Hacky

Kiddies deserve originality, too. Hard to believe something such as this young-adult-fiction, "Goosebumps"-type slop is written and filmed for an older audience than were Lewis Carroll's Alice books. No wonder nobody reads anymore when they're raised on this derivative emptiness. It's merely let's imitate other horror fiction, but remove any of the complicated mature stuff that might challenge readers and viewers and replace it with nothing. "Scream" (1996) without having to worry that you haven't seen this or that other horror movie that it's referencing. Instead, it's as though the filmmakers literally brought out their production-meeting crazy board mapping out their franchise and picked a character at random to serve as their in-movie surrogate to explain it to the other characters. Y'know, the role of film buff Randy Meeks (Jaimie Kennedy) in the Scream series. Interesting marketing strategy by the producers and Netflix, I suppose, especially since they're releasing the trilogy within a three weeks span, but it doesn't seem to actually make the cinematic-universe building interesting. And no wonder, too, that nobody watches non-tentpole franchise installments anymore when Rotten Tomatoes is certifying fresh this junk with a some 86% score.

One horror series, however, where I found this sort of in-house referencing to work--because everything is the next Marvel Cinematic Universe nowadays, I guess--was "The Conjuring" movies, especially "The Conjuring 2" (2016). That's because it was still cinematically reflexive, but the characters were the filmmakers of the films-within-films rather than the "Scream" sort of meta-ness of referring to other movies outside of its diegesis.

Besides "Scream" and "The Conjuring," we get "The Cabin in the Woods" (2012) light treatment of multiple generic slasher-film monsters to chase the teenagers around. They're such annoying teens, too, that one just hopes their deaths will be gruesome. Too many lazy writers these days passing off characters yelling at each other as supposed character development. Maybe reality shows are to blame--I don't know. And, I'm guessing that the division of the towns between "Shadyville" and "Sunnyvale" (real subtle there) is going to mean something in the sequels, because all the exposition going into that here turns out to be a huge waste of time as far as goes this first movie's narrative. Plus, boy, is that hackneyed, too. It seems as though every bit of young adult fiction features these thinly-symbolic blatant class structures that temps one to hit their head against a wall. Always the romantic couple are from different sides of the tracks. Blame "Animal Farm" and "Romeo and Juliet" maybe, but we got the same such thing in The Hunger Games series, the Divergent ones, "Alita: Battle Angel" (2019), etc. This is the first one I recall seeing where the couple are lesbians, and the changing-clothes episode may be a bit steamier than usual, but that's about it.

The best part--maybe the only promising thing here--is the opening sequence and in particular the girl working in a bookstore. It's Drew Barrymore's role in "Scream," but with books instead of movies. It's brief, and the filmmakers don't even sustain the reflexivity throughout the sequence, let alone the rest of the movie, but it's an apt beginning for a movie based on a book series to be full of other books--perhaps including some of those that it rips-off, or rather rip-off those that imitated them in the first place. A copy of a copy. I'm not sure, because that's a hard book to read, but Jean Baudrillard may've been right... or was that Chuck Palahniuk.