You forgot where you came from...

[Evil Dave]

I had not heard of that. I'll check it out sometime I'm sure.

[lazario]

admin said:

Like it matters - Dead Alive and Bad Taste are so good (AND THAT IS A MATTER OF FACT, not opinion), he'll be a Master of Horror till the day he dies.

i didnt like dead alive

so it may be a fact to you but not every1 else

I don't give a fuck what you don't like. "Not everyone else" is not determined by what you think. And if you think that, you are being a hypocrite. Because you said you don't care what everyone thinks, yet you're trying to tell me what "everyone thinks." If I don't know... then you don't know either. See how that works?

malbowski13 said:

I'm not dissing him before "Shocker" but after that he did get shitty.Don't give me any of that "Scream" crap either!How bout "Cursed"" To me, he's in the same boat as Jackson (once great, now not-so-great).

Haven't seen Cursed. But Scream was great. The sequels were not strictly horror, but Scream was plain epic.

thehillshavedave said:

While coming up with some of the greatest and most revolutionary ideas for the genre, he's also cranked out an ever-growing number of stinkers. It brings up an interesting question: Should a director be judged only on his great additions to the genre, while ignoring some of the "duds?" Or should they be judged by their "great to mediocre" ratio? An intriguing thought to ponder.............Not sure which thesis holds more water, to be honest.

Also, I believe you could add Tobe Hooper's name to the list of director's that fit this criteria. Maybe even John Carpenter (although I wouldn't).

I am of the opinion that a director who directed something as amazing as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Last House on the Left, can create another masterpiece if they're not manipulated too much by studios, ratings boards- the whole shebbang. Most of Hooper's and Craven's failures were really more based on poor resources and bad deals than a failure of vision.

[Evil Dave]

lazario said:

I am of the opinion that a director who directed something as amazing as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Last House on the Left, can create another masterpiece if they're not manipulated too much by studios, ratings boards- the whole shebbang. Most of Hooper's and Craven's failures were really more based on poor resources and bad deals than a failure of vision.

Some very good points. If they had the skill to make one masterpiece, one would have to imagine that they have at least the potential talent to be truly great again. On the flip side, they're definitely those in all creative mediums who are truly one hit wonders.

I'd also agree that some of Hooper's and Craven's flops were not completely their fault. Studios definitely can affect the original vision of a film, and thus, the final product. That being said, I definitely would have to at least question the original vision of Craven with the movie Cursed. That was just plain baaaaaaad.

[lazario]

The stories of the fucking the studio gave Craven and company on Cursed are now the stuff of legends. Literally, the movie took something like 3 years to start-shoot-finish, extensive re-shoots were ordered by somebody, the studio refused to allow the filmmakers Final Cut, test audiences were allowed to change a huge amount of vital scenes, actors left and couldn't come back, there was a big problem with the budget at some point, and then, the movie was actually shelved when it was finished and not released for quite a while. Message boards were chronicling the hell this movie was going through for over a year before it came out. All the majors predicted it would BOMB like Hiroshima. And that's why Red Eye came out 2 months later... Craven actually made it after starting, but before finishing Cursed.

Everything that could have gone wrong on that movie did, and that was all the studio's fault. Every problem they encountered was at least studio related. We'll never know how it would have been had the studio not screwed that movie up so badly. But blaming Craven for that is like blaming him for hurricanes and tornados- it's completely out of his control. A lot of people seem to think these directors can control the studios somehow... If that were true, they sure as hell wouldn't need me to defend them. I just put myself in their shoes.


There is no doubt in my mind that under the right circumstances, any of these filmmakers can make another masterpiece. And that they'd probably know better than a great deal of the 'new kids' today directing all these damn remakes and prequels.

[Evil Dave]

Yeah, I've read some of the same about the problems Craven had with Cursed because as a werewolf fan, I was absolutely elated to hear that a big time horror director like Wes was going to venture into the sub-genre. Upon actually viewing it though, the following is the problem I had with the original vision of it: If you see the movie, and consider the timeline with which it began, it begins to be painfully obvious that this movie was never nothing more than a ploy with which to cash in on the cult success of Ginger Snaps. Now, I'm not blaming Craven for this, because I've read that he legitimately had wanted to make a werewolf movie. However, with the success Ginger Snaps had in Canada, along with the cult success it's DVD releases enjoyed here in the U.S., you just know that the studios wanted to copy and paste it here in the states for their own profit. So basically what I'm saying is that I believe the studio was seeing nothing but dollar signs and when they found out that a big name like Wes Craven was interested in doing such a project, they JUMPED on the chance. Only problem for Wes was that I think the studios heavily pushed and prodded him to make a movie that he never probably intended to. They wanted a knock off of Ginger Snaps because we all know they function off of successful formulas, not original storylines. We never will really ever know if Craven was on board with the rip-off, or if he had something completely different in mind. I'm leaning towards the latter.

[malbowski13]

I always found Scream to be funny.It was almost like all it did was poke fun at the Slasher genre. The only thing new it brought to the table was that voice changer.Everybody seems to like it though so I guess I'm wrong.

