EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS: You’re Trying to Tell Me That a Giant Spider Ate Gladys?

Eight Legged Freaks (2002) – Directed by Ellory Elkayem – Starring David Arquette, Kari Wührer, Scott Terra, Doug E. Doug, Scarlett Johansson, and Leon Rippy.

If it’s been a long day and I’m tired and maybe a little cranky, if I’m mentally fried from doing too much work and I need to check out for a bit, I toss a movie like EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS into the Blu-ray player.

FREAKS is a surprisingly good little movie that knows it’s a B-movie, acts like a B-movie, but isn’t made with a B effort. It’s a smart script, full of expected thrills and likable characters. It’s not overly complicated but it’s not so simple there aren’t a few pleasant twists and turns. I didn’t plan to watch it this time because I was mentally exhausted, but it sat on my counter for a week or so while I finished up my 12-part examination of The Avengers. I had planned on watching it because it has Scarlett Johansson in it and the original plan of Avengers Month wasn’t to review Avengers 12 different ways, but to review it once and then watch a bunch of movies with the Avengers‘ actors or characters in it. The film was so good, however, that the plans changed and now instead of a month of Avengers-related films, there will only be a handful.

As much fun as it was to write those reviews, by the time I hit the Iron Man reaction, I was pretty much toasted. As a result, EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS ended up being exactly the right film to spin in the player.

The plot is simple enough. Two events pop in the town of Prosperity, Arizona: a barrel of toxic waste ends up in the town reservoir and Chris McCormick (David Arquette) returns home after being away for a decade. The town is nearly bankrupt and the mayor, Wade (Leon Rippy), wants to sell the mines (owned by Chris’ dad) and have the entire town relocate, but Chris isn’t having it. Wade is a shifty dude who convinced the town to invest in ostriches that no one wants to eat and a mall that no one can afford to visit.

Chris left town because he was in love with Sam Stroud (the always gorgeous Kari Wührer), who was married to a guy who was cheating on her. Chris beat the crap out of the guy and bailed on town without telling Sam he was in love with her.

And yes, before we go any further, it’s an entirely predictable plot. You know Sam and Chris are going to end up together, but what’s nice about FREAKS approach to this is that Chris tries to tell her a couple times and can’t get it out. When the film is nearly over and the conflict is at its deepest, Chris is determined to tell her, but Sam stops him and just lays out everything he’s been trying to say in about 5 seconds. It’s little things like this that show you how to make a genre film that ever-so-slightly plays with your expectations.

FREAKS is, as you would expect, a big monster movie. That barrel of toxic waste ends up making all the spiders grow exponentially larger. There’s an exotic spider shop in town for some reason and Sam’s son, Mike (Scott Terra), likes to go over there and hang out with the shopkeeper, Joshua (Tom Noonan). Mike gets out of the shop just before a spider attacks Joshua, who flails around and lets all the spiders out of all the cages.

After that, hilarity ensues.

The spiders start attacking and the townspeople start dying and freaking out. There’s a local pirate radio dude named Harlan (Doug E. Doug) who thinks everything is a government conspiracy. The whole town thinks he’s nuts but they all listen to him.

What makes a film like FREAKS work is that these are good characters in a well-told story executed at a crisp pace. Yeah, there’s a lot of types at play here, but every actor does their job. David Arquette really isn’t leading man material, but his sheepish awkwardness is something the film takes into account. It’s Sam who’s got the traditionally masculine role of being the town sheriff, as well as being a mom to Mike and Ashley (Scarlett Johansson).

Let’s talk about Ms. Johansson since this is Avengers Month and all. In the decade since FREAKS came out she’s become a legit superstar. She’s the fodder for tabloids, been married and divorced Hollywood style, and has become the darling of Woody Allen and had a starring role in one of the biggest movies of all time. She’s an actress that I really don’t quite get – sometimes, I think she’s really effective and others … not so much.

I saw FREAKS in the theater back in 2002 and Scarlett Johansson did not make a single impression on me that I can remember. She’s a kid here, of course, and in a small role, so there’s no reason she should have left an impression – which is good, because there’s just nothing remarkable here. Johansson isn’t bad, but there’s nothing her to suggest the kind of success she’s had. In fact, if I had to guess which kid would have had the better career, I’d have gone with Terra.

The town gets overrun with massive spiders and everyone runs to the mall for the final showdown. It’s a fun sequence with the townsfolk battling the giant spiders that come pouring into the mall. They get chased down into the mines and come across the big queen spider … and yeah, it’s a monster movie. Done really well. I wish I’d had Arachnophobia to toss into the player – and that’s a sign that FREAKS did it’s job because after watching one spider movie I was ready to watch another one.

