Product Description
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Scream: After a series of mysterious deaths befalls their small
town, an offbeat group of friends led by Sidney Prescott (Neve
Campbell) become the target of a ed killer in this smash-hit
“clever thriller” (The Washington Post) that launched the Scream
franchise and breathed new life into the horror genre.
Scream 2: Away at college, Sidney Prescott (Campbell) thought
she’d finally put the shocking murders that shattered her life
behind her…until a copycat killer begins acting out a real-life
sequel. Now, as history repeats itself, ambitious reporter Gale
Weathers (Courteney Cox), deputy Dewey (David Arquette) and other
Scream survivors find themselves trapped in a terrifyingly clever
plotline where no one is safe – or beyond suspicion – in this
“delicious, diabolical and fun” (Rolling Stone) sequel.
Scream 3: While Sidney Prescott (Campbell) lives in safely
guarded seclusion, bodies begin dropping around the Hollywood set
of "Stab 3," the latest movie based on the gruesome Woodsboro
killings. The escalating terror finally brings Sidney out of
hiding, drawing her and the other survivors once again into an
insidious game of horror movie mayhem that’s a “suspenseful,
clever and very entertaining” (NBC-TV) installment in the wildly
popular Scream franchise.
.com
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Scream
With the smash hit Scream, novice screenwriter Kevin Williamson
and veteran horror director Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm
Street) revived the moldering corpse of the teen horror picture,
both creatively and commercially, by playfully acknowledging the
exhausted clichés and then turning them inside out. Scream is a
postmodern slasher movie, a horror film that cleverly
deconstructs horror films, then reassembles the dead tissue, and
(like Frankenstein's monster) creates new life. When a serial
killer starts hacking up their fellow teens, the media-savvy
youngsters of Scream realize that the smartest way of sticking
around for the sequel is to avoid the terminal behaviors that
inevitably doom supporting players in the movies. They've seen
all the movies, and the rules of the genre are like second nature
to them. One of the iest/funniest setups features a kid
watching John Carpenter's seminal Halloween on video. As Jamie
Lee Curtis is shadowed by Michael Meyers and the kid on the couch
yells at her to turn around, Craven reverses his camera and we
see that the kid should be taking his own advice. The fresh-faced
young cast (including Drew Barrymore, Neve Campbell, Skeet
Ulrich, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette) is fun to watch, and
their tart dialogue is sprinkled with enough archly
self-conscious pop-culture references to make Quentin Tarantino
blush. --Jim Emerson
Scream 2
Fully aware of its status as the sequel to the surprise hit
thriller of 1996, this lively follow-up trades freshness for
familiarity, playing on our affection for returning characters
while obeying--and then subverting--the "rules" of sequels. Once
again, movie references are cleverly employed to draw us into the
story, which takes place two years after the events of Scream, at
a small Ohio college, where the Scream survivors reunite when
another series of mysterious killings begins. Capitalizing on the
guesswork involving a host of potential suspects, director Wes
Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson have crafted a thriller
that's more of a Scream clone than a genuinely inventive new
story. But the shocks are just as effective, and escalating
tension leads to a tautly staged climax that's simultaneously
logical and giddily over the top. Background information for
trivia buffs: to preserve the secrecy of plot twists, copies of
the screenplay were heavily guarded during production and
restricted to only the most crucial personnel. When an early
draft was circulated on the Internet, screenwriter Kevin
Williamson did rewrites, and subsequent drafts were printed with
red ink on brown paper, eliminating the threat of photocopying.
None of the cast members knew who the killer was until the final
scenes were filmed! -- Jeff Shannon
Scream 3
When Randy the video geek rattles off the rules of surviving a
horror movie in Wes Craven's Scream, he speaks for a generation
of filmgoers who are all too aware of slasher movie clichés.
Playfully scripted by Kevin Williamson with a self-aware wink and
more than a few nods to its grandhers (from Psycho to
Halloween to the Friday the 13th dynasty), Scream skewers teen
horror conventions with loving reverence while re-creating them
in a modern, movie-savvy context. And so goes the series, which
continues the satirical spoofing by tackling (what else?) sequels
while sustaining its own self-contained mythology. Catty reporter
Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) turns grisly murders into lurid
bestsellers, a cult of killer wannabes continues to hunt spunky
psycho-survivor Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell) for their 15
minutes of fame, and a cheesy movie series (Stab) develops within
the movie series.
Scream remains the high point of the series--a fresh take on a
genre long since collapsed into routine, but Scream 2 spoofs
itself with witty humor ("Why would anyone want to do that?
Sequels suck!" opines college film student Randy), and delights
with more elaborate set pieces and all-new rules for surviving a
horror movie sequel. The endangered veterans of the original film
reunite one last time for Scream 3, which plays out on the movie
set of Stab 3. (It's a trilogy within a trilogy!) With Williamson
gone, replacement screenwriter Ehran Kruger tries to mine the
formula one more time. It's a little tired by now, and pale
imitations (Urban Legend, I Know What You Did Last Summer) have
further drained the zeitgeist, but the film bubbles with bright
humor, and director Craven is stylistically at the top of his
game. As a trilogy, it remains both the most consistently
entertaining and self-aware horror series ever made. --Sean
Axmaker
Still y: The Ultimate y Movie Retrospective / Scream: The
Inside Story
As most horror devotees already know, the Scream franchise was
fraught with production troubles from its inception through its
fourth and apparently final entry, and the two documentaries
included on the fourth disc of the Scream collector's set (both
of which are feature length, which explains the confusion over
the set's "5 Film" label) represent the first attempt to bring
together a cohesive portrait of the series' behind-the-scenes
history. Both Still y: The Ultimate y Movie
Retrospective, by ShockTilYouDrop.com editor Ryan Turek, and
Scream: The Inside Story, which was produced for the Biography
Channel by much of the same creative team behind the epic Never
Again: The Elm Street Legacy, cover the same ground, which
is director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson's struggles
with the MPAA, producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, and a myriad
of other outside forces throughout the series through interviews
with many of the production principals, most notably stars Neve
Campbell, David Arquette, and Jamie Kennedy (Williamson and
Courteney Cox are conspicuously absent from both projects). Still
y offers the more comprehensive presentation, thanks largely
to its inclusion of such less well-known players as Scream 3
scribe Ehren Kruger, who capably defends his much-maligned
script, and offers welcome touches of visual and editorial style
in its "quick cuts" segments, which present tidbits of info that,
while not entirely germane to the documentary's main thrust,
provide the sort of detail that dedicated fans of the series will
love. The Inside Story delves deeply into pre-production issues,
from Craven's reluctance to helm the series to the battle over
Ghost Face's iconic and costume. In-depth discussions of the
characters through dialogue readings by the original cast and
screen tests, as well as split-screen comparisons between the
original NC-17 edit and the R-rated theatrical cut, are equally
invaluable. Though some viewers may argue with the documentaries'
conceit that the Scream franchise reinvented the horror
genre--reinvigorated is a more accurate description--the wealth
of information presented in both films sets the bar for future
horror documentaries. --Paul Gaita