Scream 2

I first became a fan of the Scream movies in the mid-2000s when I was in High School. At the time Scream 2 was my favorite, but as I've gotten older the film hasn't aged well. It's still a good film, much better than Scream 3. However, in retrospect I think that I loved the sillier and more over-the-top story as a teenager, and as an adult I find the movie a bit immature in it’s tone. While the same issue could be raised with Scream 4, that film does an overall better job of hitting the right notes.

The single biggest weakness of this film is probably the new characters. The core characters of Sidney (Neve Campbell), Gale (Courteney Cox), Dewey (David Arquette), and Randy (Jamie Kennedy) all do excellent work. However, Liev Schreiber comes across as phoning it in his expanded role as Cotton Weary, and I really can't see Derek (Jerry O'Connell) without thinking Sidney is dating Quinn from Sliders. I'd say Hallie (Elise Neal) is the only new character who comes across as compelling or interesting, and she's given fairly little to do before being killed.

The single weakest point, though, is the villains. The concept behind them is clever: Billy Loomis' mother (Laurie Metcalf) returns to get revenge on the girl who killed her son, and teams up with Mikey (Timothy Olyphant), an attention-hungry troll who wants to kill people and then blame it on the movies so he can have a high-profile trial. Unfortunately, both of these characters are only featured in passing prior to the reveal, so neither is properly set up. This lack of development is just weird, since Mrs. Loomis goes out of her way to create a false identity when she introduces herself to Gale, and Mickey is a college classmate. Both of these gave the villains an opening to interact with the protagonists. Instead, we get a number of long scenes establishing Cotton and Derek as suspects.

Beyond their lack of set-up, the villains are just downright cartoonish. Where Billy and Stu from the original Scream came across as realistically disturbed, the villains here immediately jump into insane ranting. It doesn't help that the villains have no loyalty to each other, with Mrs. Loomis shooting Mickey shortly after the reveal, keeping him down until she'd been dispatched. While having two killers still helps to explain how Ghostface could pop up at random and never tire in a chase, having them turn on each other means that at no point do the heroes have to deal with two killers at once.

There is one thing that this movie does perfectly thought: Killing off Randy. The fact that 3 and 4 limit the deaths to new characters reduces the impact of both films. The Cassandra sequence in this film is taken by some fans to imply that Kevin Williamson intended to kill Sidney off in Scream 3. Personally, I would have offed Gale, since Dewey's survival is something of a running gag in the series.

I know that many people disagree with me on this point, but knowing that writers refuse to kill off certain characters kills the tension. Killing a main character is what made Psycho a classic, and in horror giving certain characters immunity from death just comes across as cheap. Anyone can die, that’s where fear comes from.

I know that I'm harping on the bad points here, of which there are a lot, but this is still a good film. It pales next to the original, and even next to Scream 4, but it still gives you the classic characters, a lot of tense scenes, and a mystery that works fairly well. If you feel like marathoning the Scream movies, include this one.

The Grudge 2

Going in, this movie has two things working against it: Firstly, it's the sequel to a movie that wasn't very good in the first place. Secondly, the first movie at minimum told us more-or-less what we needed to know about the haunting. There was a final shock to provide room for a sequel, but I feel this movie horribly under-uses that opportunity. If the ghosts are no longer bound to the house, then why are we still going back to the house at all? Why not have them rampage all over Tokyo? Or follow Karen (Sarah Michelle-Gellar) home to America?

This film did give me the creeps with at least one visual. A girl slowly drinks milk straight from the carton, then throws it up right back into the carton, then begins drinking again. I imagine this was a metaphor for the karmic cycle of the haunting. I don't deny that the movie has had thought put into it, it's just not thought that I especially care about.

In this film Aubrey (Arielle Kebbel), Karen's sister, is told by their bedridden mother (Joanna Cassidy) that she must go to Japan to retriever her now-insane sister. I suspect Gellar didn't want to be in this film, because her screen time is fairly minimal, and she kills herself fairly early in the movie. Instead, Aubrey teams up with a journalist name Eason (Edison Chen).

