Whats Worth Watching: ScreamAThon…Who Ya Gonna Call?

Scream - Courteney Cox, Jamie Kennedy, Neve Campbell
Dimension/courtesy Everett Collection
SCREAM, Courteney Cox, Jamie Kennedy, Neve Campbell, 1996, (c) Dimension/courtesy Everett Collection

Scream & Scream 2, (Saturday, June 27, 7/8c, MTV)

Hello Sidney…

Do you like scary movies? Good, because MTV is getting itself in gear for its Scream: The TV Series with back-to-back airings of the comedy-horror flicks that gave the world Ghostface masks and countless ripoffs (we still say Urban Legend is a gem!). Obviously, you can’t beat the 1996 original, which found then-Party of Five ingénue Neve Campbell, Friends-ter Courteney Cox and least likely hero ever, David Arquette, facing down the masked killer (spoiler: killers) taking out the teens of Woodsboro, one gruesome slaughter at a time. A hip mix of scares, sarcasm and pop-culture savvy, Scream changed the game for horror flicks by injecting buckets of humor into the script and allowing audiences to be in on the joke. Part two, while not as clever as the original, still delivers the scares and a nice twist on the sequel concept—the new killings are copycats of the first Woodsboro bloodbath—with our central heroes Sid, Gale and Deputy Dewey at college, surrounded by an all-star cast that includes Sarah Michelle Gellar, Josh Jackson, Timothy Olyphant, Jerry O’Connell and Portia de Rossi. And for the real film geeks out there, don’t forget that both flicks were also written by Kevin Williamson, who went on to kill off so many more people as the executive producer on The Vampire Diariesand The Following.