Now I'm the one contributing to delinquencies, and other Scream VI thoughts

I've written at various times in the past about the movies my kids have been exposed to before we thought they were ready. I think I mentioned the time my older son sat in on a viewing of The Suicide Squad -- the really violent James Gunn one from two years ago -- when we were over for a dinner party in my wife's friend group, where each of the families has a child around my son's age, though in their case it's the youngest son while ours is the oldest. I know I didn't mention, because it only happened about a month ago, when he watched American Psycho under the same circumstances.

Well, we had a dinner party at our house on Saturday night, so I thought it was my chance to return the favor.

Of course the four 12- and 13-year-old boys wanted something aspirational, and it was clear my usual recommendation of a handful of Marvel movies was getting no traction. It was my own son, though, who was fixated on the idea of Scream VI.

Even though he's never seen a Scream movie, my son does have a history with the franchise. We came into possession of a Ghostface mask, and he's worn it on multiple Halloweens. Then last year on our trip to America, he sat next to me as I watched last year's Scream reboot on the plane. He asked questions and I'm sure saw selected images from it, and I know it lived on in his curiosity, fascination and probably deep-seated fears.

Having already planted the seed myself, through both the plane viewing and the mask purchase, it was obvious I was going to comply with his request -- especially since getting a kid to agree on a movie when his friends are over is a victory in and of itself.

Plus in the back of my head I had the fact that my younger son, who is still only nine, has friends who have told him they've seen The Exorcist, which is far more graphic than the umpteenth Scream movie. 

None of them stumbled out of the garage two hours later with any apparent scars, and I'm guessing the other three, who all have older siblings, have already seen a lot worse. (One could argue that both The Suicide Squad and American Psycho are a lot worse, and those are only the ones I know they've seen.) 

My own son seemed fine too. He acknowledged it was violent but he reminded me "I've seen American Psycho." 

When I watched it myself later, the rental having promoted it to the top of my viewing queue when otherwise I might not have seen it until October for Halloween, I was trying to figure out which there are more of: f-bombs or stab wounds. 

Did I watch movies like this when I was 12? I don't think so. I was not naturally drawn to horror as a younger viewer. By 12 I might have been trying to see R-rated movies that had boobs -- I can't remember exactly when that started -- but teenagers being chopped up was not a priority for me. Unless, maybe, they showed their boobs before being chopped up, which was much more of a thing back then. 

Every parent knows that today's kids grow up faster than they did, and whether that's actually true or not, there's no doubt we believe it. Even my wife, who tends to be a bit more careful with things like this, sort of shrugged when I told her our son wanted to watch Scream VI. She later told me it was because she considered it more horror comedy, which I don't think the Scream series really is -- at least not anymore. Sure they try to get a laugh here and there, but it feels more like typical serial killer drudgery to me nowadays. Which brings me to my next point ...

Scream and Saw are basically the same thing

Now that we have six Scream movies, it is becoming more evident that this series has quite a lot in common with the most enduring horror series of the 21st century, the Saw movies. I believe there are nine of those, though if it was double digits I wouldn't be surprised.

Consider:

1) Both series have an incredibly serpentine mythology that continues to revisit characters from earlier in the series who are presumed dead, or even if they actually are dead they still loom large over the proceedings.

2) Both series are founded on the idea of copycats continuing to carry on the work of the original killer(s).

3) Both series have an idea of who "deserves" to be killed based on some previous crimes of which they are guilty. 

4) In both series, the original killer is known for the sound of his voice in either pre-recorded messages or live telephone calls, and the exact timbre, vocal ticks, favorite turns of phrase or indications of sadism of the voice can be reproduced by multiple copycats despite them possibly never having heard the original voice, because most of the people who did hear that voice ended up dead.

5) Both series are utterly exhausted at this point. Having liked the reboot of Scream last year -- or "requel," as the characters in this film refer to it -- I felt pretty put off by Scream VI. No, I definitely do not think it's clever any more the way these films are relentlessly self aware, and try to give us credit by winking to us about what they're doing and then doing that very thing. At this point this is really just pandering, and I'm tired of it. In a way, Saw at least has a certain purity in that it presents the material more straightforwardly, without the equivalent of Murtaugh saying "I'm too old for this shit" in all the Lethal Weapon movies. Scream is basically nothing but that.

Perfect pauses: Scream VI

SPOILER ALERT if you care about who the killer was in Screams 1 through 5. 

