A 3-part exploration into the dozens of Scream rip-offs to hit the movie market from 1997-2001.

Over the course of this article me and some of my horror obsessed friends – an interesting mix of actors, writers, comedians, musicians, and even a real life high school principal – will review and explore just over twenty Scream-inspired teen chillers and how the 1996 hit influenced each one of them. My 9 co-writers for these articles are:

Shawn Collins – actor/puppeteer/writer at All Puppet Players, comedian and former elementary school teacher.

Louis Farber – legit professional actor and artistic associate director at Stray Cat theater.

Audrey Farnsworth – Twitter famous comedian/writer and Godzilla enthusiast.

Danny Gurrola – Film editor and expert of all things early 2000s.

Nathan McGough – musician and certified Neil Breeniac.

Michael Palladino – comedian/writer who is also my roommate.

Jennie Rhiner – actor/puppeteer at All Puppet Players & Disney Princess impersonator.

Ben V. – real-life high school principal and Hockey enthusiast.

Beth V. – former high school teacher and Joey King hater.

Last Time…

We explored ten post-Scream teen thrillers released from 1997 to 1998, that clearly were inspired by the success of that film. Films like Disturbing Behavior and Urban Legend, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Halloween H20.

This Time…

We keep the bus rolling with ten more entries that were released between 1999 and 2000. Let’s start things off with a completely unnecessary sequel to a beloved 70s classic.

NOTE – SPOILERS OF THESE 25 YEAR OLD MOVIES THROUGHOUT.

1999

The Rage: Carrie 2

directed by: Katt Shea; written by: Rafael Moreu

cast: Emily Bergl, Jason London, Dylan Bruno, J. Smith-Cameron, Amy Irving, Zachery Ty Byran, John Doe, Charlotte Ayanna, Rachel Blanchard, Mena Suvari, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Katt Shea, Gordon Clapp

runtime: 105 minutes

release date: March 12, 1999

opening weekend box office:

1. Analyze This – $15.5M
2. The Rage: Carrie 2 – $7.06M
3. Cruel Intentions – $7M
4. The Corruptor – $5.6M
5. The Deep End of the Ocean – $5.5M

The Rage: Carrie 2 total box office gross: $17.2M (roughly 80% of its production budget)

STREAMING ON MAX

SHAWN COLLINS: Okay, I’ll tell you why I hate this movie.

Think back to the first movie you remember ever seeing, your first conscious experience of watching a film. For most people, it’s probably a cartoon or some schmaltzy family flick. Not so for me. My first conscious viewing experience, somewhere around the age of 5 years old, was Brian De Palma’s Carrie, which my uncle (who was about 19 at the time) had rented and decided to watch while babysitting me. Now, I’ll be honest, the movie probably did not hold my attention the whole time, but I was definitely paying attention during the shower scene. I was confused – at only 5 years old, I didn’t get why Carrie would suddenly be bleeding if she hadn’t been injured. My uncle gave me a vague explanation, one that I assume left out most of the details. But it was specific enough that, during family dinner only a few days later, I loudly and proudly informed my mother that “sometimes girls bleed” in the middle of a busy Sizzler restaurant. I remember all the noise and motion in the restaurant suddenly stopping all at once while everyone turned to stare, horrified, in our direction… but that part probably didn’t really happen.

So yeah, I don’t know if I even like De Palma’s Carrie. There are things about it which are pretty good, I guess – Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie especially, and the Prom rampage at the end is still an affecting sequence – but it’s also tawdry and cruel in ways that make me feel uncomfortable and embarrassed to watch. Some of that is probably intentional, some of it is probably an indirect result of my lifetime ban from all Sizzler restaurants, but what can I say? Carrie just isn’t one of my favorite movies. And since THE RAGE: CARRIE 2 is literally just that same movie again but worse, it’s already starting at a big disadvantage.

But that isn’t why I hate this movie.

I have seen this movie at least 20 times. It came out when I was in 8th grade, and I’m pretty sure my friends and I saw it in the theater because we went to see basically everything back in those days. Seriously, we were not picky – the only movie we ever walked out of was Bats with Lou Diamond Phillips (which, fun fact, came out the same year as this movie). I don’t remember us having an especially strong reaction to THE RAGE: CARRIE 2 at the time, but we must have liked it more than Bats. Then one of my friends got this movie on VHS, and it just kind of wound up in our movie rotation. Sure, it’s not like we were riveted to the screen the whole time every time we watched it – which goes without saying, given that we’re talking about THE RAGE: CARRIE 2 here – but just having it on in the background was enough for me to absorb it via osmosis. What were we gonna do? It was one of the tapes we had, so we played it. A lot.

And then one day we watched it for the last time and then I forgot about it for over 20 years, until Mike asked me about writing this article. The last time I watched THE RAGE: CARRIE 2, all the characters in it were a couple years older than me, so I viewed them as grown-ups and took their problems and opinions seriously. And I gotta tell ya, sitting through this again as an adult was a real goddamn slog.

I get that I’m way outside this movie’s demographic by now, but it’s just frustrating. Carrie #2 discovers that she has amazing supernatural powers that could forever change our understanding of the human mind, but she gets distracted by cute dates with a boy from the clique that just made her best friend jump off a building. Part of the problem here is that I never really buy Carrie #2 as a victim the same way I did with Sissy Spacek. Carrie #2 isn’t ostracized by everyone; she’s got friends, she’s got that cynical 90’s wit, her home life doesn’t seem great but she isn’t being raised by a religious fanatic. Yeah, she’s not one of the “cool kids”, but it also didn’t seem like she was regularly picked on or anything. And since the evil friend group in this movie has all the subtlety of Captain Planet villains, it really seems like Carrie #2 would have known better than to get involved with them.

But this is a Carrie movie, so that means Carrie #2 has to fall for the bad kids’ obvious trap so that she can kill everyone in the building with magic. You know, exactly the same thing that happened in the original version, just without the pathos – or, eventually, the inhuman stare – of Sissy Spacek. I guess me no longer having the patience to sit through high school bullshit doesn’t technically make this movie bad, but watching it again after all these years felt like seeing a minor fender-bender happening in extreme slow motion: you know the whole time what’s about to happen, and it’s pretty underwhelming once you finally get there.

But that also isn’t why I hate this movie.

Hey, quick topic change! Have you noticed how original movies are pretty rare these days? There are a bunch of articles and analyses of the current state of the film industry that explain why this is, so let’s focus more specifically on one of the weeping boils freshly sprouted upon the risk-averse ass of Modern Hollywood: the so-called “legacy sequel”, also sometimes known as the “soft-reboot”. These are movies that are basically just reboots of more popular movies from an earlier era, except that they add in a few sly winks to the original film so that the movie technically qualifies as a sequel. This tricks audiences into thinking they’re watching a continuation of an existing story, rather than a retread of a better story they’ve already heard before… movies like Jurassic World and Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

I doubt that THE RAGE: CARRIE 2 was the first legacy sequel ever made, but it’s got all the same shit these movies always have. Turns out that Carrie #2 is actually Carrie’s half-sister, they play clips of the shower scene and the “They’re all gonna laugh at you!” part, and we even get a cameo from one of the original cast: Sue Snell, now working as a guidance counselor at a rebuilt version of the same high school Carrie burned down in the 70s. At one point, the sheriff says something like, “Are you sure you’re not still trying to save that girl from 20 years ago?” to Sue Snell, which feels like a pretty messed up thing to say, but he also says it so casually that it seems like something he must say all the time, so maybe “trying to save Carrie” has just literally become Sue Snell’s entire personality now. Nobody in this town understands healthy boundaries, is what I’m saying.

As a legacy sequel, this movie exists as a grim portent of everything that was to come – a glimpse at the shameless depths that Hollywood was willing to sink to in pursuit of a reliable box office. “People don’t go see movies they’ve never heard of before,” the conventional wisdom goes, “so we better slap a recognizable trademark on everything!” THE RAGE: CARRIE 2 started out as a different movie called The Curse, which they Frankensteined into a Carrie sequel because the studio thought that would make more people interested in seeing it. Now, I don’t know if The Curse would have been a good movie, but I doubt that forcing it into the Carrie franchise did anything to make it better. And it’s heartbreaking to think that we – and studio execs – could have learned this lesson all the way back in 1999 when THE RAGE: CARRIE 2 flopped in theaters. Alas, that’s not what happened, is it?

But even that’s not why I hate this movie.

No, I hate this movie because, at the beginning of the party massacre sequence, Carrie #2’s tattoo grows to cover her arm and face. That’s not how Carrie’s powers work. I would get it if she was just, like, moving the ink around under her skin, but she would have to be spontaneously generating new tattoo ink for the tattoo to grow like it does. And don’t tell me she’s just spreading the already existing ink around more thinly, because I thought of that too, the tattoo would fade if that were the case. So in summary: growing tattoo scene makes no sense, inaccurate depiction of telekinesis, not true to the source material. Ding!, cinema sin, one star. I’m afraid I cannot recommend THE RAGE: CARRIE 2. 1/5 Sizzler meal deals

MICHAEL MARGETIS: Whenever I think of The Rage: Carrie 2, I think of two things. The first is Paris.

