Scream 5 Crucial Review

 I did it. I actually saw Scream 5 before it got spoiled for me. Which I did not expect. I had been avoiding the internet to a degree since December 17th so as not to have Spider-Man: No Way Home, and then Scream 5 came out a few weeks ago and my anxiety doubled. I love the Scream franchise. And now that a new one came out and is the talk of the internet, I thought: "How long can I last before I hear a YouTube movie critic slip a spoiler into their video?" And the fact that the absolute boneheads at Cineplex won't put any new movies on their store website to rent and that Ontario is under lockdown with closed theatres across the province didn't help. I thought it was hopeless. And then an absolute miracle showed up for me in the form of the 1000 Islands Drive-In in Gananoque. This Sunday my mom showed me this article she found talking about a drive-in near Kingston that was the only place in Ontario that would show Scream 5. I am not jesting, I am one of the only 500 people to have seen Scream 5 in my entire province. And that place was remarkable. It was set up outside an old boutique-style movie theatre, and it had an even bigger DvD collection than Chumleigh's. They had the Dear Evan Hansen remake, a film I recently defended in an earlier article, on DvD.

It's also become one of the biggest stories in Cinema. All over Canada people are hearing of this place. CBC has talked about this. My parents went to go get the popcorn, and they got their photo taken by an international newspaper.  

I thank the people who ran this so much. Through this experience I feel like a cemented my status as not only a fan of the Scream. franchise, but a fan of movies as a whole. But alas, as a die hard critic, I must judge a movie on its own, free from the bias of how amazing the moviegoing experience was. So does this movie actually live up to its predecessors or the historic event it was shown with? 

yes...

Scream 5, (I know it's actually just called Scream, but come on nobody's buying that. It's another sequel. Therefore I refer to it as Scream 5), is a clever return to Woodsboro in a movie series that looked like it breathed its last gasp. Especially after Wes Craven's sad passing in 2015.  A new cast of potential killers is lead by Dewey, Sidney and Gale to stop the new wave of Ghostface's murders in the small town of Woodsboro. The Scream franchise has always been taking a risk in being a meta-commentary on a whole genre. The first two succesfully walked the line between being sharply hilarious and annoyingly smug. While 3 and 4 had their meta comedy feel a bit more on the pretentious side. Thankfully, this newest one returns to the original quality of meta comedy with some great jokes directed towards itself and equally fantastic subversions.

This movie is amazing! I can't believe it's been 5 straight films for this series and all 5 of them are quality! Name one more horror franchise that's done that I dare you! This is the first time I've been genuinely scared by a horror movie since the original Scream. And that was my first horror movie. When I was watching Halloween or the first two Friday The 13th movies, I just laughed. They weren't scary. But this movie kept me awake until 1:00 in the morning. (I'll admit, the fact that they were emptying a snow plow into dump trucks right in front of my house helped it). 

Now I am going into depth about this movie and there WILL be spoilers. And the Scream series is the work of fiction I LEAST want to spoil out of any work of fiction I've watched.  So do NOT read ahead of this paragraph if you are not one of the few that have watched Scream 5. 

As great as this movie was, I do have many more problems with it than I do with some of the originals. For starters, damn this movie has some dumb characters. For a film series that prides itself on being so meta and explicitly avoiding all of the classic tropes, it really suffers from classically having most of its characters be dumbasses. Generic, Stereotypical Jock guy accidentally offends his girlfriend, who already asininely runs out of the house to go cry in the forest. And then he runs out to go look after her! Speaking of generic Jock guy's girlfriend, where the hell did she go? I think Ghostface killed her but no one knows! She runs out and never reappears.

I also have a huge problem with a few of the death scenes. Specifically Sheriff Hicks and her son's deaths. 

Sheriff Hicks' inclusion as a whole felt really unnecessary. But her death is done especially bad. She goes to pick up Sushi for her and her son, and leaves him alone in the house. She then gets a call from Ghostface saying that he's going to kill him. Naturally, Hicks speeds the hell back to her house and calls police backup on her way. Which doesn't arrive for like a half hour. And then when she runs up to her house she's ambushed by Ghostface on the front door. And while he's killing her, she's screaming bloody murder in the middle of a populated suburb and no one seems to be there. People just stop existing during this scene. And then Ghostface goes into the house to kill the son. Which he succeeds in also. But the thing is, the son had been carrying a taser! He showed it to his mother 5 seconds before she left! He had a hand free when he was pushing Ghostface's knife away. He could'e easily used the taser on him! Frosted tips guy was also a really big waste of potential. Out of the new characters in the side cast, I was mostly interested in him. And I know that they had to kill someone close to the new main character, but they had 3 more perfect opportunities with the Jock, the expert, and the punk girl! The first two got stabbed anyways and the third just disappeared. Generic Jock guy isn't doing anything for the story get rid of him! Don't kill the two people in this series we've seen like sushi! (This might be the reason I dislike their death scenes but I choose to believe it's one of the reasons I gave before that.)