[Evil Dave]

^^^ No, you're not. I've stated many times in the past that I'm not a big fan of Scream either. I generally refrain from restating that though, because I've gone 'round and 'round with Laz about it, and I'd like to avoid doing it again. But don't fret, I'm right with you when it comes to feeling that way about Scream.

[malbowski13]

Thanks Goose.

[Evil Dave]

No problem, Maverick.

[malbowski13]

That movie always bugged me.It's like a school for the best-of-the-best which I would interpret as being very competitive.Then near the end of the movie when Maverick gets all pissy and disappears,EVERYONE is like "Where's Maverick?Where's Maverick?"Iceman is by far the best character and also has the coolest hair.

[Evil Dave]

^^^ Yeah, I don't care for it much either. Too many plot holes. I mean, why are these Russian MIGs attacking these aircraft carriers? And wouldn't that be considered a declaration of war? It's just plain stupid. Throw in the pointlessly generic "love affair" with Kelly McGillis and you've got a really brainless, formulatic movie.

[lazario]

thehillshavedave said:

I've stated many times in the past that I'm not a big fan of Scream either. I generally refrain from restating that though, because I've gone 'round and 'round with Laz about it, and I'd like to avoid doing it again. But don't fret, I'm right with you when it comes to feeling that way about Scream.

I don't remember us ever talking about Scream.

malbowski13 said:

I always found Scream to be funny. It was almost like all it did was poke fun at the Slasher genre. The only thing new it brought to the table was that voice changer. Everybody seems to like it though so I guess I'm wrong.

Scream is a movie that is really easy to take the wrong way. The writer was not some two-bit prick who hates horror movies and said, "oh wouldn't it be cool to poke fun at it? It might make a lot of money to push around a genre that's not doing that well right now." He is a definite horror fan and a smart writer, too. Not only does he use several conventions from slasher films (the obvious three- Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street)- he can also write characters. And Wes Craven knows how to not just show them onscreen, but make them complex and make the viewer actually give a damn about them. You either like them or you hate them. And several times, you feel both.

Sidney Prescott says she hates horror movies. She says they're nothing but "big breasted girls who can't act who are always running up the stairs when they should be running out the front door." Now, we're still supposed to care about what happens to her, but we know what she's said is ignorant. What does the movie do to her??? Did you notice- the killer jumps out at her. And what does she do? She runs up the stairs instead of running out the front door. She identified with the movie characters who are smarter but when she found herself in the same situation, she did the wrong thing.

Do you still think after that, the movie is making fun of any kind of horror movie?

Let me tell you what I saw: the movie corrected her smug, uneducated viewpoint. Sure, they took sides. Who's side do you think they took?

And, if you know Wes Craven- you'd know, that he has several times put things into his films as messages. A lot of them are about how content in movies are interpreted. That are a huge amount of incredibly intelligent messages in Scream and Scream 2 about how movie violence affects people. A lot of people may say horror movies make killers or screw up people's heads. This is actually true. On New Line's Jason X DVD, they showed televised Talk Show clips (of a show clearly in the early '90s or late '80s) where the audience of housewives and uppity suburban or yuppie-type people would blast movies like the Friday the 13th type movies.

In Scream, the killers act like they were just copying what they saw in movies... But remember, at least one of them tells Sidney that there was something else that was making him terrorize her.


I think more than anything, Scream gets flack for having a style that is unrecognizable from other horror movies. It's very clean and polished looking when most people expect horror to look down and dirty, gritty. But really- the intelligence in it's writing, the top-notch performance by the cast, the intense editing, the bloodiness (and gore) of the first movie, the well-placed scares, and the fleshed-out characters... It makes Scream one of the best horror movies of the 1990's.

So... the only thing new it brought to the table? I don't think horror movies always have to do something new. They just have to do something amazing with the tools they have at their disposal. Scream did that, and then some.

Nobody has to love the series. The sequels clearly decided to focus less on blood and gore and much more on step-by-step detection of the killer. Which really means the sequels are thrillers with a few scenes of horror. But still, the writing (of Scream 2, at least) makes it outstanding on one level. There are certain scenes you just can't brush off.

[Evil Dave]

lazario said:

I don't remember us ever talking about Scream.

We did. It was within the first week or so that I signed up. You referred to it as a masterpiece, and I disagreed.

[lazario]

I say that to everybody. When you peel through it's layers, like many horror movies, you see just how freaking good it really is. So, I feel no shame about calling it a masterpiece. I know a lot of people "don't like it." I'm sure if Tom Savini had done the gore effects, and there had been 6 pairs of boobs shown, and Bruce Campbell had a 20-minute part in it, and somebody's head turned into a spider and walked across a room... those morons would be the first to say- "it's a Masterpiece."

[malbowski13]

I'll say that it brought slasher movies back into the spotlight.And...nah, that's all I can say.

[lazario]

Whatever.

[malbowski13]

That movie was made for a "mainstream audience".It was very successful commercially.Horror was better before it got too big...

[lazario]

Well, you're close. But you can't forget that Wes Craven didn't make Scream to make millions of dollars. You have to be able to separate the writer's intentions from the director's intentions. And Wes really turned that movie into an excellent slasher film.