Scream (2022)

I had to check with ChatGPT to find out at the halfway point whether, after all, this 'Scream' was a Scream episode I'd already seen, and when ChatGPT told me this particular one - informally known as Scream V - was made in 2022, features Melissa Barrera as Samantha Carpenter and Jenna Ortega as younger sister Tara and follows a thousand Woodsboro teens being hunted one by one by the masked killer Ghostface, with Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette reprising their legacy character roles as Sidney Prescott, Gale Weathers, and Dewey Riley, respectively, I was none the wiser - except to say I had definitely seen it all before.

★★☆☆☆

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Scream 4

The kill count at ten minutes is five, halfway through it is seven, and overall, thirteen - not bad for an hour and forty minutes - so number four in the meta-horror series really drives the knife in for slasher fans, but even in an exercise this tongue-in-cheek - and it succeeds in being funny a number of times - it can be frustrating sitting through the idiocy on display: remember, Ghostface is a serial killer who has well and truly put a dent in the population of Woodsboro High on three previous occasions, yet in the midst of spree number four, as the body count rises, these teens hold parties, get drunk, wander outside into the dark woods, and play astonishingly tone-deaf "Ghostface" pranks on each other, making it more than a little tiresome waiting out the Scooby-Doo unmasking at the end.

★★★☆☆

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Scream 3 (2000)

This third instalment of the Scream series continues to inventively postmodernise the slasher flick by taking yet another step back, this time setting the gruesome events against the backdrop of a slasher flick being made within a slasher flick, so there are now lookalike actors playing the actors and movie sets of the movie sets, but boy it is a long episode and it tries so hard that all its energy goes out the window well before the movie's drawn-out conclusion.

★★☆☆☆

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Scream 2 (1997)

Opening with the original movie reimagined as a movie within a movie, this Scream sequel is certainly a more creative and more self-referential slasher flick than most, but it plays out no more cleverly than that: women are mercilessly taunted, chased, terrified and violently hacked to pieces while men benefit from sudden random death, so while generous critics say this movie (and the series) cleverly subverts the slasher genre, it really only pretends to be clever while mirroring and perpetuating slasher tropes.

★★☆☆☆

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Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

This 2002 creature feature manages on its low budget to be reminiscent of Arachnophobia, Gremlins, and even The Goonies during its more inventive, comic moments; in other formulaic, less interesting scenes, viewers can marvel at a young Scarlett Johansson - a long way off 2012s The Avengers - and the forever-the-same-age David Arquette - not so far off his 1996 Scream, although someone else is playing his goofy cop here while he steps up as the hero.

★★☆☆☆

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