Scream Queens.............
One of the chief complaints (among many) of the giallo has
been the convoluted plot. Yes, the giallo can have you lost in the abyss of
convolution. Like the fourth victim and who the murderer might be in Hawks’ The Big Sleep, after a while you start
to do a double take. Slashers aren’t as typical to get so lost in a body count
mystery as to produce such confusion that what a twist could be (a gas that had
you following the clues, with deductive reasoning trying to eliminate and
project the outcome totally usurped by details not necessarily altogether seen
or maybe missed because attention was diverted elsewhere) ultimately winds up
failing to quite live up to the journey to get there. So the journey is what
gives you your satisfaction. Sometimes a giallo will take you on quite a wild,
crazy ride and lay at your lap a twist that ultimately generates less than
thrilling results…but at least the ride was fun.
Scream
Queens shuffles the deck, shows you a card, asks if that is the card you
choose, hides it back in amongst its family of cards, and starts pulling from
said deck until the card you chose either emerges or doesn’t. Or at least that
is your mentality. You choose a card and keep hoping that card is the right
one. Many will choose correctly while others will totally miss it entirely (how
often you see slasher/giallo fans say they saw the killer immediately and were
right because it was so easy and other times the twist is so out of left field
it felt like the card wasn’t even in the deck but slipped in from the sleeve of
the holder’s shirt?). That is the fun part of a slasher or giallo…when it is
built on keeping you guessing and letting you see what you want, decide and
choose, and wait on the card if it is really the right one. Maybe this analogy
is about as concise and clear as the ongoing plot of Scream Queens, a series in its first that
never failed to grab your hand and drag you along across its hot coals. I often
wonder how many were burned when Gigi’s head sat on the plate instead of the
cooked turkey Dean Munsch was planning for the Thanksgiving dinner at Kappa
Kappa Tai in the episode, Thanksgiving.
Or when Boone was stabbed by his twin in Red Devil costume (we assume, right?)
instead of Gigi prior to Thanksgiving?
In Thanksgiving, the accusations and
suspicions fly. Dean Munsch, for almost the entirety of the first season, has
plenty of fingers pointed at her. Previously, she narratively admitted to
killing her ex-husband, but the serial killings themselves is another
altogether totally different thing. But trust issues exist even between father
and daughter, as evidenced by Grace and her own pops, both of which at one
point or another in the series pondered if they were the Red Devil killer to
each other. Thanksgiving was the
means to have the Kappa sisters, Grace’s dad, Pete, and the Dean all together
to posit theories about who the killer could be…and Dean was grinning like a Cheshire
cat during the whole “game”. Motives for killing the Dollar Scholars and Kappas
are put right out there, with Dean certainly taking her share of accusations
and Grace, too. Pete, with his “investigative journalism”, fingers Grace’s
father and Grace, in Black Friday,
decides with Chanel Oberlin to plot the execution of Dean Munsch! Before long
not one single character comes out of the series unscathed or without scrutiny.
Even if puffer fish poison and cryogenics didn’t kill Dean Munsch (the
cryogenics was especially silly), Grace was complicit in the attempt of the
first try at murder, and a failed convincing of Pete to help her a second time
certainly didn’t paint her as the typical kind of final girl that often is
featured in slashers. She does come to her senses, but the Kappas tell her to
leave the sorority, and even Zayday doesn’t have Grace’s back, believing the
only alternative to rescue all of them from certain death was to execute who
they think is the murderer themselves. The series continued to get more and
more absurd. Sure in Thanksgiving,
you visit Chad’s repellent wealthy family (Julie Duffy of Newhart, the late, great Alan Thicke of Growing Pains, Chad Everett as the “overseer of the hard-working
man”, and Patrick Schwarzenegger as the “hardcore porn connoisseur”) thanks in
part to Chanel Oberlin’s persistent desire to be his wife and passage into
further royalty, drug through a sewer of insults and even suffering a bribe to
go away from their son forever, with neck-braced Hester emerging alive and well
despite taking a spill down a flight of stairs in Ghost Stories…arriving just in time to inform them she’s carrying
the baby of their Dollar Scholar son. Pictionary with Hester the brunt of
cruelty and Chanel, during one of those brief heroine routines that seem to say
she’s got more to her than what so often seems hidden underneath pounds of mean
girl slurs towards the very ones who follow closely behind her, standing up to
Chad’s family, leaving the shindig with some semblance of dignity that later
diminishes when he pops back up at the sorority house resulting in a sense of
relief and joy, as if a yo-yo that goes up and down, never at rest with who she
really is.
Whether Chanel is speaking in less than glowing terms about
those who frequent passionately at Black Friday or buying her sisters iPhones
so they are ready to gang up on Dean at the most opportune time; she has
moments where you almost see something beyond the furs, jewelry, high heels,
designer dresses, and tiara, and Chanel doesn’t fail to deaden that with her
return to shtick,. It is a fascinating effect of the show. She won’t let you
get too close to her before calling heavier woman hippos or her own sisters
sluts and bitches. The insults are creative and fly out of her mouth as if
operating on locomotive speed with no break to halt them…Grace has spent a lot
of time up until Black Friday rolling
her eyes and scoffing at Oberlin because she just can’t seem to quit the verbal
abuse and shut the fuck up.
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