Scream 2 (1997)

 "How do you know that my dim-witted inexperience isn't merely a subtle form of manipulation, used to lower people's expectations, thereby enhancing my ability to effectively manoeuvre within any given situation?"

SPOILERS, in case it needs saying when discussing a slasher that is also a sort of whodunit.

I suppose this film isn't quite as good as its predecessor. But when a sequel is this good, who cares? And, naturally, the film is sufficiently self-aware as to tackle this very subject in the film class discussion scene. Sequels to slashers abound: indeed, one might say that they infest. So it's a joy to see all the knowing references to the specific tropes of slasher sequels.

The plot may be less original than the, er, original, but the narrative is dripping with witty commentary on how the plot is going to unfold. We have a much-maligned red herring in Derek, and a reveal that is a nod to Mrs Vorhees in Friday the 13th.

Yet we also have a cast that shines, and genuine chemistry between Gail and Dewey. The set pieces- the one with Sarah Michelle Gellar as Cici especially- are magnificently done, as one might expect from Wes Craven.

Most of all, though, we have a witty and highly literate script that, at one point, riffs heavily on Aeschylus' Agamemnon. We also get a reminder of how deeply unsettling and weird those American sorority and fraternity things are. Can't they just, like, lower their drinking age to something less insanely puritanical and have their students just drink in bars on campus as happens in every other country?

As sequels go, this may not be an Aliens, or a Godfather: Part II. But it's bloody good, and makes Scream a proper franchise.

Scream (1996)

 "There's a formula to it. A very simple formula.

Best horror film of all time? That's a hard question. But this is a work of genius. It does a lot of violence, but as much of it is directed at the fourth wall as to the killings of Ghostface.

The metatextuality is as exquisite now as it was then. I mean, watching this in 2023 one winces at the passing of time, that we no longer living in a world of landlines, video shop and the great state of California being guilty of judicial killing. Yet we have Randy outlining the rules of how not to get killed in a horror movie. We have a character declare that A Nightmare on Elm Street was great but the sequels were not, in a film directed by Wes Craven. Hmm. We have so many references. After this point, is a straight, non-metatextual slasher truly even possible?

This is a wonderful thing, a B movie genre turned into very clever, if very fun, riffing on all sorts of postmodern stuff. It's very clever indeed. Yet it's accessible.This is a Hollywood horror hit. And it's not lowbrow. There is hope for humanity, and this is the highlight of Craven's career.

The cast is superb, although the ensemble outshines Neve Campbell. The opening set piece is the perfect set up, with Drew Barrymore selling it to perfection. Yet, despite the very meta humour, the whole thing is structured as a perfect slasher, with the big reveal handled very well indeed. This is, simultaneously, a superb horror film and a superb deconstruction. One of the best of its decade.

Masters of the Universe (1987)

"I don't like adventures!"

This is one of my absolute favourite rubbish films. Oh, it's rubbish alright. Eternia looks like a cheap set indoors and like Southern California outdoors, but despite this they had to save money by setting it on Earth, which I imagine would be much cheaper. Skeletor's mask looks rubbish, and poor old Frank Langella gets hilariously clichéd lines such as "A curious quartet" and "Gildor, you minute minion". What's an actor to do but ham it up? As for Dolph Lundgren's performance as He-Man… well, the credits show that he needed both a speech coach and a drama coach. 'Nuff said.

I love it, though. It wears its rubbishness with pride, and is full of dialogue that can only be deliberately hammy. The music is so very, very '80s, and so are the hairstyles. It even has James Tolkan in it, the chap who plays Mr Strickland in the Back to the Future trilogy, and he's one of my favourite actors. In fact, he's probably the best thing about this film.

Still… this is a commercial tie-in to the Masters of the Universe cartoon and toys, so we'd best talk about those. It's all pretty much a formative part of my childhood since the age of five, and I can still remember a disturbingly large number of character names. One of them was called Fisto. Hur Hur. Although I'm not sure what the relevance of the phrase "Masters of the Universe" was. It was all just a load of cynical marketing, of course, but we '80s kids lapped it up. The cartoon, which mostly only featured the same few characters, was a good laugh in spite of the recycled animation and plots, partly because of the deeply silly moral homily at the end of each episode. The backgrounds always looked fantastic, almost as druggy as the plot, and set up a very specific visual aesthetic that anchored this odd mix of sci-fi and fantasy.

This film is not exactly a faithful representation, which should come as no surprise; why should Hollywood creative types slavishly adhere to the rules laid down by a range of toys? Anyway, lots of the characters would be impossible to render well in live action on an obviously limited budget; look how rubbish Skeletor looks. I'm sort of glad they didn't try to do an Orko.

The whole aesthetic is different from the cartoon- very much a mix of the standard Hollywood '80s sci-fi and standard Hollywood fantasy. The overall effect is something much darker and less trippy which makes you much more aware of the inherent silliness of names such as "He-Man and "Evil-Lyn" than would have otherwise been the case. Orko is replaced by Gwildor who, as a fairly standard '80s Hollywood fantasy dwarf, is far more budget friendly. And Billy Barty is the second best thing about this film.

Oddly enough, it seems the director, Gary Goddard, was heavily inspired by Jack Kirby's New Gods stuff for DC. I've not read much of that, but I can see how that would have affected the aesthetic and how Skeletor would presumably be a sort of Darkseid figure. More obvious, though, are the suspiciously large number of, er, "homages" to the Star Wars trilogy. Let's look at them, Shall we?

·         Skeletor is accompanied by a load of black, armoured troops that seem suspiciously close to being stormtroopers.

·         The scene with Skeletor inspecting the bounty hunters is suspiciously close to the similar scene in The Empire Strikes Back. Just using the word "mercenaries" instead of "bounty hunters" doesn't fool me, I'm afraid.

·         The final fight, with He-Man throwing Skeletor down a big hole and the camera following him down for a few feet, is suspiciously close to the climax of Return of the Jedi. Come to think of it, Skeletor looks an awful lot like the Emperor.

That's all coincidence, I'm sure. For the rest, though, we have a fairly standard adventure plot, with the Cosmic Key as our McGuffin. We have Julie (a young Courteney Cox with… interesting hair) and Kevin as our audience identification characters because, obviously, we couldn't possibly be expected to identify with aliens. We have a ridiculously square-jawed, goody-goody hero and a silly, moustache-twirling villain. We have a henchman being zapped to death for failure. We have a silly comedy dwarf. It's all very by-the-numbers, really, but fun, and crammed with action and adventure, up to and including an exploding microwave.

I'm not sure about the ending, though. If Julie and Kevin are a few months back in time, what happened to their earlier selves? Doesn't this create a time paradox so that none of this ever happened? Oh, and if the cosmic key can cause time travel then why didn't our heroes just go back in time and stop Skeletor from doing anything naughty in the first place? Probably best not to think too hard about such things…