Scream Ripoffs: The Slashers of the Late 90s to 2001

For the longest time neckbeards hated Wes Craven's 1996 kino Scream and the brief cycle of ripoffs it inspired. It wasn't gritty enough, they said. For the zoomers in the audience, gritty was the most overused word of the 2000s and gave us nothing but a decade of dogshit edgy flicks and shows filled with desaturated colour, shaky cam, torture "porn" and implausible plotting, and not filled at all with wit, inventiveness, character, charm or anything of that nature. The fact that 2000s pop culture was dominated by Saw, Zack Snyder and Rob-Zombie-as-a-""""film""""maker while Scream has aged like wine is reason enough to always ignore neckbeards. Pop punk is great too, fuck you.

And don't you FUCKING forget it.

The Scream series, of course, starred a revolving door of likely or unlikely suspects as the killer, "Ghostface", who would prank call his victims before attacking them with a hunting knife. Despite actually being different people each time out, Ghostface became the last great horror icon to this day, unless you count the Blair Witch who is not technically in the movie.

This goofy shit don't count/never happened.

The series also maintained a high standard of screenwriting and actually told a story with continuing protagonists, a beginning, a middle and an end (and a belated postscript in 2010 no one saw). It balanced horror and humour better than anything before or since, brought soaring production values we'll never see again because of the success of Paranormal Activity and its budget of $5, and remains perhaps the definitive document on the late 90s, a period when planet Earth peaked right up until 9/11 and the total collapse of everything good in the world that's been taking place since.

This is the Rose McGowan they took from us.

Less distinguished, however, are the small number of ripoffs that defined the face of horror for those sweet few years. Overly reviled as plastic, disposable trash featuring B-list TV stars, no sub-sub-genre had ever been the target of such disproportionate invective. Comparing yesteryear's disposable entertainment to literally anything released this year, however, casts these misunderstood films in a kinder, better light. Although none of them really warrant a full article outside of the Scream series, here's a quick rundown on a now-niche cycle of films deserving of a little more respect than they've received.

I Know What You Did Last Summer

The exclamation mark makes me laugh every time. It's like a threatening note from your mom.

I Know What You Did Last Summer shares a lot with the Screams, notably Kevin Williamson's then-hip sensibility, TV stars of the period, and a poster featuring the main cast looking kind of shifty and moody, but in an achingly pretty, photoshoot sort of way.

Sure, it's a cliché, but you remember this poster for a 1998 film.

There's not a lot to say about these amiable flicks, except for how beautiful and innocent the world of the mid to late 90s was. Jennifer Love Hewitt glides so photogenically through life you could quite happily watch her do mundane things and forget time was passing and not even worry about the killer. I wish I went to high school in one of these movies: everyone was beautiful and 25 years old, and you got killed by a hook-wielding fisherman before you made it to the 2000s.

The fact the killer smells like fish from half a mile away never seems to stop him sneaking up on people.

The scene where bae meets the albino chick is also pretty great.

"Drop the act. You killed Max, and took my jacket" - actual dialogue

Special mention must be made of these dudes who apparently wear fish-themed headwear to their 4th of July festivities.

Urban Legend

>ywn minor in a filler course on urban folklore taught by freddy krueger at a creepy new england college

Probably the best of the post-Scream cycle, Urban Legend is also the one with the best gimmick, which makes the lack of a proper sequel all the more disappointing (2002's Urban Legends: Final Cut is an unfunny parody of the original, the Freddy's Dead of Urban Legend flicks, and 3 is even worse). In this one the killer wears a parka and murders people using MOs cribbed from popular urban legends. What's most surprising is that most of them don't seem forced, but are worked naturally into the progression of the plot. I would have loved to see a string of sequels in which more and more tenuous reaches were made to connect kills to obscurer and ever more retarded urban legends, like the parka killer flushing a baby alligator 20 years ago in flashback and feeding someone to the fully grown one in the present. That would have been stupid as shit, but entertainingly so.

I also want to see the killer try to swing that axe inside a mini.

Sadly the parka killer (easily the best in the cycle after Ghostface) never made it past the first one, but Urban Legend still stands as a fun knockoff, like the Speed to Scream's Die Hard. Cast includes Jared Leto, Tara Reid and D-Girl from The Sopranos.

MOM'S GONNA FREAK

Tara Reid was the original Bowsette.

D-Girl is a weak and kind of unlikeable Final Girl but that's OK because the protagonists in actual urban legends often are, if they're filled in at all. Normally I like a protagonist I can root for but it's not a problem here, and the killer reveal is one of the better ones I've seen, surpassed only by those of Scream and the otherwise crappy 80s flick Happy Birthday To Me, which is worth watching solely for its final sequence.

