Scream Is A Frighteningly Sharp-Witted Take On Slasher Movies

Scream was to slasher movies what Deadpool was to superhero movies. That may sound like the headline to some ill-fated Hot Take that ends up getting dragged all over Twitter, but it seems to make total sense to me, the guy who absolutely nailed the ending of His Girl Friday. Both Scream and Deadpool were attempting to tweak the noses of their respective subgenres, but neither were explicitly deconstructions of those subgenres thanks to how frequently they still indulged in well-known tropes of that subgenre, albeit in a self-aware manner. Thankfully, there's more than just a snarky self-aware streak in Scream, which has held up quite well in the more than two decades since its initial release.

Skyscraper Is A Forgettable & Generic Die Hard Knock-Off

Skyscraper is very obviously being made in the mold of the iconic 1988 movie Die Hard and who can blame writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber for wanting to make a film in that mold considering both how good Die Hard is and how there's a surprisingly large number of Die Hard emulators that have turned out to be awesome, most notably Roland Emmerich's criminally underappreciated 2013 gem White House Down. Unfortunately, Skyscraper will go down in history as one of the more middling Die Hard knock-off's, one that's shockingly bland considering its central premise is all about the leading man from Faster trying to break into a massive skyscraper that's on fire.