Wes Craven – A Retrospective

This is the first time I've gone through the body of work of a filmmaker and simply regretted the decision. After having done several foreign filmmakers in a row (Kurosawa, Tati, Melville, and Kobayashi), I decided to search out a more modern, American filmmaker with name recognition, and I quickly settled on Wes Craven. I'd known Craven's name for…

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Wes Craven: The Definitive Ranking

I was really disappointed in Wes Craven's career. I knew of the highlights before embarking on the whole journey, but I didn't expect pretty much everything outside of those highlights to be something close to dreck. What makes it most frustrating is that his earliest films, horror films made because they were the only things…

Scream 4

#15 in my ranking of Wes Craven's filmography. #5 in my ranking of the Scream franchise. For all the façade of being rule and genre breaking forays into the slasher flick space, the Scream movies sure do stick to a formula pretty closely. They mess with details here and there from movie to movie, but…

My Soul to Take

#21 in my ranking of Wes Craven's filmography. This movie is dull, drawn out, confused, over-stuffed, and generally kind of boring. I also kind of hate it. However, it's one of the last pieces of evidence that points to Wes Craven's potential as a storyteller. He had real ideas buried under the mess that get…

Red Eye

#3 in my ranking of Wes Craven's filmography. This is the sort of movie that Wes Craven should have been cutting his teeth on in the late 70s and early 80s. Establishing himself in Hollywood, he should have gravitated towards tighter, smaller thrillers with an emphasis on actors that he could make quickly and efficiently,…