American films were typically released in Europe months after they premiered in the states, so when I went on my family’s Paris vacation in September of ’99, I was seeing advertisements for a lot of American movies that were released in Spring or Early Summer. Movies like Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, Mystery Men, American Pie, the weird Ashley Judd/Ewan McGregor vehicle, Eye of the Beholder, and of course, The Rage: Carrie 2. Of these movies, I saw the most advertisements for Star Wars of course, but oddly enough The Rage: Carrie 2 got the second most exposure. I think the original Brian DePalma Carrie is a big movie in Europe, if I’m not mistaken, so that’s probably why. Everywhere we’d go – the streets, the subway – we’d see posters for this movie my father and I had seen sixth months prior and absolutely hated. “Wait till they find out it’s a piece of shit.” my father said, or something along the lines of that.

The second thing I think of is the oldest son from Home Improvement getting his penis shot off with a harpoon gun. Don’t worry, this didn’t happen IRL. It happened in the movie. Zachery Ty Bryan plays an asshole jock bullying Carrie 2 AKA Rachel who gets his cockuppance at the end during a very familiar party-gone-nanners scene. You see part of that mangled man meat on the harpoon. It’s not insane by today’s standards but for the time it was WILD.

So, the wholly unnecessary sequel The Rage: Carrie 2 follows Carrie White’s secret half-sister, Rachel (Emily Bergl – Sammi from Shameless), who is also telekinetic and dangerous AF. She’s super unpopular and her foster parents suck. Her best friend is American Beauty‘s Mena Suvari, another loner in this universe, who tragically takes her own life when a football asshole statutory rapes her and then ghosts her to make her feel sad. It’s Carrie versus the popular football people, so I don’t have to tell you most people are on Team Football. That is except for the school guidance counselor, Sue Snell (Amy Irving), who was Carrie White’s guilty best friend in the 1976 original. A lot of boring shit happens, including teen bullies being preditcably awful, more so than they usually are IRL, at least from my experience, and then it all leads to a big party where Rachel AKA Carrie 2 unleashes her powers and murders everyone.

Emily Bergl is actually a good actress, and although this material is certainly beneath her, she delivers like it’s her Oscar reel. Amy Irving on the other hand really sleepwalks through this material, and the bully kids are merely all right. Maybe that’s why they decided to kill her off with a fire poker to the brain. Anyway, The Rage: Carrie 2 is a bad movie but it could have been much worse. It’s more competent in technical areas than most of the dumb movies on this list, but it really has no reason to exist other than to waste my life. But that harpoon dick thing was cool. 1.5/5 Sizzler Meal deals.

Idle Hands

directed by: Rodman Flender ; written by: Terri Hughes & Ron Milbauer

cast: Devon Sawa, Jessica Alba, Seth Green, Elden Henson, Vivica A. Fox, Fred Willard, Robert Englund, Mindy Sterling, The Offspring

runtime: 92 minutes

release date: April 30, 1999

opening weekend U.S. box office:

1. Entrapment – $26.1M
2. The Matrix – $11.6M
3. Life – $8M
4. Never Been Kissed – $5M
5. Analyze This – $2.8M

NOTE: Idle Hands opened at #6 in the box office, earning a mere $2.3M

Idle Hands total box office gross: $4.2M (only 28% of its production budget)

STREAMING ON PLUTOTV

JENNIE RHINER: Have you ever been involved with a project that you loved working on but ended up looking like shit to an outside viewer? The final product is not perfect, but the memory of the fun that you had made it 100% worth your time? That’s the vibe that Rodman Flender’s 1998 film, Idle Hands, gives off. I watched this movie for the first time last week and all I could think about was how I had passed the prime time in my life for me to be able to enjoy this movie. However, I still think this flick is fun and worth your time to see.

In this wacky horror spinoff that’s a spoof of Evil Dead 2, we meet slacker Anton Tobias (Devon Sawa), a burnout who wakes up one day and realizes his parents were killed by a malicious demon… Did I mention the demon possessed his right hand? With the help of his two stoner-zombie sidekicks (Seth Green and Elden Hanson), he fights to stop the demon hand’s murderous spree and prevent the girl of his dreams Molly (Jessica Alba) from being dragged to hell. The standouts among this cast for me was definitely Green and Hanson; they have fantastic chemistry together and are super fun to watch every time they are on screen. Sawa also does a decent job as the lead (special shoutout to his physical comedy skills!) You can tell they worked hard to craft a distinct villain character for the possessed hand, especially while Sawa is attached to it).

Compared to these three, the rest of the cast is pretty weak… Jessica Alba’s character doesn’t have many layers to it and it feels like she’s just there to make teen boys happy. Meanwhile, Vivica A. Fox plays a demon slaying high priestess that’s entertaining at first but gets a little over the top and annoying near the climax of the film. Outside of the performances, I had a blast listening to this movie’s soundtrack. It’s a snapshot of late 90’s punk rock that perfectly captures its chaos in song, including music from Blink-182, Mötley Crüe, The Vandals… it even features a hilarious on-screen cameo of the band, The Offspring! There are other random cameos that this movie flashes at you, including Fred Willard playing dad and Tenacious D guitarist, Kyle Gass, serving burgers.

The special effects in this movie are fun and high quality as they can be, but I think it works well with this movie’s comedy…I did get a kick out of watching popcorn being thrown into the mouth of a decapitated head. If you can get past the lukewarm humor, you’ll be like me and enjoy the cast enjoying themselves on this one. Take this one off the shelf if you’re a horror fan looking for something out of the box on a chill Monday evening. Pairs well with a couple of beers. 3/5 electric knives.

MICHAEL MARGETIS: You hit the nail on the head, Jennie – this feels like a project everyone loved working on but it just didn’t translate to the outside viewer. I remember not even loving this when it came out back in 1999, when I was 10. They couldn’t impress a 10-year-old for god’s sake! Seemed right up this Scream hound’s ally, but I found the chemistry between Sawa and Alba to be significantly lacking. Of course, my favorite part back then were the undead friend duo of Seth Green and Elden Hanson, a straight rip-off of Griffin Dunne‘s undead friend character in An American Werewolf in London, a vastly superior film and way funnier movie. As much as I loved those dudes before I knew how to do long division, watching it now is super cringe. So much of Idle Hands just lands flat for me, the movie mostly seems like a life support system for the “killer” soundtrack. Not a huge fan of the soundtrack personally but I understand it was all the rage in the 90s.

Anyway, for as dumb and lacking as the screenplay is, the technicals of how the hand works are pretty good as Jennie stated. I’m trying to think of more things to say about this really okay movie, so let me just comment on the director – Rodman Flender. He did another not good horror film in the 90s – Leprechaun 2, where Leprechaun finds himself in Hollywood and acts like Harvey Weinstein. Idle Hands is definitely better than that movie. Also, besides Leprechaun 2, Flender is Timothee Chalamet‘s uncle. No joke, look it up. 1.5/5 electric knives.

Teaching Mrs. Tingle

written & directed by: Kevin Williamson

cast: Helen Mirren, Katie Holmes, Barry Watson, Marissa Coughlan, Jeffrey Tambor, Vivica A. Fox, Michael McKean, Molly Ringwald, Liz Stauber, Lesley Ann Warren

runtime: 96 minutes

release date: August 20, 1999

opening weekend U.S. box office:

1. The Sixth Sense – $23.9M
2. Bowfinger – $10.6M
3. Mickey Blue Eyes – $10.1M
4. Runaway Bride – $9.2M
5. The Blair Witch Project – $7.2M

NOTE: Teaching Mrs. Tingle opened at #10 in the box office with a mere $3.3M

Teaching Miss Tingle total box office gross: $8.9M (only 63% of its production budget)

STREAMING ON PARAMOUNT+

MICHAEL MARGETIS: FIRST THINGS FIRST – the title should be Teaching MISS Tingle cause everyone calls her Miss Tingle, and she doesn’t seem to be married. What the fuck is this? Anyway, we’ll put a pin that, maybe Ben can explain. 

In 1999, everyone was on pins and needles to see what Scream and Dawson’s Creek auteur, Kevin Williamson, would do next. Turns out it was a lame, PG-13 teen suspense comedy named Teaching Mrs. Tingle. Helen Mirren plays the titular Tingle, a one-dimensional cold-hearted asshole teacher that everyone fears and no one will stand up to. I didn’t buy that everyone would be so frozen-in-fear terrified of this lady, someone would tell her to fuck off at least once a day, but I get it. It’s a trope of teen movies – the evil teacher. 

Katie Holmes fulfills another trope of these movies: the brilliantly smart but pitifully poor girl who needs a scholarship to not end up a waitress smoking Camels on her deathbed like her mom. She’s nice enough, but her friends are sociopaths. One is played by Barry Watson of 7th Heaven and Sorority Boys fame. He’s another trope – the bad boy. He’s failing every class, including Miss Tingle’s history class. He brings in a rock he finds outside the classroom for his class project on Plymouth Rock. What a doofus. He loves beer, though. The other friend is played by the seriously underrated Marissa Coughlan, who you might know as Officer Ursula Hanson in Super Troopers. She falls into the trope of the young aspiring actress but frequently sexually assaults Barry Watson‘s character in the movie, and I don’t know how that fits into the trope. Coughlan doesn’t save the film by any stretch of the imagination, but she creates the most believable character in this dumb story.