In one of the many times I paused the movie -- which were a lot, since I was tired and a little drunk after the aforementioned dinner party, meaning I finished the movie Sunday afternoon -- I happened to randomly catch the exact screen shot to show who the killer was in every previous Scream movie.

I've warned you once, now I will warn you again: Don't continue reading or looking down this page if you want to be kept ignorant of this information.

Here was the perfect pause in question:

Now, this was actually a spoiler for me since I haven't seen Scream 3 or Scream 4 -- and in a way, since I remember so little about Scream 2. 

At first I was annoyed, and thought that if I hadn't paused it at this exact moment, the information might have gone in one ear and out the other and I might have just been able to ignore it. They continue to talk about all these past killers, but hearing their names wouldn't have been something I would have remembered on a potential future viewing of Scream 3 or Scream 4. The faces are the things that stick with me, especially if you recognize them. (Hello, Scott Foley -- it's been a while.)

But then I thought: Given how over this series I am, what are the chances I am going to go back and watch Scream 3 or 4 -- ever?

Yeah, we know my stated goal is to watch every movie that's ever been made. But just between you and me, I doubt that's ever actually going to happen. 

So not the last one

Over the years since 2004, when the first Saw was released, I have come to acknowledge that I am a Saw completist.

I knew after the execrable second Saw and the ridiculous fourth Saw couldn't turn me away, I'd be sure to see them all, eventually -- usually before the next one hit theaters. In fact, always before the next one hit theaters, if memory serves.

But because the movies have been so ludicrous, it was with some amount of relief that I greeted the arrival of Saw 3D -- later redubbed Saw: The Final Chapter for its DVD release -- last October. Okay, I can finally be done, I thought.

On Sunday I went to the local Redbox machine in "celebration" of having won my college basketball pool -- with so many upsets this year, we didn't even need to go to the final weekend to determine a winner. I'd been searching for something cheesy-bad, with Skyline as my target. But it looks like Skyline is still within its 28-day window where Redbox doesn't yet carry it, so Saw: The Final Chapter jumped out as my next logical contender. Celebrate the end of the basketball pool (and winnings of $170) with the end of the Saw series.

Not so fast.

Never have I seen a "last" movie have so many loose ends. In fact, except for the death of a character who's been around for the last couple installments, and the return of another who'd been gone a lot longer than that, there's nothing about the "final" Saw that's really different than the other six Saws that came before it.

Stop reading now if you really don't want me to reveal any spoilers about Saw VII. (Maybe I'll just call it that from here on out, since neither Saw 3D nor Saw: The Final Chapter seems exactly accurate anymore.)

Okay, so for the last four installments or so we've know that the life's work of Jigsaw has been picked up by a detective named Rick Hoffman (Costas Mandylor). See, Jigsaw has now been dead for more Saw sequels than he was alive -- he died at the end of the third. I think it was at the end of the fourth that we learned about Hoffman's involvement, though they all tend to bleed together (pun intended) at this point.

At the end of the sixth, Hoffman looks like he'd had the tables turned on him by another insider -- Jill Kramer (Betsy Russell), Jigsaw's ex-wife (or is it widow? I can't remember). I can't remember how she did it, but she got him into the trap that has appeared most regularly in the Saw movies: the device that goes around your head and will rip your face open if you don't stop it within 60 seconds. Early in Saw VII, though, we learn that Hoffman escaped that trap with only a torn cheek, and now is out for Jill's blood. She goes to the police in hopes of being protected in exchange for her testimony.

Suffice it to say it doesn't go that way. Hoffman spends the movie systematically breaking into the station where Jill is being held and killing off all the people who would be guarding her, all the while luring a large contingent of other officers away from the station on a goose chase to catch him -- which also dooms them. Yeah, it's a bloodbath -- police are dying left and right in this movie. This is to say nothing of all the people getting killed in the movie's featured "long trap," which involves a fraudulent survivor (Sean Patrick Flanery), who wrote a book about surviving a Jigsaw trap that never happened, going through a series of tests to try to reach his wife before she's killed at the end of the hour. At each step of the way one of his co-conspirators buys it. Then there are also a couple isolated traps that have nothing to do with either of these narratives, except that they were set by Hoffman (or so we believe). They've upped the death quotient in this one, if nothing else.

Hoffman succeeds at killing everyone, and then, fairly anticlimactically, straps the same device to Jill's head. Sixty seconds usually take about three minutes of screen time to transpire in a Saw movie, but here, Jill just sits there for a minute that lasts about ten seconds, and then her head explodes. If we're real romantics we could say that now she's reunited with her dead ex-husband.