There’s a really nice subplot with Chris and Mike; Mike mentions early on how no one ever listens to the kid in these situations, so Chris makes a point to listen to the kid. It’s a nice touch, and FREAKS does a really good job with these smaller subplots – Chris and Mike, Ashley and her boyfriend, Wade and his ostriches … FREAKS sets them up, does a little something with them, and then lets them sit for a bit before coming back to them one last time. It’s really simple, really effective storytelling that the film doesn’t need to do, and so it’s easy to appreciate that it does.

EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS is a good time and it’s the kind of film that reminds me why I like writing stories. There’s nothing here that’s going to change the world, but it will certainly give you an entertaining 90 minutes.

SCREAM 4: Trapped by Its Own Past Cleverness

Scream 4 (2011) – Directed by Wes Craven – David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere, Anthony Anderson, Alison Brie, Adam Brody, Rory Culkin, Marielle Jaffe, Erik Knudsen, Mary McDonnell, Marley Shelton, Nico Tortorella, Anna Paquin, Kristen Bell, Lucy Hale, Shenae Grimes, Britt Robertson, Aimee Teegarden, and Roger L. Jackson.

SCREAM 4 is not a disaster, and it does offer a better conclusion to the franchise than SCREAM 3, but it is also a movie that’s too obsessed with its own clever past, and the result is a movie that spends far too much time looking backwards instead of forwards.

Let’s cover the good first: our long-lived main characters, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), and Dewey Riley (David Arquette) have finally shown a bit of real growth. Sidney has written her own book about the Ghostface killings in Woodsboro, Windsor, and Los Angeles, and now she’s on a book tour selling personal empowerment, and has come home to Woodsboro.

Because it’s obviously a good idea to return home to do a book signing about how a crazy set of lunatics put on a costume to try and kill you, but just ended up killing a whole bunch of other people instead.

Sidney is accompanied by her publicist (Alison Brie), who’s thrilled when Ghostface makes a return appearance because she’s a publicist, which means she has to be a horrible person. And that’s one of the problems with SCREAM 4 – it’s completely predictable from a character standpoint. The money grubbing publicist, the local yokel cops (Anthony Anderson and Adam Brody), the well-meaning mom (Mary McDonnell), and the glib high school kids.

Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven even manage to take the initial promise of Dewey and Gale being married and screw that up, too, as Gale spends much of the movie as a desperate, b*tchy malcontent. It’s not bad from a character standpoint, but it isn’t fun to watch. Gale has given up her big city life as a reporter to be married to the local deputy-turned-sheriff and is trying her hand at writing fiction, but she’s got a severe case of writer’s block, so when Ghostface rears his elongated white face, Gale is re-energized and wants to help, but Dewey doesn’t want her assistance.

Which means her and Dewey again spend the movie bickering.

Blah.

So much for the character growth.

Dewey has gotten better at the whole cop thing, and they’ve given him a deputy (Marley Shelton) who’s got a big crush on him, just so Gale can walk around with an even bigger grumpy face. Not awesome.

Sidney has to stick around town because she’s a “suspect” (but not really), so she stays at the family house. Well, no. She stays at her cousin Jill’s house (Emma Roberts) because the film wants her to stay at her cousin Jill’s house so we can have a tie-in with the next generation of slasher victims. We’ve got Jill, of course, and her friends Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) and Olivia (Marielle Jaffe). Olivia dies in a decent scene as the girls watch her getting stabbed next door. Even for a slasher film it’s unnecessarily bloody, but what makes the scene work isn’t so much the double phone conversation that’s going on with Jill and Kirby in one house and Olivia and Ghostface in the other – it’s Sidney running from the “safe” house to the dangerous house to confront Ghostface directly, and then looking around that bloodied room at the carnage.

It’s a really nice change, and Sidney’s aggressiveness is what makes SCREAM 4 feel like a truer ending than SCREAM 3, where she spent most of the film still in Little Girl Scared mode.

Unfortunately, Sidney’s aggressiveness is where the film gets caught between what SCREAM used to be, and what SCREAM could be. It recycles the whole “SCREAM is a horror movie that knows the rules of horror movies” bit, but to incredibly poor effect. There’s two film nerds this time around: Charlie Walker and Robbie Mercer (Rory Culkin, Erik Knudsen). Robbie is all about “live streaming” his life because Williamson apparently thinks this is what’s cool and fresh with kids. (Or because he’s never seen American Pie.) Charlie is the darker, more intelligent one and, well, if you can’t see where that’s going, then maybe SCREAM 4 will have some surprises in store for you. SCREAM 4 doesn’t require you to know anything about other horror movies, though; it’s completely dependent on itself (which masquerades in the movie as the STAB franchise), a fact made clear by all the fake beginnings, which comes off less as clever, and more as a cheap way to be able to put Kristen Bell, Aimee Teegarden, Anna Paquin, and some other attractive young actresses in the commercials.

