the characters self-aware AND still stays true to the slasher genre ( unlike Scary Movie ). It also introduced a new generation to classic horror films, something it still does today.
A Must See
9/10