Wes Craven Kick Part 3 - I am a Child of the 1990s

I was born in the ealry 1980s but I am a child of the 1990s.  

    It is the decade I grew up, the decade where my tastes really formed.  I like snappy dialogue, flannel shirts, boot leg jeans and short skirts.  I had a Rachel as a teenager.   It was in the 1990s where I became to really love going to the movies.  Almost every week I went to the cinema.  It's not surprising that it's this decade of Wes Craven's work that I really conncet with.  I didn't know it the time, but Craven was one of those directors that shaped by tastes as much as Tim Burton and Steven Spielberg.  And it's in this decade where Craven really hits his stride and makes some of his great movies that changed where horror went, yet again.

NIGHT VISIONS 1990

    Night Visions moves and feels like a television pilot.  And before you ask; yes I would have watched at least three seasons of James Remar and Loryn Locklin solve crimes together.   Night Visions is a completly in accurate depiction of multiple personality disorder, but it is empathetic.  Locklin is imitating other personalities around her.  It feels more empathetic, and also the added value of another way an investigator can slide into the shoes of victims and killer.  It feels like Wes Craven is playing with a new form of telekentic crime fighter.  With this oh so for TV structure Craven can really play with the empathy and the dream like sequences that fit in so easily.

    Loryn Locklin is adorable as Sally Powers, I kept getting lost in her blue eyes. There's a plunky My Girl Friday feeling to the beginning where everyone is trying to talk a mile a minute.  Though since James Remar is meant to be angry rebel cop, he generally sounds like he wants to murder everyone until the movie calms down to where it wants to go.  It's a sweet movie, it's light and frothy.  Craven is not asking a lot from you, but I could have held a second helping.

THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS 1991

    I love The People Under the Stairs, it feels like a great Craven that people don't talk about enough.  There's a witchy fairytale element that hovers over the movie as a whole.  The Tarot Card opening explaing the Fool's nature sets up The People Under the Stairs perfectly.  Fool is that leap of faith needed, innocence and quick thinking beginners luck that is infused in Brandam Adam's character.

    But there is so much more going on in this movie just than Everett McGill running around in a gimp suit.  Even if it entertains me greatly.  The People Under the Stairs is about breaking down the walls and doors that keep certain people in power.   Incestious, psychopathic landed slum lords who make people feed off others is the perfect metaphore for power stuctures that keep infecting every single politcal landscape humanity has ever had.  Craven gives this movie more weight by giving a voice to the minorties, the African American community.  It's a smart choice in terms of really nailing down the parabel.  Fool is the future, the revolutionary.  Burn it all to the ground. 

    The People Under the Stairs is a chaotic and bumbling movie.  For a long time it feels like Craven hasn't been able to let his goofy side out, because he's meant to be the master of Nightmares.  But here, in The People Under the Stairs it feels like he's allowed to be Wes.  Hiring Wendy Robie and Everett McGill was such a smart choice, they were able to bring there specific off kilter Twin Peaks chemstry to the procedings.  And it works so well.  Once Fool and a very young Ving Rhames enter that house we are in a different planet.  Everything is heightened and condensed, to the point of manic insanity.  There is a way McGill eats an organ and lets the blood drip down his chin that is glorious in it's silliness.  You're meant to be laughing as people are being slashed, eaten, disemboied and dogs flying down on sleds.  it's all of a piece and I love it.

WES CRAVEN'S NEW NIGHTMARE 1994

    And now for the most wonderous movie.  I love New Nightmare so much.  It's one of my favourite horror movies in general.  I've already written about New Nightmare in another Schlock and Awe article just after John Saxon sadly passed away.  I was literary watching New Nightmare the morning I saw the news.  You can read it here Schlock and Awe: John Saxon

    What I got out of New Nightmare this time was Heather Langenkamp's performance, it's older more warey.  Especially in how she reacts to the people around her and their expectations.  I am currentely reading Karina Longworth's Suduction, which is an amazing break down on the uses and abuses of Golden Era female actors.    Cinema has been built on the bodies of it's actresses and Heather Langkamp is no exception.  Heather is not Nancy Thompson, however, she is stalked, adored, criterised, condemned because how people she her on the silver screen.  And as the movie goes on, those close to her, Englund, Saxon, Craven all start to change around her, and she must play Nancy one more time.  New Nightmare is a movie that is about Heather taking back her power.  I do understand that at some point New Nightmare has to turn to an Elm Street movie, but what I think is the trick is that this is the Elm Street from the parent's perspective.  And Heather's nightmares are much more grounded, the safety of her family, her career.  In that we make up stories to hide cover the ills of the world, the harassment, the expectations, even death, all to mask the ture evil of the world.  And the we pass them down to our children, in the way Heather reads Hansel and Gretel or even Craven's script to her son.  You can really feel Craven trying to reckon with this form of story telling he's been invovled with for most of his proffessional life.  But it makes me so happy that here Craven made the Elm Street he wanted.

VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN 1995

    Yes, Vampire in Brooklyn is a mess.  It's chaotic, you are not entirely sure where you are meant to land.    Vampire in Brooklyn is a movie of multiple personalities and within that multiple movies.  Eddie Murphy is in two of these movies.   Comic, scary, romantic, the movie changes with it's tone often in single scene, you can see not only the duel personalites of Craven and Murphy fighting for dominace but not in they you'ld think.  As much as Craven was known for terror, he really did have a natural goofy default.  And as much as Murphy was known for being one of the funniest people alive, he has a leading man default.  And I have to say even with that wig, Murphy looks good in a cape.  There does feel like a clash in tones and personalities in Vampire in Brooklyn.  But inbetween all this mess, there are some really great things happening in Vampire in Brooklyn.  It's defintely a movie of moments but when you hit one, the movie sings beautifully.  And those moments always involve Angela Bassett, and also like in everything else, she is Queen.  To me, Angela Bassett is Vampire in Brooklyn, and it's this movie you want to sink into.  It's with Basset that Vampire in Brooklyn feels more like a Craven movie, with Bassett trying to deal with her families past and the supernatureal element coming into her life.  Whenever Murphy or Allen Payne are in the same frame with Bassett they become about 15% more attractive as they both fall in love with her, completely understandable.

  

  

    Vampire in Brooklyn is not unlike the plot of Coming to America.  Murphy comes to America with assistant (played so slowly deteriorating Kadeem Hardison)  to find a woman.  If Sexual Chocolate showed up and did another rendition of Greatest Love of All, it would not have seemed out of place.  However, in Vampire in Brooklyn, Murphy's array of characters that Maximillion transforms into does not fit and feels werid and out place.  It also feels like Craven is also trying to play his own game but in the background, a more familiar game.   Again we see familar faces from the Craven Kick, I adoere that Craven has collected a small troupe from his years.  Zake Mokae, Joanna, Cassidy, Mitch Pileggi and Wendy Robie all show up.  I was happy to see them all, but it does add to the multiple personalities of Vampire in Brooklyn.

 

SCREAM 1996

    Scream was a big deal.  By the time it got to New Zealand it already had a reputation.  I didn't see Scream in the theatre, it was a year later at a sleep over.  We were in a kind of Granny Flat above the garage out in the country.  I remember that viewing vividly, well I remember hiding under a blanket with a friend screeching like banshees.  Afterwood no one wanted to go to the bathroom in the main house alone, we went as a group, giggling, squeeling arms interlinking just in case Ghost Face was hiding amoung the shubberies.  I don't like being scared but there was a thrill the plot machanics, the twist and most of all the snappy dialoue.  I walked into the sleepover a girl, but emerged a horror loving women.  

    I still love Scream.  I've watch it so many times I just sink into the grooves of the movie.  It feels like a favourite bagy sweater that I love to wear when it's cold.  Scream starts with the ring of the phone and does not stop.  Wes Craven directs the hellout of this movie, every cut and every frame keeps propelling everything forward all the while jammed packed with jokes and references.  Craven has never made a straight Slasher, and he doesn't start here, he constantly reaffirming the rules we think we knew of the genre and subverting them.  It's why Scream still feels shocking and why the jump scares work.  It's the duality that Craven always playing with over and over in his movies.

    Scream is just as much a Wes Craven movie as it is a Kevin Willamson movie.  Williamson has always had the ability to create characters through snappy dialogue, and as a teenager I ate it up, everything sounded more intelligent.  And as a babbler myself - I felt seen.  Scream is a child of Heathers, and also in a werid way a great grand child of movies the 1930s, especially with Dewey and Gale, played by David Arquette and Courtney Cox, they have a young lovers vibe, the plucky reporter and not quite hero.  Scream is very much a movie that crosses everything I loved as a child and when on to love as an adult.  

SCREAM 2 1998

    Every time I watch Scream 2 I love it more.  It's getting to the point that I might like it more than the orginal, which feels almost sacreligious to say.  I love how Scream 2 feels like it is in direct conversation with the infamous trials of the early and late 90s, your Menedez's and your OJ's.  Before YouTube getting your five minutes of fame was hard work.  Or this could have been Kevin Williamson just trying to come up with an idea quickly while the Weinstein's were yelling abuse at him.  But what ever the case it works, when it shouldn't - the turn around on Scream 2 was increadiably quick as in to cash in on the 1996 movie.  

    While Kevin Williamson is having a conversation with murderous fame, Wes Craven is having a conversations with himself.  Scream 2 with Inception level references.  It's  movie that is commenting on what a sequeal does while commenting on it, the same game as the orginal.  However, we also get these amazing moments of the movie within the movie, the movie that was base on Gale Weather book wrote about the first movie.  It's life iminating art whole art is imitating art, the cold opening with Jada Picnkett Smith and Omar Epps being murdering a Heather Graham playing Drew Barrymore being murdered.  My eyes are going crossed eyed as I write this.  But what is interesting is the conversation Craven is having about the film making.  The re-inactments of the first movie are hilarious but also go into the nature of film making it's all about the double mirror that is Scream 2.  But also how timing of something cannot be replicated.  This is the third or fourth time in a decade where Craven has talked about the inferiority of a replication.  This could have come from bitterness of what happened on a Nightmare on Elm Street, that even when he tried to replicate it with Shocker he couldn't.  And neither can Scream 2, it almost folds in upon itself and the fact that is doesn't is the magic of the movie.  

 

    For me the 1990s was the best of the decades, because I was young and the world was fill of possibilities.  Like Wes Craven's work.  Or at least that is my memory of it, and why I love the movies he made in the 90s.  But in the next installment is much more rocky, textured and varied.  Again how I remember the 2000s.  It's an error where Craven tries to branch out, yet can't.  But that is going to be in my Craven Kick Part 4.