Scream 6: Brutal, bloody, ticks all the boxes
The makers of the slasher sequel got one thing wrong when they cast Samara Weaving, Hugo’s talented niece, as a young woman who fronts up for a blind date.
Scream VI (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★½
The Scream series began in 1996. The first film in what would prove to be an immensely durable franchise, was directed by Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s screenplay playfully set out to analyse and at the same time spoof slasher series like Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Twenty-seven years later the formula is still being used with some success, a tribute to the invention of Craven, who died in 2015, and Williamson. And the films seem to be as popular with a new generation of horror movie addicts as ever they were.
Scream VI is a sequel to last year’s Scream which was described as a “requel”. The surviving characters from that film have relocated from the town of Woodsboro, California, where the other films were set – eight of them – and moved to downtown Manhattan. The films invariably begin with a character taking a mysterious phone call, and this one is no exception;
Laura, played by Samara Weaving, Hugo’s talented niece, is on a blind date. Sporting a broad Aussie accent, she is meeting a man in a trendy downtown restaurant-bar. A lecturer on film – specifically slasher films – Laura should have been more suspicious when her date texts her to say he can’t find the restaurant. Trying to spot the man in a dark alley she is attacked by Ghostface, the latest incarnation of the serial killer who wears a black cloak and hood and whose stark white skull face is twisted into a fearsome grimace. There’s a twist soon after this, that I won’t reveal.
The film proper begins with the self-described Core Four becoming increasingly nervous. Samantha (Melissa Barrera), daughter of the original Ghostface, is fiercely protective of her half-sister, Tara (Jenna Ortega). Movie buff Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is the member of the group who articulates the rules of the game:
“Nobody makes sequels,” she explains. “We’re in a franchise and everything has to be bigger than the previous film; expect the opposite to be true; no-one is safe; the main characters are expendable”.
Also involved in the increasingly violent film are Quinn (Lianna Libertato), the sexually active roommate of the sisters, whose father, Bailey (Dermot Mulroney), is the cop in charge of the case. And there’s the virginal, nerdy Ethan (Jack Champion). Returning from previous films are TV journalist Gale (Courteney Cox) and Kirby (Hayden Panettiere), who is now an FBI officer.
The Scream series has morphed into a whodunit franchise so the killer(s) might be any of the above. Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olan and Tyler Gillett, along with screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, have also returned from the previous film.
There are some notable set pieces, especially a harrowing journey on a subway train on Halloween night when the carriage is filled with people in fancy dress, including several well-known movie killers and several Ghostfaces, one of which proves to be the real deal.
Also impressive is a scene in which the girls’ neighbour (Josh Segarra) across the way sees the killer in their apartment and tries to warn them, providing them with a rickety escape. Sam’s therapist (Henry Czerny) makes the crucial mistake of answering a knock at the door while watching the superb 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers on television.
The killings are brutal and bloody, but that’s the way the fans of films like this want them to be. With its tongue firmly in its cheek (“Who gives a f--- about movies?” demands the killer as he dispatches yet another victim) Scream VI ticks all the boxes. At just over two hours it’s much, much too long, but the good scenes are pretty good of their type.
I hope, however, that in future Samara Weaving is cast in a role in which she survives a little longer than she does here.
65 (M)
In cinemas
★★
The title of this cut-rate sci-fi thriller is pretty meaningless – 65 what.? As it turns out, it refers to 65 million years ago, so why not call it 65 Million Years BC? A film titled One Million Years BC, starring the late Raquel Welch, was made in 1966, but I bet no one thought of calling it 1.
The new film, written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Wood, opens on a faraway planet that looks and sounds very much like Earth. The aliens that live here appear to be human, most of them speak English, and they have everyday problems, like the fact that a loving father, Mills (Adam Driver), who pilots a passenger spaceship, has a job that takes him away from home at long, two-year, stretches at a time and a sickly daughter (Chloe Coleman) whom he hates to leave. But after a cute scene on a beach, in which Dad teaches the nine-year-old to whistle, he heads off into space.
Before long an unexpected meteor storm cripples the spaceship which crashes – no prizes for guessing where – on Earth. Mills and nine-year-old Koa (Ariana Greenblatt) are the only survivors – her parents are among the dead. Adding to the woes of the two survivors is the fact that the giant asteroid, or whatever it was, that killed all the dinosaurs hasn’t hit the Earth just yet, though it’s about to. This means that the wilderness Mills and Koa traverse in an attempt to find the part of the spaceship – which split in two – that might still be working is fraught with danger from a myriad of toothy monsters who are hungry and ill-tempered.
From here on in, 65 is a sort of Robinson Crusoe story with Koa playing the Man Friday role. It’s a basic story of survival in the most improbable circumstances, but the thin screenplay and predictable elements – Koa of course gradually takes the place of Mills’s daughter, though because she comes from another part of his planet she can’t speak English. This is not a new idea, as lovers of the 1964 cult classic Robinson Crusoe on Mars will testify.
The numerous dinosaur attacks are handled as though this were a horror film, with the audience assailed with jolting shock moments almost as scary as those faced by the hapless protagonists.
Sam Raimi, director of The Evil Dead franchise, was one of the film’s producers and his influence seems clear. The visual effects, some of them created in Australian studios, are moderately effective, though not up to the level of the Jurassic Park franchise.
Adam Driver is too good an actor to be stuck in a film like this. Armed with some kind of futuristic automatic weapon and with pockets filled with nifty little grenades, which come in very handy, he falls from tall trees, sinks beneath the surface of a swamp, gets stuck in a claustrophobic cave for an inordinate amount of time, and has several confrontations with the marauding reptiles.
Young Greenblatt also acquits herself well, but the film won’t add any lustre to the CVs of either actor.
Silly and trashy, it’s definitely a low-rent entry into the monster/horror genre of movies.