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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Skyscraper

The tallest, most wooden, most hollow character in this action is - surprise! - not The Rock (who is actually quite charismatic, always, and even in a dopey exercise like this) but the elaborately cgi-animated 'Nakatomi Plaza' that is this action movie's title-skyscraper 'The Pearl', a cloud-puncturing phallus full of stupid hi-tech with no purpose to exist except for a silly movie "house of mirrors" showdown - so, while the action movie starts strong, the minute it enters the hard-to-fathom cgi insides of The Pearl, things plummet into a void.

★★★☆☆

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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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The Craft (1996)

The feminist subtext of 1987s The Witches of Eastwick is thoroughly undone in this misguided teenage witch movie made nine years later: where Sukie, Alexandra and Jane were a unified coven of creators of men, music, sculpture, and babies, here, a group of sullen teenage emos are literally to blame for magicking sexual assault upon themselves, immediately turn batshit crazy when faced with male rejection, are ultimately punished for their black arts by a flippantly introduced omniscient "he", and before you argue that comparison is unfair, it is Skeet Ulrich's high school jock who first uses the unflattering term 'the Bitches of Eastwick'.

★☆☆☆☆

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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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