Scream VI

“How are you still alive?” someone says, near the end of Scream VI, to someone who certainly seemed to be Ghostface fodder. The question would almost be funny, if it weren’t so frustrating, because we’re not sure why anyone in the movie is still alive, nor why some others are dead. One person takes a deep slash to the arm and is seen, not much later, using the arm as though it were untouched. Sometimes these discrepancies between those who should be dead but somehow aren’t, and those who suffer similar or even lesser damage but expire anyway, are due to changes made during editing, preview screenings, or even filming; sometimes, though, it’s just lazy screenwriting, and that explanation fits Scream VI best.

“Fuck this franchise,” someone else says — yes, these movies are as meta as ever — and that quote shows more relevance with each new sequel. The Scream franchise is three years shy of its 30th anniversary at this point, but that’s to be expected in the horror genre; hell, Halloween was 40 years old the last time it got rebooted. But the particular whodunit emphasis of this series means that each new entry has to up the ante and devise ever more convoluted motives for the killer(s), and by now the reveals have become rote, boring. Well, we know the killer can’t be Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), the sole hangover from the 1996 original film. Nor, probably, is it the sisters Sam and Tara Carpenter (Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega), especially since Ortega has a Wednesday fanbase now, and Paramount isn’t going to lose any factor they have left to put butts in seats.

Other than that, the masked Ghostface could be anyone, taunting our protagonists over the phone in that same insinuating growl through a voice modulator (though actually voiced, since day one in this series, by Roger L. Jackson). And when I say anyone, I generally mean anyone new to the series. That narrows it down nicely. The movie also brings back Kirby (Hayden Panettiere), Ghostface survivor turned driven FBI agent. Why? To jazz the longtime fans, which now means those who were around in 2011 to see Kirby’s last Scream appearance. The one thing I freely enjoyed here is Gale Weathers’ baffled reaction to Kirby, whom she remembers as the high-school kid she was in 2011, being in the FBI now: “You’re, like, a zygote.” I get it, Gale. 2011 was five minutes ago for us Gen-Xers but 12 long years ago for the young’uns. 

Is the merciless passage of time the only thing the Scream films have to scare us with now? Certainly the murder scenes are no more interesting or impactful. It’s just stab, stab, stab, though the killer does grab a shotgun at one point; hey, it’s New York City. Horror films of late have benefited from the MPAA’s lax attitude towards gory violence, probably at least since The Passion of the Christ and surely since 2008’s Rambo. What once would have obliged a slasher flick to go out unrated, or with a self-applied X, or later with an NC-17, now coasts by with an R rating. So in Scream VI, people take a few more knife thrusts than you expect, or we’ll glimpse a bit of intestines peeking out. It was said after Columbine that movie violence would get more restricted as a result (indeed, Scream 3 in 2000 was a casualty of that), but these days Americans don’t care if kids are shot in school, so the movies are back to being bloodthirsty.

Anyway, the older sister Sam is the daughter of OG killer Billy Loomis (a de-aged Skeet Ulrich keeps turning up in Sam’s hallucinations), but at this point it’s clear she’s not going to take after him. The series, under the tutelage of directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, has decided to be about putting the past behind us and embracing the future, which is very noble and “live, laugh, love” and all that, but looks awkward draped over what started, in Wes Craven’s and Kevin Williamson’s able hands, as a gory, nasty thriller. Well, the nastiness is gone and the gore feels thin and inconsequential. In the first two Scream movies, the self-referencing felt sharp and added to the fright and the fun. Now it just feels tossed in there because it’s a Scream film. Like the directors’ previous Scream film last year, it doesn’t sting us or stay with us. It’s just pausing on its way to becoming content on Paramount+, where it will submerse into the back catalog and seldom be heard from again. 

The Pope’s Exorcist

If you plan to see The Pope’s Exorcist, may I suggest you preface it with a viewing of William Friedkin’s 2017 documentary The Devil and Father Amorth? The Friedkin film isn’t much as a movie (it’s streaming free with ads on Tubi), but its long centerpiece containing footage of a purported real exorcism is worth a look. It conveys the frustration and boredom as well as the drama and fear evoked by the ritual, and it shows us the then-91-year-old Father Gabriele Amorth at work, starting off by literally thumbing his nose at the devil and then exorcising, steadily and patiently, for however long it takes. And the result isn’t a Hollywood triumph, either. The victim, Cristina, has undergone nine unsuccessful Amorth exorcisms, including the one we see, and for all we know she suffers to this day.

Father Amorth gets his Hollywood close-up in The Pope’s Exorcist. Hell, he’s even played by Russell Crowe, here chowing down on his favored meal of late, a nice ham sandwich. Crowe must have seen the same footage of the real Amorth, because he gets the man’s sometimes goofball sense of humor and a degree of unflappable calm in the face of demons. I think the actual Amorth might have laughed heartily at this film’s depiction of him as an action exorcist, kicking down doors and investigating an ancient corpse’s stomach. And Crowe, who seems to have eased into this B-movie camera-hog stage of his career, enjoys himself. Too bad we can’t really share the fun.

