I love nearly everything about slasher flicks. While my favorites keep me in a bit of a time warp thanks to cool movies from the late-Seventies and early-Eighties, it thrills me to see a new crazed killer hunting down sex starved teens even today. Add to that the genre love that television has given to horror with cool shows like The Walking Dead, American Horror Story, Penny Dreadful and so many others, horror at home is certainly a much appreciated trend. So the idea of a series based on the fun franchise SCREAM should have me screaming like a final girl in the last half hour of a horror flick. Shouldn’t it? Not even close.
As much as I dig slasher movies, there are far too many that are void of anything entertaining. You know the kind. A big studio decides to make a cheap flick and cast a few hot young actors from the CW. They end up delivering a waste of an hour and a half that looks pretty, and feels empty. And watching the previews for the new series Scream, it appears to be a bunch of attractive people chased by a lame killer, without any heart or style. Once again, you have stupid people doing stupid things and getting killed. After only a minute of watching the bimbos and himbos getting themselves axed, I already don’t give a shite about what happens to them after a few seconds of screen time. And MTV wants us to spend several hours watching them in peril! I’m not sold.
One of the many problems – something that executive producer Wes Craven himself seems confounded by – is the lack of the iconic mask. Where is “Ghostface?” Instead, we have someone that resembles a smaller, more boring version of Rob Zombie’s homeless Michael Myers. Perhaps the people behind the series have some cool killer to reveal that will frighten us all, but somehow I doubt it. It really makes no sense to not utilize that black robe and the ghostly white face with black eyes. No matter who was behind the mask, it was a fun costume that made for a creepy killer.
In one preview, we see that somebody is texting “Head’s up,” when all of a sudden a head drops in the jacuzzi… clever. So are we going to see a texting psycho as opposed to hearing a spooky voice on the other end of the phone? It certainly makes sense that technology will play a huge part in this franchise, it always has. It all begins apparently with a YouTube video gone wrong – yet thankfully this isn’t all on Skype. However, one of my favorite horror movie moments of all time is that opening scene in SCREAM. That dialogue between the crazed creep and Drew Barrymore is one of the most frighteningly freaky times I’ve had watching a scary movie. It works. How can they bring this energy to the series with a killer that texts threats?
And then there is that witty MTV repartee! It may seem unfair to judge by a couple bits of dialogue, but what they put into the preview is dreadful. The Kevin Williamson flair is sorely missed. Instead we get retread bits about how you can’t do a slasher movie as a TV series, or some garbage about who slept with Nina. If this is what we have to look forward to, then I have very little faith. When the one character begins to spout off the slasher movie on TV line, it sounds like a sad and pathetic excuse to try and copy what SCREAM did – hell, even the lesser sequels worked better than that.
Maybe it’s the booze talkin’, but I’ve little faith in Scream the TV series. To be fair, I am making judgments on a couple of short but dull previews, but none of it really begs to be watched. “Slasher movies burn bright and fast, by the time the first body is found, it’s only a matter of time before the bloodbath commences…” spouts one of the more “knowledgable” characters yet not a single frame here seems to burn bright nor fast, just generic. No Ghostface. No Sidney Prescott. No Kevin Williamson dialogue. No Wes Craven directing. And an MTV original series? Maybe it will be a surprise and do justice to what Craven and Williamson brought us. Somehow I doubt it. From the looks of it, all we have is a dumb teen drama with gore.