The movie is so blatant about making a point about the characters knowing the rules, it does such a p*ss-poor job of setting up actual would-be killers (Jill’s boyfriend is such a complete tool that not only do you know he can’t be guilty, you wonder why Jill ever dated him to begin with), and we know from SCREAM and SCREAM 2 that we’re likely dealing with multiple people in the Ghostface costume, and that the filmmakers are desperate to give us some kind of twist …

Well, it’s not to hard to figure out that if the film is going to lead you in one direction that it will twist you in the other, so when Jill and Charlie are revealed to be the latest to don the Ghostface costume, well, it’s not exactly much a shock. (Especially since Sidney conveniently abandons Jill in a room and then doesn’t go back for her.)

And that, again, is where SCREAM 4 is caught between what it was and what it could be; the film is still so focused on Sidney, Dewey, and Gale that it doesn’t develop any of the younger characters to a strong enough degree, and because of that, SCREAM has become just another film about interchangeable teenagers getting sliced and diced by a homicidal maniac.

But here’s the kick – once the film finally gets on revealing Jill as the killer, the film becomes pretty good. Yes, absolutely, Emma Roberts is forced to overact a bit, but at least now we’re getting to something fresh and new for a SCREAM movie, and SCREAM 4 finally feels completely unburdened by its franchise’s past. The nice girl psychopath and the lovesick, film geek sidekick has some real bite to it, and it makes me wonder if Craven and Williamson ever considered revealing this way, way earlier in the movie. That would have been something fresh and new – seeing a SCREAM movie from the killer’s point-of-view instead of rehashing another tired guess-the-killer plot could have been amazing.

SCREAM 4 is so determined to be what SCREAM fans expect that it fails to remember that one of the things that so many of liked about the original SCREAM was that it wasn’t what we expected. SCREAM felt fresh; SCREAM 4 spends far too much time in the shadow of SCREAM for it to feel anything but derivative. It’s only in the final act that SCREAM 4 takes off, and in doing so it manages to give the franchise a much stronger conclusion than SCREAM 3. The idea that kids have become so addicted to fame and so desensitized to the violence around them provides the film with a solid foundation – it just takes too long to build anything new or engaging on that base to make SCREAM 4 anything more than a decent excuse to eat some popcorn.

SCREAM 3: Why Don’t You Take Some F*cking Responsibility?

Scream 3 – Directed by Wes Craven – Starring Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Patrick Dempsey, Parker Posey, Deon Richmond, Liev Schreiber, Kelly Rutherford, Jenny McCarthy, Patrick Warburton, Matt Keeslar, Emily Mortimer, Scott Foley, Jamie Kennedy, Roger L. Jackson, Carrie Fisher, and Lance Henriksen.

SCREAM 3 has the right idea but the wrong execution, and what was so fresh and fun during SCREAM and SCREAM 2 becomes limp and predictable.

SCREAM took place in high school, SCREAM 2 in college, and so SCREAM 3 is transported into the real world. The Stab franchise (the in-film franchise interpreting the real-life events of Sidney Prescott into cheesy slasher films) is filming its third go-round and Sidney is living by herself (okay, with a dog) up in the hills and working as a telephone counselor who goes by the name Laura.

It makes complete sense that after everything she’s seen Sidney (Neve Campbell) has retreated away from the world, but it doesn’t make for a very good movie. Each film resets Sidney back to the scared victim and by now that’s worn thin.

I’d be more than willing to accept a lessened role for Sidney if the franchise pushed Dewey and Gale (David Arquette and Courteney Cox) to the front. Unfortunately, they’ve reset that couple, too, so we’ve got to sit through the Dewey and Gale Courtship Dance all over again. Why? Having Dewey and Gale as a couple would have been a perfectly fine place to start and would have given the film some momentum which it sorely needs.

The film has the right idea introducing the film cast of Stab, but doesn’t take enough time to make them real people, so they’re just actors getting killed. It feels reheated, too, after SCREAM 2′s use of Luke Wilson, Heather Graham, and Tori Spelling to redo the actions of the first movie. It is pretty cool to see Woodsboro rebuilt on a movie soundstage, and there’s a nice scene with Sidney back in “her” bedroom, but for the most part, the entire movie angle falls completely flat.

Even the appearance of Randy (Jamie Kennedy) via videotape doesn’t work. They try to do the whole “in the third film, all bets are off” bit, but what horror movie stops at #3? Randy’s “all bets are off” line is apparently justification for “do whatever you want,” because the bad guy this time around is Roman (Scott Foley), the director of Stab, who also (TA-DAAAAAA!) happens to be the son of Sidney’s mom, Maureen Prescott! Is your mind blow?

Probably not.

SCREAM 3 generates some energy from the Courteney Cox/Parker Posey pairing. Parker plays Jennifer Jolie, the actress playing Gale Weathers in the Stab movies, and as they investigate Maureen Prescott’s life as an actress, they manage to scrounge up a few laughs.

Mostly, though, it’s just a whole lot of snooze, as people we don’t care about get killed by a guy in a mask.