We probably shouldn’t look to most exorcism movies for physical realism. But this movie doesn’t even gesture towards plausibility. People are supernaturally flung into walls with a force that should kill anyone, and they just groan a little and get up; one woman gets her head slammed onto a bathroom sink hard enough to shatter it, and somehow her skull doesn’t follow suit. This is all caused by Asmodeus, a demon whose ultimate goal is to possess Amorth and infiltrate the Church. The demon starts off in the frail body of a little boy who hasn’t spoken since seeing his father die a year ago. His mother and sister have accompanied him to an inherited Spanish abbey, which we gather was the site of a lot of evil. The demon, apparently there waiting, takes over the kid and demands a priest. They send in a wet-behind-the-ears fellow, and the demon roars “Wrong fucking priest!” I liked that a lot, but there’s nothing else here as good.

So this younger priest joins forces with Amorth against this demon, who taunts them with visions of the women they sinned against. I can see how this could have been treated as a feminist wrinkle in the movie’s premise (God is cool, the Church is shady), but in practice it’s bloody, highly sexualized women bashing celibate men around, and it brings up tonal and thematic questions this frequently dumb movie doesn’t have the wherewithal to answer. Maybe the director, Julius Avery, and the five people credited as writers on this thing have made an unconscious indictment not only of the Church but the toxic masculinity that powers it and commits so much evil behind closed gilded doors. We chew this over; maybe the movie is more thoughtful than we’d assumed. But then it’s back to the demon pretending to be a woman biting the head off a bird.

It’s not every movie that suffers in comparison to not one but two William Friedkin exorcism movies. The Exorcist, of course, is an enduring ornament on the gnarled tree of horror. And even The Devil and Father Amorth, for all that it feels like a DVD extra that probably wouldn’t even have gotten the small release it did if Friedkin’s name weren’t on it, has that blandly filmed ritual with a growling, obviously pained woman at its center (possessed or psychologically/neurologically wounded? the movie leaves it open), creating the drama the one-take filmmaking lacks. The Pope’s Exorcist is dramatic bordering on melodramatic, but it doesn’t take any of its own concerns seriously, the way you definitely felt Friedkin and William Peter Blatty did on The Exorcist. This might as well be an Evil Dead film a week early. 

Inside (2023)

To the question of which actor we’d most be willing to sit with solo through a 105-minute movie, Willem Dafoe is as fine an answer as any. The deep-dish survival thriller Inside casts Dafoe as Nemo, an art thief who gets dropped off by his cohorts via helicopter at a deluxe New York penthouse, whose owner, a high-end art collector, is away on business. Nemo is there to snag three Egon Schiele works; after finding two, he tries to skedaddle, but the place’s security system locks him in, and his cohorts panic and leave him. For the remainder of our time with him, Nemo tries to dig, whittle, smash, unbolt, or otherwise dismantle his way free, when he’s not singing to himself, fixing appetizing meals of raw, soggy pasta, spying on a cleaning lady, or starting to lose touch with reality.

We’re not meant to ask why the cops don’t show up when the alarm initially goes off. This isn’t a beat-the-clock thriller. It’s constructed to force Nemo, a failed artist, to confront himself. Thus we witness Nemo’s devolution from crisply hyper-competent thief to shuffling, walking corpse who sings “I’m going to heaven on a hillside” over and over, looking like a bundled-up Howard Hughes. The script, by Ben Hopkins, based on an idea by director Vasilis Katsoupis, works metaphorically but draws yawns narratively; a viewer on Reddit opined that they were expecting a twist wherein Nemo was reduced to a work of performance art to amuse the penthouse owner and his buddies, but no such luck. The artsy doodles in the margins — the references to Schiele and William Blake, as well as the actual art (or copies thereof) on display — just feel like padding. If Nemo were just a good thief who had no particular artistic consciousness, this would be a very short movie.

Which may have been a better deal than what we get. Inside is not an altogether bad film, not with Dafoe girding his loins and throwing his then-65-year-old body into the challenge. (As I’ve noted elsewhere, Dafoe has practiced ashtanga yoga for decades and could most likely run laps around people a quarter his age.) It’s conceivable you could enjoy the film just on the level of watching Dafoe move around, change his posture as Nemo starts losing his bearings, grunt and whistle. It’s a full, and fully physical, performance, and it deserves to be in a better film. To change things up, the filmmakers start tossing in dream sequences or hallucinations in which Nemo is allowed to interact with a couple of people; this almost feels like cheating, though it may have been meant as a reprieve from solitude — for us as well as for Nemo. (At least Tom Hanks in Cast Away had to rely on a gore-painted volleyball for company.) 