The plot? Ok. So Katie Holmes does this pretty all-right history final based on letters from women burned at the stake during the Salem Witch trials. Even if she takes creative license with some of the writing, this is an A project for a public high school. She clearly spent months on it. Let’s be serious, give her an A, right? Nope. Mrs. Tingle gives her a C and most likely her two friends an F. Though the actress friend deserves her F – she dresses up like Marilyn Monroe and talks about having sex with JFK. That’s not accurate, no matter what popular culture has taught us. She’s worse than that Blonde filmmaker. ANYWAY – desperate for a grade, the three friends go to Tingle’s house to plead with her. Pleading turns into kidnapping when Barry Watson becomes violent and puts all three in a situation that would most likely ruin their lives. They kidnap MISS Tingle, who by the way, has the most basic taste in classical music (I think she’s listening to like The Magic Flute or something when the kids barge in). They keep her for several days, and she turns them all against each other and makes Holmes and Watson have sex. 

Eventually, Tingle escapes and tries to change all their grades back to F’s, but the three friends attack her again. But she strikes back, so she’s the bad guy. Ultimately, the principal (a criminally underused Michael McKean) stops by her house to find Tingle trying to kill Katie Holmes, so he fires her. The ending is so rushed together that it almost seems like they had more footage, but folks at test screenings said, “Just rush the ending. No one gives a fuck, Kevin.” No one really does. This is such a lame, limp-dicked excuse for a movie. The characters graduate high school in a 15-second montage that they overlay the end credits over, and we don’t even get a dumb epilogue of on-screen text that tells us what happened to each person. But do we care? I dunno, not really. I think they thought this a good movie for the Scream crowd’s younger siblings, but I first saw this when I was 9 and thought it was bullshit even then. 

P.S. – my favorite moment. of the movie is when Katie Holmes is fighting with her actress friend and through tears, calls her a “a Tingle in sheep’s clothing.” How could you not burst out laughing saying that? Holmes deserves an Oscar.

BEN V: To start at the top: kids do not give a fuck about their teachers, so the Missus/Miss thing is literally just because students will do that. I can’t tell you how many students I’ve taught over the years that never learned my name beyond “Mister,” and honestly, that was better than what they wanted to call me, so…

As far as an accurate depiction of high school, this kind of still tracks? History teachers are always old, mean, and needlessly harsh. I think it comes from getting a history degree, which is even more useless than an English degree, and I can say that because I have two of the latter. Helen Mirren sucks in this, which is weird for her but worse for us. Like, she definitely embodies the “teacher everyone hates” trope down to the T, but it’s also such a wasted casting that it’s almost not worth talking about.

The rest of this movie is… well, you nailed it Mike, like they thought “what could connect more with the kids?” Like everyone has a teacher they hated the most, but my idea of revenge was always messing with their car in the parking lot, or one day making more money than them (I am 0/2 on redder revenge). If one of my friends in high school had suggested we take the AP European Teacher (fuck you, Mr. Johnson!) hostage in his home and stage lewd photos of him with another teacher, I’d have transferred schools.

For being set in a high school, this movie does an infinitely worse job of capturing the high school aura than Scream, which actually did a pretty great job of capturing high school AND horror. That’s the other thing about Teaching Mrs. Tingle: it’s NEVER scary. It’s tense maybe once, but the rest of the movie is like if Scooby Doo met Ferris Bueller. All in all, I give this movie one “racy picture of Helen Mirren’s cleavage” out of ten, and that’s strictly for the shots of Helen Mirren’s cleavage.

2000

Scream 3

directed by: Wes Craven; written by: Ehren Kruger

cast: Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, Patrick Dempsey, Parker Posey, Jenny McCarthy, Deon Richmond, Scott Foley, Matt Keeslar, Emily Mortimer, Lance Henriksen, Patrick Warburton, Jamie Kennedy, Heather Matarazzo, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith

runtime: 117 minutes

release date: February 4, 2000

opening weekend U.S. box office:

1. Scream 3 – $34.7M
2. The Hurricane – $4.9M
3. Stuart Little – $4.7M
4. Next Friday – $4.2M
5. Eye of the Beholder – $4.2M

Scream 3 total box office gross: $161.8M (made 4x its production budget)

STREAMING ON MAX

MICHAEL MARGETIS: Scream 3 is obviously the worst entry of its franchise, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not nearly as bad as the shittiest entries of most horror franchises. Is Scream 3 really as trash as Jason Goes to Hell or Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers? Is it seriously as bad as Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare or Halloween Resurrection? Is it honestly as terrible as Leprechaun 4: In Space or Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers? You get my point: Scream 3 is still better than most slashers, and Halloween is the worst franchise in horror. 

That being said, Scream 3 is a bad movie. The first problem is that it doesn’t feel like a Scream movie. This is 100% due to the replacement of writer/Scream creator Kevin Williamson with Ehren Kruger, who, despite being Freddy Kruger‘s nephew, fails to capture the inherent playfulness of the dialogue and characters. This story finds Sidney in hiding after being the target of a mass murder spree, not once but twice in two years. She’s a remote therapist who talks with folks over the phone about their issues, like being abused by their partners and stuff like that. Meanwhile, in Tinseltown, the studios are making a third “Stab” movie with Parker Posey playing Gale Weathers, who has employed Dewey as her bodyguard. But that’s when shit pops off.

Cotton Weary (the always great Liev Schrieber) is ghost-faced to death along with his girlfriend, and the movie is shut down. Why? Because Cotton was in the film playing himself, and in the script of “Stab 3”, he gets murdered in the opening scene. THE KILLER IS KILLING PEOPLE BASED ON HOW THEY DIE AND WHEN THEY DIE IN THE SCRIPT FOR “STAB 3”!!!!! It is an exciting idea, but it goes off the rails when they reveal Ghost Face has a unique voice modulator that allows him to talk in other characters’ voices. This technology doesn’t even exist 23 years after Scream 3‘s initial release, so it’s a bit hokey, to say the least. Also, the characters are bland compared to the first two. Jenny McCarthy basically plays herself pissed off she’s playing a “dumb blonde,” Deon Richmond plays a self-aware Randy knock-off, Matt Keeslar plays a typical fuck boy actor with a stack of DUIs, and Scott Foley plays Roman, the director of “Stab 3” who is actually the killer, and Sidney Prescott’s long lost brother. 

Yes, the killer is Sidney’s long-lost bastard brother, who is revealed to have orchestrated the events of Scream 1 by coercing Billy Loomis and Stu Macher to kill Sidney’s mom. It’s a stretch, to say the least. Also, the fact Roman is the ONLY killer makes zero sense. These movies push the envelope of plausibility in terms of how Ghost Face could commit all the murders, but not having two killers in this one is just too ridiculous to believe. Additionally, director Wes Craven and screenwriter Ehren Kruger try to hit a somewhat heartfelt note between Roman and Sidney, and it just doesn’t work. Maybe it would have worked better if they had developed Roman as an actual character during the movie other than an agitated secondary character whose entire personality revolves around “I want to shoot my movie!” 

The highlight of Scream 3 is far and away Parker Posey, as the actress playing Gale Weathers. While the “comedy” between Arquette and Cox Arquette frequently fails to deliver, Posey never fails. We end up caring about her as much as Sidney Prescott in this one, and I can safely say that has nothing to do with the quality of the script but with the quality of Posey as an actor. Besides her, the other performances could be better. Patrick Dempsey is solid as an LAPD officer who helps Sidney and eventually dates her, but besides that, everyone is really phoning it in. The kills are all pretty generic and tame, primarily due to post-Columbine MPAA panic, and none of the action/chase set pieces are nearly as inspired as anything from the first two. 

However, for as mid as this one is, it’s more watchable than most horror sequels because, for all its faults, it actually feels like a movie. 2/5 ghostfaces.

Palladino, what do you think?

MICHAEL PALLADINO: Remember the part when they all watch that secret tape that Randy must have made before he got a full-body ventilation in the back of that van in Scream 2? From beyond the grave, the guy tries to let his old friends know what to expect when the inevitable ‘threequel’ hits. 

I like to imagine that scene now, but with twenty-three years and three sequels worth of fresh context. 

“Guys, if you’re watching this tape, it means we’re deep into a whole other level of insanity. All those horror movie rules I taught you? You can forget them. We’re dealing with something that those Y2K era Weinstein kissasses would never have predicted: the horror franchise. 

And there are certain rules for horror franchises, people! For instance, you have to go to new locales to keep things fresh and exciting. Think about it: Jason took Manhattan. The Leprechaun terrorized Vegas. Rocky went to Russia. But don’t stray too far from home, unless you want to alienate the original fans who have been with you since the Blockbuster Video age. Every franchise has its ground zero. Its Crystal Lake, its Elm Street, its Haddonfield… You gotta go home and pay respect to holy ground. And while you’re there, kill off a major character who had been there from day one. Remind your audience that they’ve passed through the tunnel into Crazytown about two or three sequels ago and now everyone is fair game. 

And last but not least: you gotta have the weakest link. The entry that makes people say ‘yeah, what was up with that one?’ The one that fans wish wasn’t canon, but if it wasn’t then that would open up a whole other can of worms and before you know it the franchise would be in Halloween territory. Do you want to have to look at a damn flow chart every time you watch a horror franchise entry just so you know which sequels go to which entries in which order? I didn’t think so. 

