shea_bennett

Darker and a lot more magical than the two previous movies, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban comes highly recommended. The three main actors have all aged but this works better with the heavier subject matter of the third installment of the Potter franchise. Michael Gambon is excellent as Richard Harris' replacement for Dumbeldore and after about half of the movie you fail to notice the actor has been changed. Emma Thompson and Dawn French are amusing in supporting roles. My only gripe is that the excellent Alan Rickman as Professor Snape was once again criminally unused, and overall it's astonishing how little screentime the A-list actors receive! Draco Malfoy is also totally useless in this movie - what happened to that boy? I figured by now he'd been inspiring fear, not laughs. Perhaps not suitable for very younger children - my 3 1/2 year old found the werewolf scenes a bit tense, to say the least. My eight-year old loved it, however. Overall, a strong 9/10.

Grin at 'cool' Fonzie and pathetic, nerd friends time travel on a saucer. Titter at cuddly mascot, 'Mr Cool'. Chuckle at the gangs' crazy adventures. Scream with laughter when you realise you've gone blind and you won't have to endure anything minute of this tripe. A horrible, horrible show.

Everyone used to talk about how SCREAM 'saved' horror; the irony was, as we've now come to see, it actually killed it off, and almost for good. While SCREAM is a pretty decent film, the firm tongue-in-cheekness of the script, combined with pretty teenage kids, and subsequent turnover at the box office, made studios go teen-horror movie mad. The end result was five years of complete drivel from the so-called horror genre, with few notable exceptions, all from outside the teen horror area (SIXTH SENSE, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, and lately RING). Tripe like I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, URBAN LEGEND, SHRIEK, and the spoofy but equally terrible SCARY MOVIEs helped turn horror completely into a farce. A joke, even. The follow-ups to SCREAM further contributed to this demise, both forgetting the joke and playing themselves further into near-total parody. Another irony is that Craven did this in-joke horror much better two years earlier with NEW NIGHTMARE; a far superior horror movie, and a very underated flick. Only lately, with the realisation that horror was actually a lot better in the 1970s, have we seen some signs that a turnaround might be on the horizon. Please, please, please... don't screw it all up by making another SCREAM, Wes.