Everyone’s favorite desert-dwelling mutant cannibals return in this gruesome sequel to the classic drive-in shocker! Years after the original massacre which pitted a suburban family against a band of cave dwellers, traumatized survivors lead a team of dirt bikers back into the wild for a bus expedition. After their vehicle breaks down, the travelers must fend for their lives when the hungry savages (led by spooky Michael Berryman) emerge from the hills in search of dinner! Directed by horror maestro Wes Craven (Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street), this brutal chiller features shocking highlights from the original film (including the now legendary canine flashback) and an eerie score by “Friday the 13th’s” Henry Manfredini. Vicious, delirious, and outrageous!

Jason Bene, Donny Broussard and Christina Rickman give props to Wes Craven’s underrated film The People Under the Stairs. So click below and listen or download it and listen on your way to work, and don’t forget to comment or like us on Facebook.

One, two, Freddy’s coming for you. Three, four, better lock your door. Five, six, grab your crucifix. Seven, eight, gonna stay up late. Nine, ten, never sleep again.

And with those bone-chilling lyrics, director Wes Craven unspooled a horror bad guy for the ages who is still the king of the movie villain hill. Heather Langenkamp’s portrayal of Nancy Thompson is as American as apple pie. She was the girl next door who knew how to look pretty and kick your ass at the same time. Currently available at the I Am Nancy website and Amazon is the new documentary about the three key players behind the popularity and success of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the fans who love them.

Jason Bene: What is I Am Nancy?

Heather Langenkamp: It’s a jumble of different kinds of movies. We were kind inspired by documentaries like Super Size Me, Air Guitar Nation and King of Kong. It was those documentaries where you go into a world that people really don’t know anything about, and you try and tell them about it. My first mission was to kind of explain this horror craze that has taken over America. Once we started getting our footage at conventions we really realized that fans had a lot to say about Freddy, of course, and they also had a lot to say about Nancy, which kind of surprised me. It’s kind of Freddy mania out there. Everyone is wearing a red and green sweater. They sell hats and gloves. There are two Nancy dolls and they both don’t move. We started focusing on the toys and the marketing. We started asking people deeper questions about “Who is their Freddy in their life?” “Who was their Freddy?” “What person did you have to battle like Nancy did?” That’s when the heart and soul of the movie started to develop.

The movie has this strange arc. If you really want to know how important the film is to people,  then you really need to go out and meet the fans. The second act of the movie talks about the fans and the marketing and these conventions. This is going to be a big benefit for conventions because they just look like so much fun. Then we move into an interview with Robert Englund. We really get to know what kind of guy Robert really is, and what a great actor he is. His real life personality is sweet, goofy, fun, loving, caring and gentle. Then you realize this is the guy who played Freddy Krueger – people are really going to appreciate Robert Englund in a whole new way. Then we decided that Wes Craven was going to tell us even more about the dynamic between Nancy and Freddy. It’s quite a long interview with Wes. His interview leads us into a much deeper and more philosophical discussion about the movies. We interview Jessica Craven, Wes’ daughter, who was very instrumental in the creation of A Nightmare on Elm Street in several ways. I think fans are going to be shocked by the things they don’t know about Wes and Robert. It’s going to give people a really new insight into the people who made that movie.

Jason Bene: It doesn’t surprise me that you are so popular with fans because your character went against the cliche and fought back and wasn’t a victim. You are also in the three best films in the series – A Nightmare on Elm Street, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.

Heather Langenkamp: I think you hit the nail on the head. I don’t think that it is me. But I do think that Wes knew the formula for this movie had to include this battle between this young person and Freddy. He made the conscious decision to make the character a girl. What is more important about Nancy is the way she approaches the battle. It doesn’t have anything to do that she is a girl fighting, it has more to do with the fact she’s a person who’s actually willing to face Freddy and go straight at him. I think the word victim is more about how you approach your adversary. You consciously admit or decide to feel that you can’t fight back. Wes says, ” A hero is someone who is willing to face fear.” The fact that it is a girl or boy has never mattered. A lot of people want to make it like “final girl”. I really don’t think it’s about that.

Jason Bene: This was filmed at five different conventions in two continents. Is that your normal convention schedule?

Heather Langenkamp: No. I usually do two a year. Only recently did I start doing them because of the 25th anniversary of A Nightmare on Elm Street there were lots of requests to go places. I used that as an excuse for being able to go to these places. We actually went to six conventions by the end of it. We took our camera all over the world. Some of the camera footage is from my Sony HD. We filmed all the fans who agreed to be on camera. We got home and we had over one hundred hours of footage. We took a year to edit this film. There are probably close to one hundred fans featured in the film. We also have a music video on the DVD that features more fans because there were some fans that we hated cutting. We tried to put everyone who could in the movie. They are the stars in a lot of ways. In the end, everyone just wants to be on screen.