As Hoffman leaves the station following this massive slaughter, he's approached by three figures in cloaks and animal masks -- or, I should say, "animal heads," because their entire heads are covered. We've seen these figures kidnapping future victims in past Saw movies. They inject him with something to put him to sleep. One removes his mask, and it's Dr. Gordon (Cary Elwes) -- the man who cuts off his own foot to survive the original Saw, eons ago now. This is not as shocking as we might think, since the movie opened with a flashback to Gordon's torment, and he's later seen at a survivor's meeting, where he has some cryptic words for Flanery's faux survivor. It turns out Gordon has been Jigsaw's other assistant all these years. It's a bit facile -- like anything we see in a Saw movie isn't facile -- because they already used that same gimmick in Saw II and III, where Shawnee Smith survived a trap and then became a Jigsaw disciple. But whatever.

Okay, so Gordon leaves Hoffman chained to the same pipe he was chained to, way back in the first Saw. There are still at least two dead bodies lying in this location, nothing more than skeletons by this point. I guess that's chilling, because it means that in all this time, the police still haven't found this location -- it must be pretty remote. And then the movie ends with Hoffman panicking and Gordon saying "Game over!" to him as he closes the sliding door, leaving Hoffman there in the dark. That's at least the third Saw movie that's ended with this door being closed on somebody.

Okay, so what have we really "resolved"? Not much. Jill Kramer is dead, but she was always a pretty passive character -- things were always happening to her, and that's no different in this movie, where she spends most of the time cowering in a jail cell. Hoffman is not dead, and the situation he finds himself in is not by any means a death sentence. You'd think he was worse off at the end of Saw VI, when he had the head-exploder strapped around his melon. A bunch of police are dead, but that doesn't matter because they were only just introduced to us. Gordon is not dead, and in fact, even with only one good foot, he makes a pretty good candidate to continue Jigsaw's legacy. And who are those other two people who never took off their animal masks? Then there's the faux survivor, Bobby, who didn't save his wife (she got heated up to the boiling point inside some kind of cauldron), but didn't die either. In fact, there was a peculiar lack of resolution to his storyline, even though it just began in this installment.

No Saw VIII? Really?

Okay, so if there is going to be a Saw VIII, at least it's not coming out this October. I looked up Tobin Bell, the only actor who figures to definitely return for another Saw (who has appeared in flashback in the last four movies now), on IMDB, and Saw VIII is not his next project. If it were coming out in October, we'd know about it.

But I had a bit of a scare when I googled "Saw 8" and came up with a bunch of entries, one of which included the following poster art:


Granted, it doesn't look ready for primetime and was likely made on somebody's home computer, but just for a second, I thought "REALLY??" History is full of examples of series that continued on past what was supposed to be the "last" installment, but I thought it would be particularly disingenuous to say that it's the last one, and then not even miss one Halloween before putting out the next.

So we will indeed have Halloween 2011 off from Saw movies, but I wouldn't be so sure about 2012. If there's one thing the legion of scribes who've written Saw movies have shown, it's a commitment to the series' warped sense of cohesiveness. You may think they've just kept making movies that involved some variation on the iconic killing devices we've seen in these movies, but they've done more than that -- they've tried to keep the storyline internally consistent and plausible. Usually they've failed stupendously in this regard, but even the attempt to maintain a comprehensible narrative throughline is commendable in its sheer sense of crazy ambitiousness.

So expect those dangling threads at the end of Saw VII to be resolved at some point. Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but by 2013 at the latest.

If legends never die, as the fake Saw VIII poster suggests, neither do successful movie franchises.

Diluting Halloween

I must not have much of a social life, because for the last five Halloween nights, I've been home watching a scary movie. Or at least a movie that was trying to be scary.

Up until this year, I have had a decent excuse. The previous four Halloweens fell on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. And yeah, you might go out for Halloween on a Friday night, but not if you're old, like my wife and I are. In fact, people less old than we are would go out any night of the week, and damn the consequences.

This year? Well, the Halloween party we usually attend was held on the previous Saturday, and my wife is in the midst of a really (I mean really) busy time. We did stop briefly by the Halloween bash being thrown by our next-door neighbors, which included karaoke, people who had flown in just for the occasion, and nearly 100% participation in wearing costumes. But we stayed for only 10 minutes, so I hardly think that counts. Besides, we had to get back to watch ... another scary movie.