In North Park, Kenny kills you.

I don't know why urban legends were such a hot topic for horror filmmakers in the 90s, but at some point Parka should have crossed paths with Candyman and the hook-handed Fisherman from Summer. Better yet, the original killer could come back in a new sequel taking cues from online creepypastas. It would probably be gay but I'd go see it, if they got the right people back.

Cherry Falls

Did a 2000 slasher flick give us the final solution to the much hyped incel terror wave?

Top of the list of movies that should have been better than they were, Cherry Falls has the excellent gimmick that the killer attacks only virgins, which should have led to a mass panic in which nervous teens try to get laid urgently, with each embarrassing failure bringing the spectre of death that bit closer. It should have been the perfect formula for suspense and satire, and Britanny Murphy should have been the perfect Final Girl. Instead, however, it sucked and was quickly forgotten, but the possibility of the cult classic it might have become is still intriguing.

This fuck's method of eating pringles or whatever is a Clerksian highlight.

The late lamented Murphy plays the virginal daughter of the small town police chief. Not unlike D-Girl, she's actually a pretty obnoxious Final Girl, but on this blog we love Murph Murph so we'll let it slide. She's basically an emo/scene girl so we can surmise getting the D would save her life both literally and in a more thematic way, which would be a smarter subtext than the actual one in the movie. The big problem with Cherry Falls is its awkward straddling of American Pie style frat douche humour and moody scene thot stylisation.

Is it edgy industrial album cover core...

Evil Dead style gag comedy...

...or whispy haired dreampop artfaggotry? You decide (because the director couldn't).

I can at least give the filmmakers some credit for trying to mix artsiness with an utterly artless script, but it's like oil and water, and has only been tried one more time, in the objectively superior remake of 70s C-movie Town That Dreaded Sundown. I'd check that one out as it's at least consistent with its dreamy visuals and less confused with its sophomoric social commentary, though its killer reveal is about equally lame. Will the perfect 90s-college-alternative-chick-angst-slasherkino ever be made? Probably not, but the experiment remains compelling enough to squat like a gargoyle in the memory.

RIP based Murph Murph :(

Valentine

Any flick with a sufficiently cleavagey chase scene can never score below 2 stars.

Scraping the bottom of the ripoff barrel, Valentine is a bold synthesis of glossy slasher flick and unfunny "relatable" comedy chick flick set on a day already taken by My Bloody Valentine and featuring a fairly creepily masked killer doing a bit of a Myers impression.

"Remember this shot from a better movie?" - director

Sadly he doesn't use the bow again, which would have been kind of fun. The movie also suffers from too many obvious red herring characters, a couple of extremely filler kills and its attempts at humour that are obviously pitched at a rom com audience that don't watch horror movies.

"OMG she washes her hair in the toilet JUST LIKE ME" - w*men

Despite being the weakest in the cycle, Valentine is very watchable due to its photogenic cast of affably hateable Stacies including Marley Shelton, Denise Richards and Katherine Heigl, making it Supreme Gentleman kino.

Daily reminder H*llywood denied us this thicc qt because she was too much of a drag to work with, but closed ranks for creepy Bryan Singer and Kevin Spacey for decades.

I miss the period from Starship Troopers to The World Is Not Enough in which Denise Richards' eyebrows ruled cinema. In hindsight, it was the last golden age of civilisation.

Honourable mention: Final Destination

Is Final Destination part of the cycle? Is it a slasher movie? I say yes for three reasons: it has that glossy post-Scream aesthetic, the cast are featured prominently on the poster looking shifty, and the characters are killed off one by one. It differs from the others in the list because the killer (Death) is supernatural, but no one says A Nightmare on Elm Street isn't a slasher, except Silvio. Final Destination features a character named Clear Rivers, which is one of those names only movie characters would ever have, and which for some reason I love.

"Hi, I am Clear Rivers" - this character

I won't say too much about Final Destination here because I might do a piece on the series later, but it's worth a mention in the context of post-Screamcore. Technically there were others but they're not worth mentioning beyond a single line. Lover's Lane was a fun Summer ripoff featuring a pre-Scary Movie Anna Faris and Cut was an unfunny meta comedy notable only for a thicc latterday Molly Ringwald.

So for the 30 year old boomers who remember the time before the dark age when even a crappy knockoff movie could be relied upon to provide the various simple joys of an attractive cast, a colour palette that looks like something on Earth, and axe murders, these flicks deserve a small place in your sad hearts. Imagine being a zoomer and growing up on Paranormal Activity, Saw 119, and A24.