Jason Bene: I like how you joke in the trailer how Robert Englund has a huge line of fans compared to you at the convention.

Heather Langenkamp: I try to be really tongue-in-cheek about that. I pretend I am the little sister who gets no attention. That’s part of the humor of the film is that we really try to play that up. We try to come to this serious place, but all along the way we try and make people laugh. In horror, everyone wants to scream and be scared. I’m hoping that people have patience with the fact that I don’t think they will ever get scared by my movie, but they might laugh.

The studio will be adding the title to their new Midnight Madness Series on Blu-ray for the first time on September 6th, although specs and extras have no been set yet.

The Carters are an all-American family on their way to California when their car breaks down far from civilization in the remote southwestern desert. But they are not alone. Watching from the hills is a very different kind of clan, a family of marauding inbred cannibals with an unspeakable taste for human flesh and monstrous brutality. In the nightmare that follows, what depravities must this wholesome family endure to survive? And in a primal wasteland ruled by lust and rage, who will become the most shocking savages of all?

Will you add this 1977 cult film to your collection?

Source: Arrow

Craven talked to EW and had a different opinion on doing Scream 5. “I’m taking the summer off. I directed and produced, and my wife [Iya Labunka] produced, both Scream 4 and the previous film, My Soul to Take, and they were both very difficult films. So we just decided, ‘You know what? We’re going to spend the summer someplace nice and not think about film for a while.”

He didn’t rule out doing another sequel either, adding: “If they get a script I’m interested in directing. The best situation would be if Kevin [Williamson] would come back.”

Thoughts?

In other words, Scream 4 feels more necessary than the  fan favorite tacked on sequels from Jigsaw. Plus, Jigsaw never got product endorsements. Scream 4, brought to you by Red Bull.

Despite poor imitators and the spoof franchise of Scary Movie, Scream always felt like the clever smart-ass that the horror genre was too nervous to invite over. Credit Kevin Williamson. Using the genre’s conventions to gleefully twist them into something new, Scream was a great horror film. The sequels, especially Scream 3 – with no help from the rapping, pot-smoking comedic Ghostface in Scary Movie -have made the clever movie seem rather quaint. Everyone knows everything about movies today. Scream 3 was the tacked on, unneeded sequel much like Saw 3D was to that franchise.

Scream 4 is as fresh as a proper remake should be, yet it still has the elements of the prior films that we enjoyed so much. It’s like a weird suicide fountain drink of being a sequel, a reboot, and a self-mocking reflection of itself. It works, it’s exciting, yet horror has changed. Even the slasher film feels supercharged, and there’s parts of Scream 4 that feel quaint. The whole long-lost brother from a different father or whatever climax to Scream 3 was overwrought, tedious, crappy leftovers of ideas that Scream hated. Luckily, the “reveal” here is startling, and purposeful. It’s about legacy like I said, and more so to Wes Craven as well with Ghostface.

As pitiful as it has been to see Wes Craven’s recent films like Cursed or the abysmal My Soul to Take, Scream 4 is as good as he has done in the late 1980s, something horror fans can be thankful for. Even if the meta humor seems a bit passed its prime, Scream 4‘s voice is as assured as it was in 1996. Just don’t mind that the irony is gone.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

The Film:

After one ballsy move in killing Cotton Weary (the great Liev Schreiber) in the pre-title kill, Scream 3 is largely aimless and becomes a dumb slasher sequel, something that the first film parodied. Oops. At least it wasn’t Scream 3D. The only heart-beat the film has is its clever banter between Parker Posey’s “Gale Weathers” and the real Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox). It’s probably too easy to blame screenwriter Ehren Kruger (The Ring, The Skeleton Key, and The Ring Two), as he cobbled notes together from the absent Kevin Williamson, but we’ll blame him anyway.

Safely, I can get this out there now: There’s no way Scream 4 will be this confused, boring, and bland as Scream 3. Most of the film feels like they’ve mined every ounce of ideas already, with the most outrageous twist at the end, that apparently “wrapped” everything up and closed off the series. Mhmm. Until now, we never knew we were getting a fourth film, but I’m glad we are. Scream 3 is a mess, and possible the start of the crappier Wes Craven films we would get for the next decade. Because Scream is this huge horror franchise, the film-makers had too much fun placing cameos instead of a cohesive plot.