And because those previous Halloweens all fell on weekdays, I'd seen nothing but scary movies on Halloween since that 2005 starting point of the current five-year streak/tradition. (I started keeping track of the dates I'd seen movies in 2002, but didn't watch anything on Halloween in 2002, 2003 and 2004). By that I mean none of them were days when I realistically could have gotten two movies in, since I was working. I guess the notable exception there was 2006, when Halloween was my last day of freedom before starting my current job. I did watch a second movie that day, and while it doesn't quite qualify as a horror, it is pretty damn grisly -- the craptacular Caligula, which includes gruesome disembowelments and plenty of other violence. So I count that as sticking with the theme.

This Halloween was a Saturday, which meant I had a full day open for potentially watching movies. Errands? Around-the-house projects? P'shaw. (Actually, I did get my hair cut). And my wife was out all day with one of those many things that are keeping her very busy. Even more of an opportunity for a mini-marathon.

So I diluted my Halloween horror streak about as blatantly as I could, watching a romantic dramedy about a highly mischievous dog: Marley & Me.

I actually had a handful of choices in the scary movie category. I'd borrowed both Poltergeist and Let's Scare Jessica to Death, a 1971 horror I knew nothing about except the title, from the library. But I didn't know which one we might watch that night, and besides, I started watching Marley & Me with my morning coffee. Horror before 9 a.m. just isn't that scary.

So sometimes I just like to let the choices come to me randomly, to cherry-pick them off the selections available OnDemand. When I saw Marley & Me, I knew that was probably going to be the choice. I like both Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, and had read an A- review of it in Entertainment Weekly when it came out last December. So Marley & Me it was.

Since that was all I really wanted to write about today -- the not-as-interesting-as-I've-made-it-out-to-be "irony" of watching Marley & Me on Halloween -- I might as well make a short story even longer by giving you a quick rundown of the titles we've entrusted to scare us over the last five Halloweens.

2005: Saw (2004, James Wan). My love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with the Saw series began on this date four years ago, my last Halloween that I lived alone. Perhaps it was being alone in the house that made this one creepier than it would have ordinarily been. After all, some of my friends left the theater laughing after Saw. But it worked for me, and got me excited enough about these films' potential for squirmy gore that I saw the execrable Saw II in the theater less than two weeks later.

2006: The Hills Have Eyes (2006, Alexandre Aja). Aja's High Tension has one of the most bogus endings you will ever seen in a movie, but up until that point, it was pretty freaking great, so I was interested to see what he could do with the Hills Have Eyes remake. (Despite not having seen the original.) I lived with my wife/then-girlfriend by this point, and she was okay with it too. Invigorating technique and some exquisitely graphic and disturbing scenes, but weird structure: Instead of killing off the innocents one by one throughout the movie, the ones that die are killed off within a ten-minute period in the middle of the movie.

2007: Cronos (1993, Guillermo del Toro). Pan's Labyrinth had whetted our appetite for del Toro's earlier work, and we'd heard this one was creepy. I honestly don't remember it that well, but his interest in bugs -- seen a few years later in Mimic, then regularly in the rest of his work -- was already present here. It was macabre and squirmy enough to do the trick on Halloween.

2008: One Missed Call (2008, Eric Valette). For the first time in this tradition, we did not prepare by renting something, so we let OnDemand dictate what we might watch. Bad move. One Missed Call came up massively short of the standards set by its predecessors, failing even to be as good as most bad Hollywood knock-offs of Japanese horrors that probably weren't as good as they were hyped to be in the first place. Please, I don't want to laugh on Halloween. I've got to learn not to let a good poster (featuring a ghostly face with two screaming mouths for eyes) hold undue sway over my better judgment.

2009: Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971, John Hancock). Ah, the 1970s. Back then they really knew how to creep you out -- no sophisticated gore effects necessary. I'm surprised I'd never heard anything about this film, since it absolutely gave me the willies for almost the full running time. A mentally disturbed woman, her husband and one of their friends leave the city for the countryside in order to try to clear her head, but end up in a mansion that's known to locals as the potentially haunted home of a woman who drowned in the lake behind the house in the late 19th century. Hancock does more with a vacant look, a whispered voice and an eerie soundtrack than all the buckets of blood and startle scares used by hacks in the last 20 years of horror filmmaking. Highly recommended. An additional testament to the film -- even the fact that karaoke was blasting through our closed windows didn't break the mood. (On a side note, we were referring to it as Let's Make Jenny Scared all night because that's the title my wife absorbed from a quick glance at the DVD cover.)

Happy (late) Halloween, everyone.