New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

When I found out the Davis would be getting Scream 4, I arrived quickly at the idea that seeing the movie there would probably make a lot of sense.

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.

Continued:       1       2