If anyone can logically tie this into the first film believably, kudos. Instead, we get a Roger Corman, Wes Craven, Princess Leia, and a Jay and Silent Bob cameo! Williamson always played with our expectations. In Scream 2, he did a crazy thing and killed off the fan favorite Randy (Jamie Kennedy), but it was smart and made that sequel fresh and unpredictable. Here, we get Randy’s sister Martha, who just happens to have a VHS tape with Randy’s Rules of Surviving a Trilogy. Yawn.

Most of this is recycled ideas from the prior two films, with little actually being new. All I know about movie trilogies is in the third one, all bets are off. I guess, dude. To be fair, Kruger was rewriting the film as it was shooting, but one wonders about Williamson’s unused draft. Even Craven really didn’t want to direct this, and only did to do his dramatic outing in Music of the Heart. All of which leads us to a stale whimper of a conclusion.

The Blu-ray:

Audio/Video: Lionsgate offers us a usually good, but rather ho-hum HD presentation. While at times the sharpness and detail are great, like in Scream 2‘s Blu-ray, if also shifts into some digital noise and softness time to time. It’s not glaringly bad, but disappointing nonetheless. The DTS 5.1 mix rocks without question. Better sound design technology, more bass and more rear speaker activity, offer up a great audio experience for fans.

Like the previous two Scream films on LGF Blu-ray, they just ported over the DVD edition’s extras.

Commentary: It’s dated, but it’s still a decent listen with Wes Craven, producer Marianne Maddalena and editor Patrick Lussier, who come back for another chat about the film and the stars. It’s decent, but not as good as previous tracks.

The Deleted Scenes and Alternate Ending both have optional commentary and are worth a look by fans, despite the bad pic quality on the deleted scenes. Some goofy Outtakes, a weak collection of Scream scenes in Behind-the-Scenes, Trailers, TV Spots, and a Creed (lol) Music Video finish the disc off.

The Film: Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

The Blu-ray: Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Mondo, the collectible art boutique arm of Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, is excited to announce Wes Craven as the next filmmaker for their “Director’s Series” featuring both classic and contemporary films from the master of suspense. Mondo kicks things off with Alex Pardee’s clever and gruesome takes on Wes Craven’s two icons of fright – Freddy & Ghostface – for A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream. Additional titles scheduled for the Mondo treatment include Swamp Thing, The Hills Have Eyes, and The Last House on the Left.

“It’s an honor and great fun to be chosen by Mondo to participate in their Director’s Series. I think the posters brim with wild imagination and sly humor. Thank you so much – I’m pleased my films have earned a place in your gallery!” said director Wes Craven.

These posters will be on sale soon, so follow MondoNews on Twitter.

The Film:

All highly successful horror films deserve a sequel or five, but 1997′s Scream 2 is just as good, if not better than its predecessor. It’s simply the Hollywood case of “more”, and that’s what we get out of Scream 2. More kills. More twists. More, more, more. And it works. Proving that you can stretch the satirical nature of the franchise into “more”, Kevin Williamson stabs (ahem) the notion of sequels and the rules, while being self-referential about the popularity of the budding franchise.

While the film came out theatrically in December 1997, I waited for the film to hit VHS (ahaha) some six months later. While waiting (and we didn’t have the internet to spoil the revelations), my sister and I rocked the soundtrack, which featured some of the series’ best soundtrack tracks. Kottonmouth Kingz’ Suburban Life; She’s Always in My Hair by D’Angelo; songs by Collective Soul, Eels, Tonic, and Foo Fighters, all filled our trembling anticipation for the sequel. But it was two songs that seemed to be our own soundtrack to score our waiting: the epic Red Right Hand by Nick Cave and DJ Spooky and Master P’s Scream (here), which was on constant MTV play, since by Master P last LP just went Gold. The video is awesomely dated. Thugs and Ghostface. Ah, the 90s.

Anyway, on a film front, Wes Craven delivers a great sequel, as I have aready stated. We get great stunt casting with Luke Wilson and Heather Graham in the film version of the events of the first film with Stab, Tori Spelling (probably the only time I’ll credit her for acting), Jada Pinkette-Smith, and the number one reason of why I was so stoked for Scream 2: Sarah Michelle Gellar (riding high on Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s second season).

Williamson’s script is just as good and clever as the first film. Randy’s “Rules of the Sequel” are great. We never considered them too much until they’re reinitialized to us. What if Alice Hardy knew this back in 1982 when Jason finally killed her in the opening of Friday the 13th Part II? More twists, more kills, great sequel. Like I mentioned in the Blu-ray review of the first film (here), it’s a shame the Scary Movie franchise and the copy-cats in Hollywood left a sour taste in our mouths on the Scream franchise, because this is a great follow-up.