Is your second female lead also on one of the biggest sitcoms of all time? Then you have to, and I mean have to, give her a completely different hairstyle in each one, and in your weakest link, that haircut better be fucking outrageously wretched. She has to look like she got it cut by a blind five-year-old who hasn’t slept in two days. It has to be so horrendous that it ultimately ends up being one of the main things fans actually associate with that particular entry.

And the killer reveal? You better let down your audience harder than you ever let them down before. When that ghostface mask comes off, you want your audience to say something like “Wait, what?” or “Who was he again?” or even “How come there’s only one killer this time? I like it better when there’s two.”

I should have ended that bit two paragraphs ago, but have you ever tried writing in Jamie Kennedy’s voice? It’s actually pretty fun and I think when I’m done here I’m going to start that Malibu’s Most Wanted fan fiction I’ve always been too ashamed to write. 

In all seriousness, Scream 3 just feels so out of place within that franchise. I mean, here we are, writing an article about Scream rip-offs and part three made the list. That says it all, doesn’t it? But let’s not allow this one’s shitty reputation to overshadow Parker Posey’s performance. She reminds me of Gina Gershon in Showgirls because I feel like she knows she’s in a bad movie and plans on having a lot of fun doing it anyway. That’s what a role model does. Be like Parker, everyone. 

Overall, I give it 2/5 ghostfaces.

Cut

directed by: Kimble Rendall; written by: Dave Warner

cast: Molly Ringwald, Kylie Minogue, Jessica Napier, Frank Roberts, Geoff Revell, Sarah Kants, Simon Bossell, Stephen Curry, Cathy Adamek

runtime: 82 minutes

release date: February 23, 2000 (Australia)

STREAMING FOR FREE ON VUDU

NATHAN McGOUGH: In April of 2017, The Daily Beast published an exposé on Robert Fisher, a recently elected Representative for New Hampshire’s congressional District 9. Through what The Daily Beast described as a “large but weak web” of fake online identities, journalist Bonnie Bacarisse was able to uncover that Rep. Fisher founded controversial subreddit r/TheRedPill all the way back in 2012, prior to his election. Through this subreddit, Fisher and many others grew an online community of men who, for one reason or another, felt disenfranchised from the larger society, and held the belief that women were largely to blame for their woes. Fisher‘s subreddit would go on to become an important pillar of new forums and movements based in misygony and collective blaming of women, dubbed the Manosphere. Notably, the self-titled incels and the harassment campaign GamerGate were a part of this growing movement, which arguably had a wider influence on the rise of right-wing extremism and the election of Donald Trump. To say the least, one man’s inner construction of the outside world, as he saw it, had an unpredictable and dangerous effect on the culture at large.

Why did Fisher choose the name “TheRedPill” for his community? Of course, most people know this is a reference to The Matrix; the moment where Morpheus offers Neo the chance to pull the veil from his eyes and see the world as it really is. All Neo has to do is take a red pill instead of a blue pill, and his eyes will be opened to all that has been hidden from him; the unseen forces that control his life and make him feel inadequate. This concept was important to men who felt disenfranchised by feminism and any legislative progress that had been made towards equality for women. In their mind, feminism was the matrix and women were the machines, and in order to break free from the control of these machinations, men had no choice but to view women as the enemy (aka become redpilled).

This must have been terrifying for Lilly and Lana Wachowski, the creators of The Matrix (1999). In writing this story, they had created a deeply personal and intimate metaphor for their own struggles as closeted trans women. In fact, in early drafts, Neo was supposed to change sexes after taking the red pill and breaking free from the matrix. However, as often happens with popular art, once their movie had mainstream success, the original intent was lost on the masses. The once personal metaphor became watered down into a cheaper and broader message, misunderstood by many to be plainly anti-status quo. The red pill was no longer symbolic of overcoming self-doubt and personal empowerment, but rather doubting anything and everything that appeared to have consensus in society, even if that consensus was good. And because of this, the red pill became easy for disingenuous political groups to hijack as a symbol of their extreme views and hatred for consensus.

The red pill became a monster that the Wachowski‘s had never intended or imagined they would create. One little idea from a story they were writing as far back as 1992 had turned into an amorphous blight of negativity, permeating the online culture twenty years later, and it needed to be stopped. It’s clear that Lana Wachowski felt some responsibility for creating this monster, and aimed to reclaim it as her own in writing The Matrix Resurrections, the fourth installment of the franchise, which hammers home the silliness of taking the red pill so seriously. Whether or not she was successful in her reclamation remains to be seen, but it’s something all artists must reckon with: What portion of your art belongs to the self, and how much of it belongs to the collective experience? What do you do when something you created leads to bad things happening? How do you deal with that?

If you’re still with me, these are all thoughts I was having while watching the wonderful Australian slasher comedy Cut (2000) for the first time. This movie is the first feature from director Kimble Rennar, who would famously go on to direct the second unit for both The Matrix Reloaded & The Matrix Revolutions (2003).

In this story, (spoilers ahead) the bad guy is not the grieving mother of a child who drowned at summer camp, nor a psychopathic killer trapped inside a doll by way of voodoo, but something much more terrifying: the collective negative energy from a scrapped film project, manifested in physical form. Let me put this another way, the villain of Cut is the unintended consequences and friction that comes with creating art with other people. Yes, that’s right. Imagine all of the negative experiences from your group school projects, every disagreement that ever happened between you and a coworker while trying to meet a deadline, every drawing or script you threw in the trash because you thought it wasn’t good enough; all of this has now re-entered your life in the form of a six foot tall man with garden shears trying to kill you.

The story starts in meta fashion, with a mother cooking dinner for her family, and her daughter Chloe (Molly Ringwald) getting out of the shower to find “Now you die” written in the fog on her mirror. A few suspenseful shots later, and a masked villain named Scarman has Chloe cornered in the kitchen ready to kill her. Before the final blow, we hear someone off-screen yell “Cut!” and after the title sequence for our movie, it is revealed to the audience that we were watching a take from the set of a movie called Hot Blooded all along; Chloe is not real or in danger, she’s an actor named Vanessa Turnbill. However, the director of Hot Blooded (played by Kylie Minogue) is not happy with Brad, the actor who plays Scarman, and berates him in front of the crew for making a mistake that will cost the crew hours to reset their practical effects.

In the next scene, Brad visits the director in her trailer, and murders her with his character’s garden shears, out of apparent revenge for her poor behavior and for firing him a moment before. Vanessa goes to visit the director’s trailer with another crew member named Lossman, only to discover she has been murdered, with Brad still inside. Brad attacks Vanessa and Lossman, and after a struggle, Vanessa eventually kills him with the very same garden shears in self defense. Our movie then cuts once again to many years later, where some film students named Raffy and Hess (played by Jessica Napier and Sarah Kants) are being told the story of why Hot Blooded never was never finished by none other than Lossman, the crew member who was there in the trailer when Vanessa killed Brad. The students want to finish making Hot Blooded, but Professor Lossman strongly advises against it, explaining that many have tried to finish making the movie, and all of them were mysteriously murdered before it was completed.

Are you still with me? All of this lore and knowledge about the universe of Cut is accomplished within the first 10-13 pages of the script written by Dave Warner. It’s quite the feat to pull off successfully, without feeling the least bit winky or hamfisted. I was really impressed by these first few minutes, it’s the kind of script that makes you jealous that you didn’t think of it first, and in my opinion, was way ahead of its time. Whereas Scream was about deconstructing the slasher genre and what people love about horror movies –playing on audience expectations to later subvert them– Cut has a broader appeal because it invites the audience to step behind the camera and participate in the making of a slasher film. We are not just trying to figure out who the killer is; we are trying to figure out why the Hot Blooded movie is being made and what the characters stand to gain from finishing it, despite the warnings that they shouldn’t even try. There’s a boldness in writing the movie this way, because it can’t hide behind the conventional tricks of a slasher or rely on a big killer reveal. The audience is already behind the scenes. It assumes we will already know these things. Instead, Cut wants you to believe that a lot of times the process of making art is far more interesting than the final product. For my money, I can’t think of a horror movie that is more honest in this way, including Scream.

I don’t want to spoil the meat of the movie, but eventually these characters wind up at the original filming location where Brad murdered his director, and of course, begin getting picked off one by one by the reincarnated Scarman. Raffy and Hess are able to get Vanessa Turnbill back on board to reprise her role, and Molly Ringwald gives a stellar performance as an overly entitled actor past her prime. It’s really funny to see Molly be so mean to everyone when most people know her as a sweetheart. Speaking of meta jokes, there’s lots more to love here. One example that comes to mind is how the jumpscare sound is utilized. They’ll use this sound for expected moments, like when the supposed killer appears from behind a corner, but also in completely inappropriate moments, like when the cameraman uses a corny line to hit on one of the girls. Again, just more evidence that the creators of Cut knew how their audience would be watching the movie, and wanted to show them some appreciation by letting them in on the jokes.

Eventually, after several of the new crew members go missing and Raffy thinks they have abandoned their posts, Professor Lossman has a heart to heart with her on why she wants to continue trying to finish the movie instead of moving on to something new. Raffy reveals that the original director of Hot Blooded (the one murdered by Brad all those years ago) is in fact her late mother. She wants to finish what her mother started, because she believes that it was truly important for the world. Her mom had an artistic vision, and that vision was tragically never realized. By finishing the movie, Raffy can finally honor her mom and let go of all the baggage from this unfinished project that has followed her throughout childhood. Shortly after this, the producer who gave Raffy the rights to finish the movie shows up out of guilt, and reveals that the reincarnated Scarman is not a new killer imitating Brad, but rather the physical manifestation of all the negative energy surrounding the project. In order to kill Scarman, Raffy and Vanessa must destroy all traces of Hot Blooded’s existence; meaning they must burn the original film stock and only remaining copy of the movie. In doing this, Raffy must let go of her sense of obligation to her mother’s work and rely entirely on herself in order to survive. Are you seeing the metaphor here?

If it wasn’t already clear, I absolutely loved and adored Cut. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a horror movie quite like it, and for my money it’s the only one that is actually about making movies (at least as far as I’m aware). Just as Lana Wachowski wanted to face a monster from her past that slowly hobbled from the ether of her finished creation, Raffy is faced with a similar but arguably more interesting choice of how to deal with the monsters of an unfinished work. The script is ambitious and the direction from Rennar matches the uninhibited creative spirit written on the page. I don’t think this movie should be viewed as a response to Scream, though I can see how the influence of that franchise made its existence possible. Cut is special and unique, and deserves praise in its own right. Some may even argue that it’s better than Scream, and you can count me among those who do. 4/5 Meanie Ringwalds.

MICHAEL MARGETIS: While I maybe didn’t love this quite as much as Nathan, this is easily one of the best movies I’ve had to watch out of all 27 movies spread across these three articles. It’s second only to Scream and Scream 2 in my book, mostly because the production value and acting is not quite at the level of those movies. What Cut lacks in that though it more than makes up for in ambition and ideas. This is the only movie in this article that says, “Hey Scream, I see what you did there. Let me add to and expand upon it.”

Basically, Cut is about a cursed indie film production where all the negative energy on set manifested into a physical representation of the killer from the movie and murdered the director (Kylie Minogue) of the movie. Years later, a film student and secret daughter of the murdered director, Raffy (Jessica Napier), attempts to finish the production which makes news headlines in Australia. Along with her producer/lover, Hester (Sarah Kants), Raffy brings in the star of that original movie, a real Hollywood actress and super diva pain-in-the-ass, Vanessa Turnbill (Molly Ringwald – exceptionally chewing the scenery here), to finish out her role. Predictably people start dying again because you can never escape negative energy on some film sets.

There are some really good kills in this movie, but hands down the best thing about it is a fantastic opening sequence, better than any opening sequence in any of the Scream films. Unfortunately, the rest of the film doesn’t live up to the genius of that opening, but it’s all pretty good throughout. When I originally saw this two or three years ago I didn’t like it. I think I let the low budget get in the way of my appreciation for it and I didn’t understand the campiness in the context of the movie. I had been binge watching 90s era teen slashers at this point (it was peak Covid) and I think I was O.D.’ing on the sub genre. The ending is WILD but the film does not have the production budget to fully realize the director’s vision, so we end up seeing a sort of a working test model version of what could have been.

In terms of how this holds up today, Cut is very progressive for a 2000 slasher film in that it not only follows two completely out lesbians at its center, but it follows several women in positions of power that is never questioned by any of the male characters. It also has a scene where Molly Ringwald‘s agent is trying to get her to agree to finish the movie, and says the director might be the next Jane Campion, who just won her first directing Oscar a little more than a year ago. If you’re looking for something you’ve never seen before this Halloween, seriously give Cut a shot. 3.75/5 Meanie Ringwalds.

Final Destination

directed by: James Wong ; written by: Glen Morgan & James Wong

original script by: Jeffrey Reddick

runtime: 98 minutes

release date: March 17, 2000

opening weekend US box office:

1. Erin Brockovich – $28.1M
2. Mission to Mars – $11.3M
3. Final Destination – $10M
4. My Dog Skip – $5.2M
5. The Ninth Gate – $3.5M

total box office gross: $112M (4.9x its production budget)

STREAMING ON MAX

MICHAEL MARGETIS: Amongst a sea of repetitive, regurgitated teen slasher garbage, a new franchise was born with a great, original concept – teens have premonitions and cheat death, then death comes back to claim them in ways that look like freak accidents. Originally written as an X-Files spec script by Jeffrey Reddick, a struggling writer, this ended up being turned into a feature film and rewritten, coincidentally, by a writing duo mostly known for writing X-Files episodes, Glen Morgan and James Wong. Originally intended to be a more serious-minded movie about mortality, the sappy first cut of the project involving Ali Larter giving birth to Devon Sawa‘s baby was decimated by test audiences, prompting New Line Cinema to make Morgan and Wong recut the movie to be more fun. I hardly ever side with studios over creatives on creative decisions, but New Line was right on the money. I’ve seen the original ending footage of the “serious” version, and it’s dumb as hell. This idea plays best for a fun, dumb horror thriller. While Final Destination isn’t a great film by any stretch of the imagination, it introduces a fun game of guessing by what bizarre and/or ironic ways characters will die. Still, the franchise wouldn’t find its sweet spot till the first sequel, creatively titled Final Destination 2, which understood the franchise worked best the more it focused on the outrageousness of the deaths versus the plight of the two-dimensional teen characters.

Devon Sawa plays Alex, a high school senior taking a red-eye to Paris for a school trip. While boarding, he has this intense, visceral premonition of the plane exploding and all of his classmates and teachers dying. Freaked out by how real it is, he causes a commotion, and he and a bunch of classmates (and one teacher) get kicked off the flight. There’s Clear (Ali Larter), the loner orphan girl who crushes hard on Alex, Carter (Kerr Smith – Jen’s gay bestie from Dawson’s Creek), the super aggressive asshole jock, Terry (Amanda Detmer), Carter’s girlfriend who is kinda just there, Billy (Seann William Scott – Stifler from the American Pie franchise), the doofus kid who is always falling over things, Tod (Chad E. Donella – the albino kid from Disturbing Behavior) who is Alex’s best friend, and Ms. Lewton (Kristen Cloke), their teacher on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

When the plane violently explodes seconds after taking off, everyone is shocked. Police people think Alex is some kind of terrorist, and his classmates and teacher think he’s some kind of freak. Just to note, Final Destination was released in theaters just 18 months before 9/11. Anyhoo, the classmates and teacher start dying off in ridiculous ways:

Tod slips in the bathroom and accidentally hangs himself (pretty tame/boring – 3/10)

Terry gets annihilated by a bus after stepping into the street and saying the rest of the group can “drop fucking dead” (10/10 – hilarious and shocking, one of the best deaths of the franchise)

Ms. Lewton gets murdered by an insane series of events that happen in her kitchen, which conclude with a whole block of knives falling into her stomach (9/10 – the most prolonged and intricate death in the film, another franchise highlight)

Billy gets mouth-decapitated by a flying train part after proclaiming, “You’re dead, and you ain’t taking me with you!” (nice gore but very predictable – 6/10)

Carter gets smashed by a giant sign in Paris as a tag to the movie, but we don’t see the impact (compelling but dumb stereotypical horror movie ending – 5/10)

This is a very dumb movie and when it tries to elicit genuine suspense it’s somewhat lacking. The deaths are cool, but in all honesty the original is the weakest entry in the franchise besides the terrible fourth one. You remember the fourth one confusingly titled The Final Destination, right? It was shot in 3D and opened with a NASCAR accident? Ringing any bells? Real bad CGI and Bubba from Forrest Gump gets wiped out by an ambulance? The original is FAR better than that piece of shit, but the second, third and fifth installments all execute on the “how-they-gonna-die?” game infinitely better. 3/5 X-Files Spec Scripts

LOUIS FARBER: Final Destination is neither final nor a destination. However, the original 2000 film is the one of the best of the series. It’s effectively a bloated Twilight Zone episode based on the premise that you can’t cheat or outsmart death. As horror icon Tony Todd says in this film, “In death there are no accidents, no coincidences, no mishaps, and no escapes.”

The movie begins with a high school class boarding a plane for a class trip to Paris. Alex (Devon Sawa), one of the students, has a graphic and disturbing premonition of the plane exploding. He leaps up to get off, has a fight with Carter (Kerr Smith), and ends up being ejected along with five other conventionally attractive students and one teacher. Then as the group is working through their feelings about not making it to France on time and what a weirdo Alex is, the airplane takes off and explodes mid-air. Was this plot point inspired by the tragic flight TWA800 which exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on July 17, 1996, approximately 12 minutes after takeoff from JFK International Airport, on a scheduled international passenger flight to Rome with a stopover in Paris? Only writers by James Wong, Glen Morgan, and Jeffrey Reddick can answer that. Most especially Jeffrey Reddick as Final Destination started as a spec script written by him for an episode of The X-Files. Also, you sci-fi nerds are probably saying to yourself, “That James Wong?” Yes nerds, that James Wong. The co-executive producer on The X-Files.

After the explosion takes place, the FBI begins to question all involved in the incident and truly believe that Alex was somehow involved in the accident. Especially once the other survivors of the fatal crash begin dying around him. So, Alex commences to put together Death’s plan. He discovers he can beat Death if he “sees” the death before it happens and desperately tries to explain his theory to anyone who will spend more than one minute in his pale and jittery presence. Unfortunately for him, most characters think he is about as believable as Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) earnestly reading “Tropic of Cancer” in the airport before their doomed flight to France in the beginning of the film. A reference that was probably wasted on the teen target audience as likely none of them knew Henry Miller’s controversial novel was notorious for its candid sexuality.

Most people complain about the absence of great acting and most people are correct. The movie does not try to be sincere or satirical. It is hilarious in a flippant way which is on par for the conventionally attractive cast loaded with some of the year 2000’s favorite would be teens (Ali Larter, Amanda Detmer, Brendan Fehr, and Sean William Scott). All who meet their end more imaginatively than the last. For example, the very last shot of Final Destination, set in Paris has a high level of build-up and complicating action, which resolved with an anti-climactic and ironic reversal, that makes the entire story meaningless but for setting up Ali Larter and the next installment. Most people would say Kerr Smith deserves better and most people would be wrong.

Final Destination was a hit though and inspired the obligatory sequels, much like the original Scream did. The only problem is they must one up themselves each time with the horrific and complex premonitions and the subsequent deaths. And the as horror icon Tony Todd says in this film, “But remember the risk of cheating the plan, of disrespecting the design… could initiate a fury that would terrorize even the Grim Reaper. And you don’t even want to fuck with that MacDaddy.” 2.5/5 X-Files Spec Scripts

Gossip

directed by: Davis Guggenheim ; written by: Gregory Poirier & Theresa Rebeck

cast: James Marsden, Lena Headey, Norman Reedus, Kate Hudson, Joshua Jackson, Eric Bogosian, Edward James Olmos, Marissa Coughlan

runtime: 90 minutes

release date: April 21, 2000

opening weekend US box office:

1. U-571 – $19.5M
2. Love and Basketball – $8.1M
3. Rules of Engagement – $8M
4. 28 Days – $7.3M
5. Erin Brockovich – $5.5M

NOTE: Gossip opened #12 at the box office earning a mere $2.3M.

total box office gross: $12.5M (only 89% of its production budget)

STREAMING FOR FREE ON YOUTUBE

MICHAEL MARGETIS: Basically, a slasher that uses pointed rumors instead of edged weapons, Gossip is an only-could-have-been-made-back-then gem that is completely forgotten in 2023. This is weird because being a story about how students react to the rumors of rape on a college campus seems glaringly relevant in our post-#metoo world. To be fair, multiple people I asked who worked at a movie theater in 2000 never even heard of the movie. It opened at #12 in the box office, and this wasn’t no quaint limited release. This was a wide release that made back only 89% of its production budget. The only reason it’s featured in this article is the cover art of multiple teen/young adult faces looking into the camera is a straight-up copy of Scream, Urban Legend, IKWYDLS, etc.

The story surrounds James Marsden of Jury Duty and Sex Drive fame, as this obnoxious journalism student absolutely in love with himself. He’s a rich asshole, so he can afford an apartment in New York City that is bigger than most restaurants. His roommates and fellow journalism students are played by Lena Headey, AKA Queen Cersei, and Walking Dead‘s Norman Reedus, as an absolute doofus of a dude. He’s “artistic,” which means when other journalism students track down leads and write articles, he’s making wall collages of rape victims.

One fateful night, some rich girl played by nepo baby Kate Hudson shows up to the club with Dawson’s Creek‘s Joshua Jackson in tow. Everyone starts gossiping about how she doesn’t put out because she’s a bitch that doesn’t like sex. Marsden follows them up to a (bedroom???) on the club’s second floor that’s connected to a (public bathroom??) and while he’s trying to hook up with a puking girl, he overhears Kate Hudson resist sex from Joshua Jackson. Jackson leaves, but Marsden decides as his capstone project, he should start a rumor about Hudson being raped by this dude and see how far it goes. He gets Headey and Reedus on board, and somehow, the three think their teacher will give them an ‘A’ instead of reporting them to the police.

As anyone could tell you, the rumor gets out of control, and Joshua Jackson gets arrested. Kate Hudson actually begins to believe she was raped, which unlocks a whole tidal wave of trauma for her, NYPD Detectives assigned to the case get their time wasted, but it’s all fun and games for the #gossipsquad. Their little tall tale has gotten out of control! The only one with a shred of remorse is Lena Headey, who mostly went along with it cause she’s hot for Marsden. HOWEVER – PLOT TWIST – it turns out Marsden actually dated Kate Hudson‘s character in high school, raped her, and then left his hometown because the local rags gossiped about him being a rapist. But he absolutely was a rapist! So the entire plot of this movie is really just a teen rapist’s calculated revenge on the victim he’s still obsessed with.

It’s so apparent from the beginning that Marsden is the bad guy that they shouldn’t have even attempted to make that a twist. While it’s nice to see a talented thesp like Jimmy Mars get the opportunity to show his range, Gossip surely isn’t the vehicle for that. It’s not as bad as some of the garbage in this article, but it’s incompetent around every corner and wastes a bunch of talented actors really giving it their all for a project that fails dramatically. The ending “twist” is also easy to see from a mile away. Of course, Marsden isn’t getting away with it, and of course, Lena Headey and Norman Reedus will turn on him.

While it’s refreshing to see a movie from this time attempt to take collegiate sexual assault seriously, Gossip is ultimately too stupid and beholden to the teen thriller formula of the time to make a powerful statement about it. 2/5 nightclub bedrooms.

P.S. – Eric Bogosian is perfectly cast as their journalism teacher who, in one insane scene, turns the classroom into a TV show with cameras that seem to appear out of nowhere.

NATHAN McGOUGH: The early 2000’s was somewhat of a golden era for young people, especially teenagers, in terms of social freedom. The internet certainly existed, but was not yet merged with the social structure; allowing a brief sense of genuine connection with strangers, without the pressure of presenting individuality as a brand. You could learn things you never knew before, and chat with people who shared similar interests, but those functions were limited in scope. You still had to call your friends to make plans, you still had to go out to make new friends, and it was very unlikely anyone in “real life” would ever see something you wrote online.

Perhaps this is why Gossip (2000) –a confused cautionary tale about misplaced trust and spreading rumors– is at least interesting to watch, if only as an artifact of how things used to be. Or at least, that was the lens I viewed it through. College age characters in the year 2000 were sort of different breed; I find it fun to think about how different their social life was compared to what I experienced about ten years later. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that it has a killer cast in Lena Headey (soon to be the notorious Queen Cersei), Norman Reedus (soon to be Daryl Dixon), and James Marsden (forever-hunk and the one and only Scott Summers). Somehow Kate Hudson is also in this as a supporting character, and arguably the biggest star out of all of them. Both James and Kate probably considered this movie to be an afterthought at release, because each had huge hits coming up in X-Men and Almost Famous, which would release just a few months later.

And to be clear, that’s probably a fair assessment of Gossip as a whole: an afterthought. Both in terms of its response to and affect on pop culture, as well as the quality of its script. For example, I found zero stories from the set of this production, and those who were in their teens or early twenties when this was released had no memory of it when I asked them. For what it’s worth, I do think there’s a good thriller hidden somewhere in the pages of this script, but by the end it seems apparent that the original vision was noted to death and rewritten to be more like it’s popular, twisty predecessors, such as The Game, The Sixth Sense, and of course, Scream. You can’t blame the studio for thinking Gossip needed a few twists and turns, that’s just what was working at the time.

The story starts with Derrick (Marsden) and Jones (Headey) in a college communications class. Nearing the end of the semester, they are tasked with coming up with an idea for their final paper. Inspired by an in-class spat between their professor and an unnamed luddite, the two decide they will start a rumor and see how far it will spread, then write about the experiment for the final. Jones seems more invested in the academic aspect of this endeavor, while Derrick seems mostly interested in getting into Jones’ pants and is happy to go along with the project as a means to that end. There is a sexual tension between the two, but Jones knows that Derrick is just a playboy; using his parent’s wealth to sleep around and do college fuckboy stuff. They both live in a loft apartment with Travis (Reedus), who is a talented artist with no money, and allowed to stay there rent-free out of an apparent generosity from Derrick.

One night, they all go out to a party and while at the bar, a stranger congratulates Jones for sleeping with her communications professor. Jones quickly shuts this rumor down as false, and asks the girl where she heard it from. The girl explains that Naomi (Hudson) was the one her told her, and they both look over to see Naomi across the room with her boyfriend Beau (Joshua Jackson). The same girl also leans in and tells Jones another rumor she heard: Naomi doesn’t put out. Meanwhile, Derrick takes a drunken girl he’s trying to sleep with up to the bathroom to help her vomit. While in the bathroom, Naomi and Beau enter the adjacent bedroom. Now that the audience knows Naomi doesn’t put out, a tension begins to build as Beau becomes a little aggressive with his girlfriend, making out and getting handsy with her, while she tries to tell him she’s too drunk and wants him to stop. Derrick leaves his date at the toilet, and peaks out through the bathroom door after hearing the commotion, seeing that Beau and Naomi are making out, but eventually Beau leaves and Naomi presumably passes out on the bed.

The next day, Derrick decides to act on what he saw by suggesting his and Jones’ rumor project should be telling people that Naomi and Beau had sex (even though they didn’t). Inevitably, the rumor gets out of hand when Naomi begins to believe she was raped by Beau, who then becomes hated on campus and faces the threat of criminal prosecution. As the stakes are raised, Jones becomes more suspicious of Derrick, who has an unsettling comfortability with the whole situation. She urges Derrick to come clean, but also hesitates because she knows her own culpability in the whole mess. Jones continues to catch Derrick in various lies, and starts to realize that he is hiding something about his relationship to Naomi, who he originally claimed was a complete stranger to him. A lot more happens, but the only important thing to know is that Naomi is absolutely frightened of Derrick, which Jones learns by visiting her dorm room and accidentally mentioning his name. It turns out that Derrick had previously dated Naomi in high school, and she accused him of rape, which was a big deal and essentially ran Derrick out of their small town.

