Make an Argument
By Eric Hughes
November 3, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
For those of you who don’t live in Chicago, or, for those of you that do live in the Chicago but don’t know about the city’s gem of a theater planted on that good stretch of North Lincoln Ave in Lincoln Square, the Davis Theater is perhaps best described as this: It’s that movie theater in the sky you and I went to countless times in the early to mid ‘90s that was eventually overrun by those 16-, 20-, even 24-theater gargantuans that promptly ran mom and pops like the Davis out of town.
It’s got all the, shall we say, amenities of those movie houses of yore: That steep, steep incline that immediately meets your feet as you step inside the exterior’s wall of doors, that tacky, god awful, purple-y “carpet” that, despite covering every stinkin’ square inch of the space, would do us all a favor by getting swapped for something shinier, passable audio and video quality in the theaters themselves that would never hold a candle to the equipment and setup that spoils us today and, for the frugal old man inside of you, cheap, cheap popcorn sold in bags, not tubs.
For the young ones out there who have no idea what I’m talking about here, I pity you. Really. For those of you who do know what I’m saying, is this or is this not the kind of setting that a franchise like Scream should always be seen in?
For whatever reason, I missed out on the nostalgia that a trip to the Davis would drum up by failing to see Scream 4 in theaters. It may have been a general sense of lazy on my end that, what, with Redbox and Netflix and home video and the rest of it, the media all but influences - I’ll see it sometime… just not now! - or, a bit more subconsciously, it might have been my brain at work on overdrive, working its darn tail off to get me to ignore a thing that had to have been conceived as a cash grab. I mean, come on, it’s Dimension Films.
Thanks to the incredibly good deal a simple Redbox rental affords us ninety-nine percenters, I brought Scream 4 home with me one evening and popped it in for a play. Scream, the original, remains one of my favorite horror movies of all time - hell, it reinvigorated an arguably dead genre when it was released a decade and a half ago - so, no, I wasn’t some casual Scream 4 viewer. I actually hoped and dreamed for it to be flippin’ fantastic.
In some ways, Scream 4 doesn’t disappoint. It’s incredibly conscious of what it is, what it’s doing, what happened in its brief history and so on. And for horror, especially, that’s pretty sweet! It’s a step up, at least, from the genre’s utter mindlessness that gets tossed at us every which way through torture porns like Saws II through whatever.
But I have a bone to pick with that ending, which our own Edwin Davies expounded upon a bit here and, which, I’d like to piggy back off of.
I’ll agree that Scream 4 missed out on utter greatness by resolving itself with two finishes.
Whoa! Before I get going here, may I remind you that you’re a fool to think I’d be doing this without revealing any spoilers.
Anyway, I’ll agree that Scream 4 missed out on utter greatness by resolving itself with two resolutions. There was the shock and awe ending - the holy sh*#tf@&%k! finale that had me applauding its guts for going out with not only murdering Sidney Prescott - effing Sidney Prescott!! - but, all the way, grooming an evil child who killed many, many others to fulfill a misguided attempt at merely appearing as a victim - and the totally contrived ending that happened right after, which had Sidney Prescott of course awaking from her slumber, zapping her dear cousin with a couple of defibrillators and, rather cinematically, departing her enemy’s feeble last breaths with: “Don’t fuck with the original” (with threatening tone).
At first, and I’ll be honest here, at first I was relieved that Sidney was still with us, because a possible Scream 5 - Scream 4 only earned $38 million domestically - would, right now, seem like it was missing something. I mean, even though Sidney was regulated to the supporting cast in Scream 4, Neve Campbell’s commitment to the cast of a Scream movie has, up to this point anyway, been mandatory.
On top of that, there’s the authority of guys like Kevin Williamson himself who, having been a part of the franchise in some capacity since Scream’s inception, says: “Fuck the new generation and their misconceived notions of instant gratification and acting out the role of [fill in the blank] in the company of strangers” by allowing an opportunity for the heroine of Screams 1 through 3 to, you know, pown the totally new girl struttin’ into Woodsboro.
Having Sidney off her cousin, Jill, in the film’s closing credits is like the franchise demanding a sort of obligatory worship from Generation Z. You know: “You were hardly an infant when the first Scream came out; what do you know about horror movies?!”
But as I thought about it more, I realized where I’d swung wrong: The way Scream 4 ended itself is a totally sucky way for Scream 4 to end itself. Sidney Prescott recouping from the dead just doesn’t feel right - as much as I’d like Kevin Willliamson to shove it in Generation Z’s faces.
Having Jill surprisingly succeed over her victims, in much the way Jigsaw did in the original Saw, would have left many a mouths open as audiences filed out of the theater. (That people of Generation Z can do anything, so long as they put their minds to it. Even murdering, and with ease, the heroine of a trilogy. Yet where does that leave you, once officers arrive to clean up the muck?)
That sort of dark surprise would have elevated Scream 4 to something greater than third sequel to an awesome film. It would have, as it tried to imply, advanced Scream to a new generation of viewers - not just us fogies - by maintaining relevance more than a decade after its last release.
I mean, where do you go after a secret torturer - who fought hard to be that torturer! - overcomes the hero to become the victim? I don’t know that the genre has touched that yet.