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Scream Trilogy Box Set

Roadshow Entertainment/Roadshow Entertainment . R4 . COLOR . 0 mins . G . PAL

  Feature
Contract

Conceived by Kevin Williamson - later to go on to create the teen soap Dawson’s Creek - and directed by modern horror maverick Wes Craven, the Scream trilogy has become one of the most successful scary-movie franchises in cinema history. This is in no small part due to the sense of “false reality” set in place with the first film and carried across its two sequels - a fictional world that includes references to real-life things, particularly the genre films that preceded it (and, in the sequels, sly references to the original Scream itself). Despite the producers’ claims to the contrary, there’s really nothing especially innovative about the Scream trilogy - the films are great fun, sure, and deliver plenty of bang for the buck. But it’s the writing that gives these films their edge - writing that is, once again, great fun, but which also veers dangerously close to overdoing the type of self-aware parody that became commonplace in movies and TV during the latter half of the ‘90s. As Homer Simpson was once heard to guffaw, “It’s so funny… because it’s true!!!”

Roadshow’s Scream boxed set is controversial before it even gets out of the starting gate. The three movie discs are all the standard region 4 DVD releases of the films - and that means that the original Scream (shot in Panavision) is offered, completely unacceptably, in pan-and-scan format. No, Roadshow weren’t responsible for this travesty of a DVD - but they’re offering it as part of this package, and that’s a big, big disappointment.

At the time of writing, sample copies of the movie discs themselves had not been offered for review; therefore, what we’re focussing on here is the fourth disc in the package, the Special Features disc. Does it make the price of entry worthwhile - especially for those who already have some or all of the films on DVD already? Does it justify the buyer having to tolerate a substandard first disc? Unfortunately, the answer is no - though if you don’t have any of these films on DVD and don’t mind a spot of pan’n’scan, you’ll be in Scream Heaven.

  Video
Contract

The video material on the Special Features disc - culled from a wide variety of sources - is all presented in standard 4:3 and is not enhanced for widescreen TVs. Which is perfectly fine - this material was largely made for viewing on a standard TV screen.

Video quality across the various materials here is always good, if not exactly reference material. Taken from available sources, it’s been authored with care and there are no compression artefacts or other problems visible throughout.

  Audio
Contract

Audio throughout the Special Features disc is standard two-channel stereo, and is perfectly acceptable for the content. There are no audio fireworks here, but then, we didn’t expect to find any.

  Extras
Contract

The entire Special Features disc is, of course, a great big extra. So what do you get for your investment? Essentially, a grab bag of Scream video trivia ranging from the fascinating to the mundane. In a nutshell:

Behind The Scream: A 31-minute feature about the creation and success of the trilogy, well made if a little light on substance. While obviously produced after the final film in the trilogy, most of the running time here concerns the original film and its conception, with barely two minutes allowed for the most recent instalment. The cast spend a lot of time telling us how wonderful Wes Craven is, and indeed it does appear that a lot of fun was had on the set. There are, however, very few real insights into the production here, aside from the fascinating revelation - no doubt told before - that the producers deliberately upped the gore factor in Scream 2 so that once they were asked by the MPAA to make the inevitable cuts, they’d have the movie they intended to make released. As it turned out, the MPAA passed the film intact with an R rating (the equivalent of an Australian M or MA)!

Screen Tests: Ten minutes of raw screen test footage from the initial instalment (almost exactly five years ago at the time of this review) - Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich and Jamie Kennedy are featured. Of some interest, this footage is also used in part in the featurette above.

Sunrise Studio Trailers: The raw video sources for the mocked-up “movie trailers” used in the trilogy. While amusing in principle, most of these don’t come off especially well (particularly the Blair Witch parody), and most of the laughs come from the titles of the “films” themselves. Needless to say, none of these are real movies.

Scream 2 Featurette: A run of the mill EPK-style promo effort for the second film. This is not included on the Scream 2 DVD, but there’s not a great deal here to suggest that you should have been upset about that if you bought the disc at the time.

Music Video - Scream by Master P: You know the story. Gangsta rap meets Hollywood, who make sure the tie-in video includes plenty of footage from the product. The song is completely forgettable, as is the clip.

Crew Bios: Rudimentary biographies of the principal crew. At which point we ask… what about the cast?

Scary Movie Trailer: Included as a not-very-well-hidden “Easter Egg”, this is the standard cinema trailer for the Keenan Ivory Wayans parody film Scary Movie - ironically (and probably deliberately) also the original title of Kevin Williamson’s Scream screenplay.

DVD-ROM Content: If you happen to have a DVD-ROM drive attached to your computer, you’ll find a lot more to like on this disc than most. It’s powered by the infamous PC Friendly software, and as a result is compatible with Windows machines only. You’ll need to use this software, unfortunately, to navigate much of the content properly, though it is possible to look through the files manually. There’s 1.3 Gigabytes of stuff to entertain you here - but the “Screamsaver”, which installs a fairly large set of video files from the films to your hard disk for display when you’re away from the computer, takes much of this up. The neat trick here is that if the DVD happens to be in your computer at the time, the screensaver will instead utilize longer, higher-res clips for its look-at-me activities. This writer sees no point in screensavers and suggests you use power management to shut off your monitor instead. Your mileage may, of course, vary considerably. The “Screamsaver” accounts for 870MB of the DVD-ROM content, more than two-thirds.

The rest is better, though not without its problems. With extensive use of Macromedia Flash animation, the browser-based content includes a game, a script viewer for all three films (also browsable as standard HTML), an extensive character synopsis, and an archive of the web site produced for the release of the third film - including a fake Sunrise Studios site, a “parody” site about the same, and the “Gale Weathers Channel” - a parody news site. All of these are exceptionally well designed. The game, though, generated Flash 5 scripting errors when we attempted to run it, and then crashed Internet Explorer; it’s possible that playing it through the PC Friendly software would help here, but that software constantly generated application errors under Windows 2000 and had to be uninstalled manually to restore system stability. This software is reportedly more compatible with Windows 98.

A nicely comprehensive DVD-ROM effort, this would have been a much better prospect had it been designed for full use without often-unstable third-party software. Having said that, the PC Friendly software does run a lot more comfortably under Windows 98.

  Overall  
Contract

As intimated at the start of this review, this boxed set will mainly be of interest to those who have none of the individual Scream DVDs. But even then, the customer is being short-changed with the disc of the debut film - in a collectors’ set such as this, pan’n’scan is completely unacceptable. The content on the Special Features disc will no doubt be considered essential by the die-hard Scream fan, and as a bonus offering it certainly provides a satisfying diversion. The feeling is always there that this could have been done bigger, better and with less unnecessary hype. But Scream fans are, of course, going to love every bloody byte of it.


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