At least it’s not “gay” like A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge was dubbed.

The Blu-ray:

Audio/Video: This film looks a lot better than the first film did in 1080p, with sharper details and better contrast. Black levels and shadows are deep. The DTS track is a hell of a lot more robust. Booming bass, better overall sound mix, which adds ambiance in the rear speakers, makes this a solid release.

Just like the first film, Lionsgate Films just ported over the DVD edition’s bonus material, so there’s nothing new – sadly.

Commentary: Wes Craven is joined by his Producer Marianne Maddalena and his Editor Patrick Lussier (who would go on to direct My Bloody Valentine 3D) for a decent film-making centric track. Without screenwriter Kevin Williamson, the track doesn’t have the energy or the talk about sequels or the ideas, but it’s still a decent listen.

Featurette is just an EPK making-of; Deleted Scene with optional commentary is an extension of the film students talking about movies; some fun Outtakes; two Music Videos; and Trailers round out the disc’s bonuses.

The Film: Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

The Blu-ray: Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Source: Coming Soon

However,  it still remains to be seen if a fifth film will ever happen. We heard rumor (here) the studio was already looking at writers for Scream 5, but Craven has denied these claims (via Cinema Blend). “No, there is no Scream 5 script. Kevin [Williamson], when I first talked to him about this project before there was a script, he had an idea for a trilogy, so we’ll have to see what comes out of that,” he said. That’s not to say another film won’t happen, but it’s all up to Bob Weinstein. “I’m sure Bob Weinstein is open to it if the script or ideas are to his pleasure. He has very high standards. I don’t think he’s in any rush to do it particularly, but on the other hand, I think he’s open to the idea of a trilogy, so at the point when there is an idea that he’s really excited about I’m sure he will begin launching that next film,” Craven said.

May be it’s just best to wait and see how Scream 4 is received until a sequel gets moving. After all, the previous film wasn’t too well-received by many fans of the series, but hopefully this will win some back. Until then, Scream 4 opens on April 15th.  “Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), now the author of a self-help book, returns home to Woodsboro on the last stop of her book tour. There she reconnects with Sheriff Dewey (David Arquette) and Gale (Courteney Cox), who are now married, as well as her cousin Jill (Emma Roberts) and her Aunt Kate (Mary McDonnell). Unfortunately Sidney’s appearance also brings about the return of Ghostface, putting Sidney, Gale, and Dewey, along with Jill, her friends, and the whole town of Woodsboro in danger.”

The Film:

In the 15 years since its arrival on the horror world, Scream seemed to become the punching bag for everything that horror fans hated about the 1990s. After a gory, sticky, and insane 1980s for the genre with the birth of the slasher, Scream was the modernistic take the genre was headed for, after a slew of box office failures from the genre in the late 1980s. It was a clever take, but not unlike we haven’t seen before in such films like April Fool’s Day. But don’t let the fallout of Scream‘s success hurt your views on this 1996 film.

In fact, it might be one of the better out-right horror films in the ’90s and it’s also the last great Wes Craven film (thoughts on Scream 4 pending). Strictly following the slasher film genre’s conventions, screenwriter Kevin Williamson finds these little moments that make the film a borderline classic. You never run upstairs. You never go investigate a strange noise. You never go back to see if the killer’s dead. But they do, and Williamson allows the characters to be in on the genre’s trappings, which alludes to its self-mocking attitude, so widely copied from here on out.

But then Scary Movie (this film’s original title) came out and spoof the Scream craze and then the backlash against the franchise was born. To bad horror fans feel this way, because after 14 some odd years, Scream is a crazy cool slasher, with a great looking killer in Ghost Face, and some genuinely thrilling moments.

The Blu-ray:

Audio/Video: Lionsgate bought the rights to this franchise from Miramax, while other Miramax titles were bought by Echo Bridge Entertainment. Luckily for us, this is a good HD disc. The good looking transfer is aided by its sound, which isn’t full 5.1, but that was not LGF’s fault, but a product of the film’s intentions. While it won’t wow like most newer films, it nevertheless is a pleasing HD effort.

All of the extras are ported over from the DVD version. Nothing new, sadly.

Commentary: Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson chat it up, from all aspects on the film: the story, the killer, the references. Good stuff.

A Production featurette is rather EPK in nature; Behind-the-Scenes featurette is a bit more substantial; the Q&A is light-hearted and fun; and the disc finishes off with some Trailers.

The Film: Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

The Blu-ray: Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars