This one you can rule out before learning anything more about it. It’s forgettable even among a lineup of nearly identical Lifetime and Hallmark and Harlequin holiday romances.
Jennifer (Jillian Murray) goes home for Christmas because her sister has cancer and could use the support. But while she’s there, she bumps into her old college sweetheart Mark (George Stults), who’s just as handsome as ever. But Mark hasn’t been waiting around for her – he moved on, got married, even had a baby. But once the baby came, the wife left, and now Mark’s raising his newborn daughter on his own, and the whole town can’t quit gossiping about it. A saint, they dub him, for merely doing the bare minimum. Anyway, between the cancer and the baby, this Christmas, shit gets real for Jennifer. It’s not what she was looking for – especially because she left behind a boyfriend – but will she succumb?
Honestly, this one’s worse than most. You can do better. In fact, you could close your eyes and reach about with a mere candy cane and probably accidentally poke something better than this. Watch that. Even if it’s your cat. Even if it’s your microwave. Watch anything else.
Some horror movies take place in dark alleys, or abandoned houses, or deep woods. But others, like this one, know that real terror lives and hides in the suburbs – perhaps in your own backyard.
Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Brigitte (Emily Perkins), two twisted teenage sisters, social outcasts by default, are totally and completely obsessed with death. Their parents have come home to so many gruesome death scenes, no amount of blood, nor dismembered body parts, nor daughter’s corpses can faze them. The teachers at school, however, are not so desensitized. Trips to the guidance counsellor remain ineffective.
One night, at a park just like the one where you pushed your toddler on the swings, the sisters are attacked, and Ginger is mauled by a large and aggressive creature. Bigger than a dog, uglier than a bear, Brigitte just barely wrests her sister away from the blood thirsty animal, its pursuit interrupted by its encounter with a van. Creature eviscerated all over the quiet neighbourhood cul-de-sac, the sisters flee, leaving driver Sam (Kris Lemche) to guess at the impossible. Ginger’s been bitten by a werewolf, and her life (and her body!) are about to change in unexpected ways.
The film puts a twist on the classic werewolf tale by equating it in some way to womanhood. Ginger is bitten on the full moon, also the day of her belated first menstruation. “The curse,” my grandmother used to call it, though she never suggested it might accompany fur on my knuckles or a tail on my heinie. Ginger is transforming in more ways than one. With wolf blood in her veins, she is confident, more alive. She withdraws from her sister as she enjoys this new feeling of self-determination. Though she confuses her new need to hunt as a new need for sex, she manages to satisfy both, sometimes in one go. Her wolf side is like her newly discovered sexuality, both grant a marginalized young woman a certain power over men, and that’s an intoxicating feeling no matter how tragic the consequences.
John Fawcett’s film is clearly low-budget; even for 2000, the effects are unimpressive. Yet it forces him to explore the theme in creative ways, defining womanhood and femininity in new terms. There is a subversive, feminist filament running through this film, with generous deposits of coal-black humour and diamond-sharp wit.
There is a beast inside each woman, and she’s hungry like the wolf.
Twenty four years ago, Drew Barrymore in a blonde wig lured people into theatres where Wes Craven was reinventing the slasher flick, and his career, with a little help from a fresh spin on the genre from Kevin Williamson’s script.
A year after her mother’s death, Sydney (Neve Campbell) and her friends are targeted by a serial in a white mask (“Ghostface”) who taunts them with horror movie trivia. The movie was meta and self-referential, it launched a franchise and reinvigorated a flagging genre. In many ways, Scream has influenced much of modern horror. It walked a thin line between satire and homage, carefully peeling back the layers of our expectations while forging new ones, yet still managing its own frights and thrills at the same time.
Craven assembled the ultimate 90s cast: Campbell, Courteney Cox, Skeet Ulrich, Rose McGowan, David Arquette, Matthew Lillard, Jamie Kennedy, some of whom actually spanned the entire four movie franchise. Sydney (Campbell) was hypocritical, Gail (Cox) the most unobservant journalist known to history, and Dewey (Arquette) a remarkably inept deputy, yet somehow they managed to evade even the most determined killers.
Scream broke the fourth wall by naming the standard horror film rules, yet played at subverting them with each new twist: 1. You will not survive if you have sex 2. You will not survive if you drink or do drugs 3. You will not survive if you say “I’ll be right back” 4. Everyone is a suspect 5. You will not survive if you ask “Who’s there?” 6. You will not survive if you go out to investigate a strange noise.
The 5th installment of the franchise is due in theatres (if such a thing still exists) in early 2022. This will be the first without Wes Craven at the helm, but new directors Radio Silence (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) seem intent on honouring his legacy, although, to be fair, rarely does anyone intend to make a disappointing movie that fucks up an entire franchise. But sometimes that happens anyway. And we’re in a very different place with horror than we were in 1996; Jordan Peele (Get Out), Robert Eggers (The Witch), Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), and Ari Aster (Midsommar) are making arthouse horror and elevating the game. Of course, Radio Silence are the duo behind Ready Or Not, which would seem to suggest they’re up to the task.
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