I felt like the attempts to expand the story in this film seemed fairly ineffective. We discover that Kayako (Takako Fuji) was trained by her mother (Ohga Tanaka) as an exorcist. Apparently this has something to do with why she and her family became ghosts, because dying in a horrible way wasn't sufficiently terrifying enough.

This is shown in parallel to the story of Allison (Ariell Kimble), a Japanese school girl who enters the house on a dare, and what happens to her and the bullies who entered with her. While Allison might learn far less, I'd say most of the actual scares come from her story. A series of creepy things happen because she's under attack by ghosts.

...oh, and pretty much everyone dies...duh...

As with the last movie, I feel like this movie tries far too hard to be subtle. Some extended scares would have gone a long way. As it is, it's probably marginally better than the first Grudge, but only marginally.

The Grudge

Time can change our perception of movies. When The Grudge first came out, Roger Ebert said of the opening “I'm not sure how this scene fits into the rest of the movie, but then I'm not sure how most of the scenes fit into the movie.” Now, in the year 2015, with the benefit of Wikipedia I can easily figure out how the various scenes fit into the narrative...I simply don't care.

To summarize: A Japanese man named Takeo (Takashi Matsuyama) killed his wife Kayako (Takako Fuji) and son Toshio (Yuya Ozeki), because he read his wife's diary and realized she was having an affair with an American professor (Bill Pullman). After this, their spirits killed him, and the three of them haunt their home and attack anyone who comes inside.

I haven't seen the original Japanese film this is based on, but I'm torn on the decision to set this film in Japan. Rather than setting it in America, the creators apparently decided it would be easier to justify the use of English by having a bizarrely disproportionate number of Americans involved in the story. Not only was the Professor an American, but the next residents of the apartment were an American couple and the husband's aging mother (William Mapother, Clea Duvall, and Grace Zabriskie).

Even more bizarrely, after the couple are killed, the mother, apparently suffering from Alzheimer's, remains in Japan for some reason, being cared for by caretakers who come to see her daily. When her regular caretaker (Yoko Maki) is killed by the spirits, an American Exchange Student named Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is sent in her place. Even if the woman had no family back in the US, I strongly suspect that the Japanese government would send her to a nursing home in the States rather than pay for her care.

That's three independent trips to Japan by Americans who all end up as part of this story, to say nothing of Karen's boyfriend (Jason Behr). For the love of God if you're that determined to have Americans in .your film, just set the film in the US of A. I don't see anything difficult to culturally translate about “people who are murdered violently become violent ghosts.”

Putting that aside, however, I've tried hard to put my finger on why most of the scares don't work. My best guess is that it's a combination of factors. Most of the scares are fairly generic, and the movie is far too willing to show the ghosts. The build-up to the horror isn't especially tense, either.

All of these problems can be easily seen in the portrayal of Toshio: he seems to just exist around the house, and periodically say hello to someone, who typically doesn't even realize he's a ghost...oh, and he occasionally meows in the voice of his dead cat, who his father also killed. How are we supposed to be afraid of something treated with so little awe or reverence. Granted, most of the attacking is done by Kayako and Takeo, but having a ghost so open about his own existence cheapens the concept.

More significantly, though, the scares passed too quickly. The ghosts show up, then they attack...next scene. I found myself mentally comparing the film to The Woman in Black, a film that had a truly dazzling extended ghost attack (if you've seen the movie, you know exactly what I'm talking about). There were a number of sequences here that could have been frightening, if they'd been given proper time.

A perfect example of this is the famous shower scene. Karen is showering, and we see a hand start to emerge from the back of her head. She feels it, and...that's it. She's scared, but we're still anticipating. We're hungry for more, and we're not being fed.

The movie ends with Karen burning the house, and the implication that she inadvertently freed the evil. I intend to review the sequel (the first one, at least) next. I certainly hope it's an improvement over this entry.

There are worse films out there? Sure. But, honestly, this movie kind of made me wish I was watching them. I'd rather see amusing trash than this overly slow bore-fest.