scream 2 – subhumanzoids

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This entry is a three-for-one, but not in the way Body Bags was way back in the beginning of the month. For movies 26-28, my wife and I watched the first three Scream movies back to back. It takes a lot for my wife to want to watch a horror movie, and it helps that we both find the Scream movies entertaining. Guess what? They’re mostly still good!

This should come as no surprise given the fact that the late, great Wes Craven directed them all. You end up with diminishing returns along the way—especially when the time comes to reveal the big whodunnit twist—but each has an incredible opening scene, and the first is a total classic of the genre.

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Beyond the frozen-in-time casting, it’s amazing to go back to these and see what Craven kicked off with the series as a whole. So many teen slashers rose from the ashes of Scream, which revitalized the horror genre for the late ’90s and early ’00s, regardless of what the old heads at the time had to say about it. Even if you don’t like some of the movies that followed—from your I Know What You Did Last Summers to your Urban Legends—you gotta hand it to Scream.

Scream 3 is the weakest of the initial trilogy, but in this case it might not have helped that I watched them all one after the other. As for which has the best opening, while the first with Drew Barrymore is an all-time great, I really love the movie theater rowdiness of Scream 2‘s kickoff.

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If, like me, it’s been ages since you bothered with the Scream movies, fire ’em up sometime soon. We plan on bringing the saga to an end with Scream 4 tonight, but I’m already past my 31 movie plan so you won’t be reading about it here.

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