Movie Review #1 Scream

Movie Review #1: Scream

Scream was only my second look into the dark but imaginative and quite fun world of Wes Craven. Lately I`ve been getting into horror films a lot, especially the slasher genre. The other film I`ve seen by Wes Craven is A Nightmare on Elm Street, which I love. Knowing that he is a horror god, I had high hopes when I started this film, and I was not let down. It was released in 1996, and has become an extremely popular film. It revolves around a teenage girl named Sidney, who a year prior to the opening of the film walked in on her mother who was just raped and killed, and she testified against the man who supposedly did it, sending him to jail. So, that whole experience has made her very tense about sex, and she has a boyfriend, Billy, who has so far been patient about her nervousness about sex. The opening scene actually has Drew Barrymore in it, she plays a teenager about to settle down and watch a horror movie, when she gets a phone call from a man she does not know and hangs up. He calls back many times and eventually gets angry, she finds out that the mysterious man has her boyfriend and will kill him unless she can answer questions about horror movies. When she gets one of them wrong, her boyfriend is killed. She is now scared out of her mind and is hiding in the house, she eventually gets out of the house trying to escape, but is killed by a man wearing a black cloak and a mask, now known as ghost face. This was a shocking scene, the first time I tried to watch it (a few years ago), I put it off, I was terrified. It is quite intense and genuinely scary. Also, this was shocking because Drew Barrymore was advertised as a main character, and she was killed in the first 15 minutes. So, now it introduces Sidney and her friends, including her best friend Tatum, her boyfriend Billy, Randy, and Stu. The school is full of reporters about the killings of two teenagers, and we meet Gale Weathers, a big reporter who will do anything to get the story, she is played by Courteney Cox. Sidney is attacked by ghost face, but manages to survive just as her boyfriend arrives, and he drops a phone, she now thinks he made the scary phone calls. He is arrested but then later released when they find he didn`t make the phone calls. People are now dressing up as ghost face at school to scare Sidney, but she decides to go to a party hosted by Stu. After she finally has sex with Billy, and most people have left, the killer is in the house and after killing Tatum and almost killing Randy, he goes after Sidney. Now although I have given a somewhat detailed analysis of the plot, I am not going to give the rest away. I thought the ending was great; I loved the killers and just how crazy they were. Now onto the things I really liked; one thing in particular was these two references to A Nightmare on Elm Street. In the beginning when Drew Barrymore is on the phone with ghost face, he says that his favorite horror movie was A Nightmare on Elm Street, he said it was scary. Drew said the first one was but the rest were bad. I loved that scene because Wes Craven only directed the first Nightmare film (in the original series). Another thing was that Wes Craven had a cameo. The principle of the school thinks someone is watching him, he goes out of his office looking for them and says an insult under his breath, you then see Wes Craven as a janitor wearing the hat and sweater from A Nightmare on Elm Street, and he says “What?” The principle says that he wasn`t talking to him, and the janitors name was Fred. I loved that scene.
Anyway, that’s it for this review, as for the film, I really liked and I am looking forward to the rest of series.