This is where the movie could have become a solid thriller by accepting that Derrick is a full fledged rapist, who is manipulating his current friends to get revenge on Naomi for outing him. The movie could have had something to say about how easily rapists get away with their crime, and use social pressure to make us doubt their victims. Instead, it makes a hamfisted effort to trick the audience into uncertainty about Derrick/Naomi, attempting to make us believe that there’s a chance Naomi was lying the whole time and Derrick is only getting revenge on her for “ruining his life”. The problem here is that almost everyone knows a Derrick in real life, and James Marsden‘s performance was already oozing with that creepy, untrustworthy energy, so this plays as one of the most obvious red herrings in cinema history. The ending of the movie is a campy fake-death scheme, where Jones and Naomi collaborate to make Derrick admit he raped Naomi. That’s right, the twist of this movie is that the woman was telling the truth the whole time, shocking I know! I’ve seen Scooby Doo episodes with less obvious twists.

Even while acknowledging the nothingness of Gossip, caused by its twist-whiplash and non-commitment to any single message, I could still see the faint outline of good ideas that just never came to fruition. And for what it’s worth, the performances are all pretty good. Still, the best thing I can say about this movie is that I won’t have to watch it again. 2/5 nightclub bedrooms.

Ginger Snaps

directed by: John Fawcett ; written by: Karen Walton & John Fawcett

cast: Katharine Isabelle, Elizabeth Perkins, Mimi Rogers, Kris Lemche, Jason Wise, Danielle Hampton, Peter Keleghan

runtime: 108 minutes

release date: September 2000 (Toronto Film Festival); May 11, 2001 (Theatrical Release)

opening weekend box office:

1. The Mummy Returns – $33.7M
2. A Knight’s Tale – $16.5M
3. Bridget Jones’ Diary – $4.4M
4. Along Came Polly – $3.07M
5. Driven – $3.04M

NOTE: Ginger Snaps opened at #32 at the box office earning $129,939 in 72 theaters (for reference, The Mummy Returns opened in roughly 3500 theaters).

total box office gross: $572,781 (roughly 11% of its production budget)

STREAMING ON PEACOCK, TUBI, SHUDDER, AMC+ & PLUTOTV

BETH V: Ginger Snaps, directed by John Fawcett, was a movie that sat neglected on my Watch List for a long time until now, but I am so glad I did! I was fully prepared to laugh at it, especially as the movie started to roll. Everything kicks off with some pretty gruesome canine gore and the macabre sisterly antics of Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Brigitte (Emily Perkins), like staging and photographing their own fake deaths. There’s an immediate campiness and an incredible gore factor that play well together that drew me right in.

So, what’s going on here? Ginger and Brigitte are two weirdo sisters who are obsessed with death and leaving the suburbs. They’re odd for a number of reasons, including the fact that they haven’t gotten their periods well past the point when they should have. Unfortunately for Ginger, she gets hers on the way to steal her bully’s dog (normal behavior), and this draws in a werewolf creature that then attacks her for being stinky. This is a pretty accurate representation of what it’s like to have your period for the first time, and both Ginger and Brigitte are rightfully horrified. And as with periods, Ginger is forever changed by the experience: she grows hair in weird places, oscillates between being horny and murderous, and becomes somewhat of a foreign entity to both her sister and the person she was before the attack.

Brigitte, afraid of losing her sister, searches for a cure, working with Sam (Kris Lemche) to develop an injectable version of wolfsbane. She successfully tests this cure on a boy that Ginger bit, and heads out to save her sister. Brigitte spends most of the movie trying to prove her loyalty to Ginger, going so far as to cut her hand and let Ginger’s infected blood enter her system, effectively dooming herself to the same fate. Unfortunately, Ging is too far gone and dies by the same hand that tried to save her, and the movie ends on a real bummer note, with Brigitte crying over her sister’s body.

And I loved it! Goofy as it may be at times throughout, this movie does not shy away from body horror in any sense. It creatively handles the frightening and empowering metamorphosis that people with periods experience, and delves unflinchingly into what we can potentially lose when that transformation takes place. To grow up, especially as a teenage girl, is both monstrous and enticing. And despite her best efforts, Brigitte finds that there is no cure for it – for her sister or for herself.

Honorable mention has to go to the mom in this movie, who was immediately down to cover up murder for her girls and for making Ginger the sweetest period celebration cake. And, finally, a warning: if you’re a “does the dog live?” kind of movie watcher, this is one to skip. 4.5/5 menstrual cramps.

MICHAEL MARGETIS: My family and I are huge dog lovers and a major reason why when we, as a family, rented this little Canadian werewolf indie back in 2001, we promptly shut if off after only twenty minutes. Ginger’s family’s dog is – SPOILER ALERT – completely ripped apart. Like chunks of the golden retriever are strewn around its dog house. It’s fucked up. The movie also begins with a montage of Ginger and Brigitte’s staged, morbid suicides they created for their film class. I guess 12-year-old Michael just didn’t get what was so funny, ironic, or interesting about this movie, so I always wrote it off as trash. That is until last year when my boss bought me the Shout! Factory special edition blu-ray of it for my birthday. “Yeah, I like this movie” I awkwardly and untruthfully stated while holding up the blu ray. This however forced me to give Ginger Snaps a revisit, and I’m glad I did because it completely turned me around on it.

Easily one of the best movies I had to watch for this article, and an actual good movie, this is a very allegorical but never pretentious horror film that explores getting your first period through the lens of werewolf transformation. That’s clever, and while the film is directed by a man, it is thankfully written by a woman, Karen Walton, who went on to write for Orphan Black. Katharine Isabelle (Freddy vs. Jason, Margot Verger from NBC’s Hannibal) and Elizabeth Perkins (Bev Marsh from 1990’s It, Anthony Perkins‘ daughter IRL) play the teenage sisters, Ginger and Brigitte, respectively, and both are excellent. Their roles are also three dimensional which is almost unheard of within the genre, especially at this time. Mimi Rogers plays their mother and Kris Lemche (McKinley from Final Destination 3) as Brigitte’s friend who tries to cure Ginger of her werewolfery.

Ginger Snaps is incredibly violent but also frequently very funny. It’s well acted and while it definitely feels a bit outdated in parts today, it’s a movie that seems to exist for reasons beyond to cash in on the post-Scream teen thriller craze. 3.5/5 menstrual cramps.

Urban Legends: Final Cut

directed by: John Ottman ; written by: Paul Harris Boardman & Scott Derrickson

cast: Jennifer Morrison, Matthew Davis, Joey Lawrence, Hart Bochner, Anthony Anderson, Loretta Devine, Eva Mendes, Jessica Cauffiel, Michael Bacall, Marco Hofschneider

runtime: 98 minutes

release date: September 22, 2000

opening weekend box office:

1. The Exorcist (re-release) – $8.1M
2. Urban Legend: Final Cut – $8M
3. Almost Famous – $7.1M
4. Bring It On – $4.1M
5. The Watcher – $3.5M

total box office gross: $38.5M (2.6x its production budget)

STREAMING ON TUBI & PLUTOTV

DANNY GURROLA: Next up is a horror film so up its own ass, it found pre-cancerous polyps.

Urban Legends: Final Cut is an unnecessary sequel that makes the original look like a horror masterpiece. None of the original cast returns, minus Loretta Devine, who now works as a security guard for this douchy film school where horrific killings start knocking off the students. Despite being one of the only survivors who first-hand saw the crazy shit from the first one, she is immediately dismissive about the whole ‘students getting murdered again’ situation unfolding before her.

Anyways, the movie opens during a turbulent plane flight, where two horn dogs shack up in the dirty bathroom and attempt to join the mile high club.

The apparently satisfied woman notices some threatening writing on the mirror and soon finds that a killer has stabbed everyone onboard. Then the director yells CUT, and we see that it’s actually a HUGE set filled with miserable film students! The movie is really about a bunch of annoying film brats who are trying to win the prestigious Alfred Hitchcock Award with their capstone projects, which apparently means they are going to be big wigs in the industry? I know it’s called the Alfred Hitchcock Award because they say it roughly 500 times.

The main character, Amy, still not sure what her thesis will be about, gets inspired by the events of the previous movie and writes a script about a series of murders in the fashion of famous urban legends. Also in her class are Joey Lawrence, Eva Mendes and Anthony Anderson. All these characters are annoying and die deserved deaths. The plot gets more convoluted and increasingly hard to follow from here. There are stupid twists, dumb turns and even a secret twin brother shows up, soap-opera style!

The first kill happens to a character we have not met, nor is important to the plot. A random girl, who we see rejecting the douchebag director from earlier, gets drugged in a club and wakes up in the bathroom from Saw. She is in a tub full of ice with her kidney stolen. She tries to escape, but proceeds to get her hands ripped up by barbed wire and her stomach wound torn open by the killer. Then she’s decapitated by a surprisingly heavy window and her kidney is fed to a dog. This entire death sequence is so brutal compared to anything in the rest of this movie (and everything from the first one) that it feels like it’s from a Tubi Hostel knockoff. Evidently, it was a studio note reshoot in a desperate attempt to make the movie less shitty. It’s quite an intricate kill for someone that doesn’t matter to the plot. I guess it’s supposed to be a red herring for us to think the director is the killer. 