Vasilis Katsoupis’ direction is too literal, and not poetic enough, to put across the movie’s ambition to be an art object itself. Given a reality that lingers on mundane problem-solving or physically plausible obstacles, we expect the narrative to be more nuts-and-bolts than it is; instead it slackens, loses its hold along with Nemo. It becomes a statement on how Nemo (Latin for “nobody”) is trapped in a world to which he doesn’t belong, which he can only consume parts of, or destroy other parts of on his way out. So basically Nemo is all of us, scooping beautiful fish out of an aquarium and eating it raw, or building tools while leaving a shambles of his surroundings. It begins to try our patience about forty minutes in, and it still has about an hour to go. I sighed a lot and was reduced to micro-scrutinizing Dafoe’s performance, as it became the only point of interest. To revisit the question up at the top: yes, we would sit with this man solo through a 105-minute movie. But maybe not this one.

Safety Last

Last Saturday, April 1, Harold Lloyd’s famous Safety Last hit the century mark. Aside from a couple of low-key caricatures common in its day (they could be worse, but they still stick out to the modern eye), the film has aged beautifully — it goes like lightning and seems supercharged by creativity and by the comedy of physical logic particular to silent films. If a rope or a net or a flock of birds introduce themselves, you can be sure they’ll be getting in the way of our hero as he attempts to scale a tall city building. Even before the climax, Lloyd (playing a character called Harold Lloyd, though the credits name him The Boy) sidesteps or blocks or evades one spot of trouble after another, by luck as much as by ingenuity.

Harold Lloyd was perhaps the most relatable of the silent titans (Chaplin, Keaton) of his time. He repped the American can-do ethos, brightened by his eternal smile, meant to instill confidence in him, occasionally soured by anxiety. In Safety Last, Harold leaves his small hometown for the Big City (actually Los Angeles — the film inadvertently gives us a good peek backwards, at L.A. streets and storefronts the way they looked two years before The Great Gatsby was published). He leaves behind his girlfriend (Mildred Davis, who’d married Lloyd earlier in 1923), who expects he’ll send for her when he gets settled. A while later, Harold is a $15-a-week garment clerk in a department store, but pretends to have a management position. We accept he’s not trying to be deceitful out of any malign motive — he just wants her to think as well of him as he does of her. The credits call her The Girl, and she’s kind of treated as such.

The sexual politics there are a bit cobwebbed, as are the fleeting but still eyebrow-raising appearances of an overeager Jewish jewelry seller with bad, ratty teeth and a Black worker literally scared up the wall by one of Harold’s ploys. For the most part, though, Safety Last —  I will remind you the film is a hundred years old — is good-hearted and simple. The really enjoyable thing about it is that it establishes the general pattern of Harold’s tribulations before the stakes become life or death. There’s a lengthy section where Harold’s girlfriend comes to his work for a surprise visit and he has to improvise, lord it over baffled coworkers, bribe and then rescind the bribe (‘20s and ‘30s movies are far more money-conscious and honest about class than any movie today) — he pulls out all his tricks. Before that, he’s accidentally whisked away by a towel truck and must make his way back to the store before the bell rings so he can clock in on time, and he moves heaven and earth to get there, culminating in posing as a mannequin, the act that so frightens his Black colleague. Harold is a chaos magnet; the chaos comes out of his wanting to fit into the capitalist machine. And that applies, as well, to him ending up dangling from a clock high up on a building.

That image is the film’s most famous, possibly American silent films’ most famous — I imagine everyone has seen it somewhere. The full effect of Lloyd’s achievement requires some contextual understanding. It turns out he didn’t do 100% of the stunts himself, and some camera trickery was used to make the clock seem higher than it was; nevertheless, Lloyd did more than enough, and could easily have been killed. These days, we just assume CG effects are involved. Even if Tom Cruise actually scaled the world’s tallest building for Mission: Impossible 4, the cables securing him to the surface were digitally whited-out. By and large, we know no such pizzazz was available to the makers of Safety Last. We can see it plainly: He’s up there.

Lloyd was inspired by watching steeplejack Bill Strother (who plays Harold’s pal and roomie) ply his trade, climbing a building, and he made sure to add a bunch of roadblocks to that vertical run. Every smaller, less dangerous obstacle we’ve seen Harold contend with builds towards the payoff of the clock. (And clock and watch faces have been a visual motif, too — Harold setting back the punch clock, prefiguring his turning the big clock’s hand back.) Time itself is the big city monster that drives and pursues Harold. Mortality and financial insecurity are in the air — World War I was fewer than five years in the rearview when the movie premiered, and the Great Depression was only six years ahead. That image speaks volumes about how America must have felt — on a disastrous precipice, the bloodbath of history still not fully dry, yet trying like mad to move up anyway. The fact that the movie is also, after a hundred years, still funny as hell doesn’t hurt.