Then we have the main death of this film. This is the thing I least want to spoil in the work of fiction I least want to spoil in the history of fiction. So if you were lame enough to read to this point hoping for some major spoilers, click away NOW. I'm not kidding this is huge. 

So... Dewey's dead now...

The one reason I wanted to watch any of the sequels as a 12 year old, got killed off. David Arquette's performance as Dewey gave the series a new light it otherwise didn't have. His presence in each scene saved the franchise from becoming something like Fear Street. A depressing and dark horror film with no happiness. Dewey brought me joy every time he was on screen. And he made the franchise better than it ever would have been without him. And now he's gone. 

The most angering part of this whole thing is how this scene was treated. In Scream 2, Dewey was looking for Gale and went into a sound booth room, and then got pinned against a plexiglass window and stabbed by Ghostface. And the score is filled with this tragic opera singing and sad violin, perfectly fitting the tragedy that was Dewey's death scene. But then the funny thing is. He didn't die! He gets rolled out on a stretcher just like the last movie! Don't get me wrong I'm really happy that he survived, but what I'm NOT happy about is how THIS movie treats Dewey's ACTUAL death scene. It's almost completely silent. And it just kind of happened and didn't add anything major to the story since Gale was already there and could've just called Sidney later. No one is saved by his death, and barely anyone seemed to be affected by it. I get why they'd do it for the sake of refreshing the series, but it just makes me mad how they did it. 

I also wish there was only one killer for once. That's one of the main things I liked about Scream 3. I do get why there were two though. For instance, some fans of the Friday The 13th series genuinely think Jason can teleport because none of the writers took into account how the killer gets where he does so fast to kill people. There being two killers provides more freedom in putting Ghostface where he needs to be. 

That being said you could've made both of the killers interesting. For the first half of me writing this I legitimately forgot that Amber was a character, let alone one of the two killers. She has nothing outside of one really good scene and getting burned alive. 

                                                 Also, what the hell was the point of this guy!? 

Was he supposed to be a Red Herring? Why is he here? What contribution does he have towards this movie? He dies like 10 minutes in after getting in an unrelated bar fight with the main characters. 

Well that's all the stuff I didn't like. But the things I do like are so explicitly great. For starters, the scene where Amber and the expert are in the basement successfully fooled me into thinking that neither of them could be the killer. Regardless of how unmemorable Amber was as the second killer. 

But far and away my favourite part of this movie is how much they switch everything around. Scream 5 subverted my expectations perfectly multiple times throughout while never feeling like it lost the soul of the original films. First off, I absolutely LOVE that they finally made their red herring the actual killer. Not only that, but the fact that characters like Dewey directly call out Ritchie for being suspicious, and then he ends up being the killer. Just like in real life. The most likely suspect is the actual criminal almost 99% of the time, it makes the whole movie feel more real in a way. Another thing they did that subverted my expectations was making the girl from the opening scene survive and become a major character who ends up playing a vital role in taking down the killers. Speaking of the killers, I loved how hilariously pathetic their motive was. They both went on a massive killing spree just because the newest Stab movie sucked. I didn't think the killers could get more whiny and pathetic than the ones from Scream 4, but they did. And I know that sounds negative, but I found it genuinely funny. 

Another really funny moment was when they redid the turn around scene from the original Scream. This time with Ghostface stalking up behind the expert, who's watching Ghostface stalk up behind Randy in the Stab movie playing on the TV, who's watching Michael Myers stalk up behind Jamie Lee Curtis in the original Halloween. Except this time Ghostface actually succeeds in killing the person he's stalking up behind. Plays on the originals like that are why I'm fine with the Scream franchise continuing. 

Scream 5 is a truly great movie and is up there in competition for the best of the franchise. I was really nervous about this movie getting lost in attempts to modernize the series but they do it so excellently. Overall I give it an 8 out of 10. And honestly in years to come I'd like to see Scream get even more movies. I'm sorry but series like Halloween or Friday The 13th have no business having that many movies when half of them are terrible. Scream excels as a franchise not by quantity, but through sheer quality. I want to see this franchise get more films as long as they can still stay true to their roots. I never want to see it do things like what Halloween does where they do trilogies with a movie per year. As long as Scream keeps taking the time in between movies to let things change and make a quality movie each time. And thank god that's what they've managed to do so far.