Spoiler alert: the killer ISN’T the director kid. It was the arrogant Professor Solomon the whole time! Apparently, a masterpiece had been made by one of the students in his class and he wanted to steal the movie and slap his name on it. In order to get away with it and win that prestigious award from earlier (I forgot what it was called), he starts killing everyone involved in the movie. Having your entire cast and crew murdered seems like a really great way to be pinned as a murderer, just sayin’. He’s also wearing a fencing mask for no particular reason?

The final confrontation with the killer has a Looney Tunes gag where there’s only one real gun among dozens of prop guns, as one last ‘fuck you’ to the audience. Then Rebecca Gayheart shows up as a nurse for one second in a cliffhanger, hinting that the killers from each movie might team up in a future installment for no reason. 

Oh brother, this movie fucking sucks. It gets 1 Alfred Hitchcock Award out of 5.

(Fun fact: The movie was co-written by now successful director Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange, Sinister). He went to film school with my thesis professor back in the day and I’ll just say this; I can spot some personality similarities between my teacher and Professor Solomon.) 

MICHAEL MARGETIS: Here we are. Out of the ten movies reviewed in Part 2 of this article, Urban Legends: Final Cut is easily the worst. One of the least scary, most incompetent, and honestly most all-around painful to watch “horror” films of all time makes the original Urban Legend look like Francis Ford Coppola‘s The Conversation. It takes place in film school, yet the only movie reference people make is Hitchcock. It’s like the only filmmaker they know. Jesus Christ, here we go…

This rancid scoop of celluloid follows a film student played by Jennifer Morrison (TV’s House, the dead girl from Stir of Echoes) and her dumb classmates as they get picked off one by one by a mystery killer in a fencing uniform. The killer is killing people based on famous urban legends but also just killing people in ways that have nothing to do with urban legends. It’s like, pick a lane, Mr. Killer! Anyway, everyone expects a lot out of Morrison because her dad was some “famous, Oscar-winning nature filmmaker.” First of all, would you win Oscars for nature films? What? Maybe he won an Emmy for a Nat Geo TV thing, but an Oscar? Anyway, the cast is rounded out by Joey Lawrence of Brotherly Love and Blossom fame, credited here as “Joseph Lawrence,” a full name for a very serious actor, Eva Mendes, Anthony Anderson, and Hart Bochner (Ellis from Die Hard) as an asshole film professor who is bitter about never making it as a filmmaker.

Throughout 98 ass-numbing, straight-up torturous minutes, a bunch of folks get killed, but the scariest part of the movie comes when one character asks another to read their screenplay. OH GODDDDDDD, THE HORRROR. There’s a scene where the killer is chasing someone up a mine ladder, and the killer is moving so slowly and clumsily that all potential tension and suspense is wholly lost. Like, the killer is tripping and falling on a little ladder, like WTF? The fact no one can fight back against this oafish baffoon is hilarious. There’s a dumb red herring thrown in about a dude who kills himself and then his identical twin brother randomly comes into town and basically takes his place in the plot. It becomes so obvious that this dumb, contrived “twin brother” is actually the killer that when he ends up not being the killer and the twin brother is actually real, I laughed out loud. Keep in mind, I’ve seen this movie at least twice before, but it’s so forgettable I didn’t even remember who the killer was.

The killer ends up being Hart Bochner, the jealous professor, because the dead twin made a movie so good, the professor thought he’d just kill him and slap his own name on the film to become famous late in life, and all the students who he killed were folks who worked on the dead twin’s movie. First of all, how the hell did he expect to get away with that? Even people who DIDN’T work on that movie would be like, “Oh, yeah, there’s no way our professor made that. I’m pretty sure it was a dead twin guy.”

This movie makes no sense, and in a lazy attempt to tie it into the first one, they have the killer go to a mental institution at the end, and his nurse is the killer from the first movie – Rebecca Gayheart. She wheels him away while the music from Alfred Hitchcock Presents plays (if you haven’t seen or heard of it, it’s from that Family Guy scene). Good god, a movie about film students who only know one thing about movies – that Alfred Hitchcock was a filmmaker who existed. I fucking hated this. 1/5 Hitchcock Awards.

Cherry Falls

STREAMING ON AMC+

directed by: Geoffrey Wright; written by: Ken Selden

cast: Brittany Murphy, Jay Mohr, Gabriel Mann, Michael Biehn, Jesse Bradford, DJ Qualls, Kristen Miller, Candy Clark, Bre Blair, Michael Weston, Karem Malicki-Sanchez

runtime: 91 minutes

release date: October 25, 2000 (USA Network Original Movie)

MICHAEL MARGETIS: Besides Cut and maybe Ginger Snaps, Cherry Falls is the best slasher on this list and certainly the goofiest. It takes place in a small Virginia town where virgin teens are getting picked off one by one. Enter teen virgin Jody Marken (a fantastic Brittany Murphy) whose tool bag boyfriend, Kenny (Gabriel Mann) is pressuring her to have sex. He ends up breaking up with her because he wants the sex, and as the murders increase, Jody’s sheriff dad (a fun Michael Biehn) surprisingly encourages her and the rest of the virgin teens of Cherry Falls to start fucking each other. If they fuck, the mystery killer won’t kill them, so the teens in town set up this massive orgy to ensure their survival. Comedian Jay Mohr also plays a weird English teacher who may or may not be a virgin still.

There’s a real ridiculous sense of humor and goofiness to Cherry Falls that I think was lost on most mainstream audiences and the fucking garbage MPAA when it was released. The MPAA kept giving the movie an NC-17 for some reason – there’s nothing too graphic in the uncut version I own on Shout! Factory blu-ray – so they ended up not releasing it wide and settled for a cut version premiering on the USA network. The fact this somewhat interesting slasher with an actual sense of humor got shelved while garbage like Disturbing Behavior and fucking Teaching Mrs. Tingle got released is some fo real fo real bullshit.

Anyway, the killer ends up being Jay Mohr, screaming like an insane person in a cheap Halloween wig, which will never not be hilarious to me. His motive is tied in with a dark secret of the town involving his mother getting gang-raped by four boys (including Michael Biehn) and then going crazy and turning into a psychopath. He’s seeking revenge for his mother’s sexual assault that went unavenged and that’s the only part of this movie that kinda loses me. I get that this was a time where rape was thrown into a lot of horror movies as a cheap gimmick and collectively as a society we weren’t socially conscious enough yet to be like “that’s fucked up not to treat it seriously” but Jay Mohr insanely overreacting makes up a little bit for it.

If I had to change anything about this movie, I’d punch up the humor and change the gang rape to an accidental murder or something. I think Cherry Falls is fascinating but far from perfect, it’s about 3/4 of the way there and I think with a tighter, funnier and more focused script and some tweaks here and there it would be an undeniable classic. As it stands, it’s a very interesting and underseen/underrated slasher gem from a period of time that represented a serious low point of the genre. 3.25/5 teen orgies.

AUDREY FARNSWORTH: First of all, every character in this movie looks at every other character with the eyes of a crazed, rabid animal. And then we’ve got Jay Mohr sitting sweetly on a desk being a teacher in a three-piece green suit, who is basically like, “What does everyone think about how two people died, hm? Specifically, you, guy who I know is going to say something extremely fucked up! Tell the class your thoughts.” And then he does, and Jay Mohr gets mad! Okay! We are on track to making absolutely no Fucking sense whatsoever!

My favorite guy in this movie is the one who doesn’t even know he’s in the movie, by the way. He’s just always eating a snack. Somebody says something to him as he’s slowly eating one potato chip or laying his head down on a can of Sprite, and he’s like, “What? Is this about my lunch?” except HE DOESN’T EVEN SAY THAT MUCH. He’s just like, “[looks up] Huh? Ah. Haha.” ????????? Fantastic! We love this character over here at Farnsworth Industries.

This movie starts out stupid and ends as the literal funniest thing I’ve ever seen in front of my eyes in my whole life. The whole movie is Brittany Murphy (RIP queen) looking confused and scared while her dad asks her if she is kissing guys and ends with a whole bunch of teens meeting at a place called—and I am fucking serious as hell—“the old Donkey Hill Hunting Lodge” to—AND I AM SERIOUS AS HELL—have sex. ALL OF THE TEENS are ALL meeting at ONE BUILDING to have sex. And it’s called the OLD DONKEY HILL HUNTING LODGE.

And if you thought you were dead after reading that, prepare to become more dead actually! Because when shit hits the fan, and the killer arrives, the naked teens FALL DOWN THE STAIRS ALL AT THE SAME TIME into a BIG NAKED TEEN PILE. And the PILE was too BIG, and it BROKE THE STAIRCASE. I am convinced that this is the funniest thing that has ever happened in any situation, real or fake. I am cackling as I write this. I promise you, even me telling you about it doesn’t even spoil it. Please watch this film. I am begging you. 5/5 NAKED TEEN PILES!

NEXT TIME…

2001

The 90s teen thriller era of Scream wraps up in a relatively lame fashion with some real garbage and one really good thriller from the director of Rounders of all people.