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| Directed by Kevin Williamson; Starring Katie Holmes, Helen Mirren, Barry Watson, Marisa Coughlin, Jeffrey Tambor, Leslie Ann Warren, Molly Ringwald, Michael McKean, and Vivica A. Fox |
I can admit that there was a time about two or three years ago that I would have sung the praises of young screenwriter Kevin Williamson, of course at that time he has only produced one screenplay. Now in the years that have followed Scream’s release, he has quickly killed off most respect that I once had for him. The first thing that came after Scream was the laughably bad I Know What You Did Last Summer. But by the end of that year he had already thrown out a respectable screenplay for Scream 2 only to replace it with a mediocre one (the fact that I saw Scream 2 seven times is simply because of its enjoyability to see time and again and not in its utter perfection in filmmaking). Since then Williamson projects have seen the light of day running from the bad The Faculty to the awful Dawson’s Creek television series (one must say that the only director that ever is mentioned on the show, which once touted itself as being film savvy, is Steven Spielberg). By the release of Teaching Mrs. Tingle, I was already joyous over Williamson not writing Scream 3 (the project has been handed to Arlington Road scribe Ehren Kruger).
Dealing with what happens when three students (Holmes, Watson, Coughlin) take their teacher (Mirren; a surprise to grace such a film) hostage when she has the ability to ruin the leader’s chances of being valedictorian. Teaching Mrs. Tingle, directed and written by Williamson, is one of the worst teen horror films I’ve seen in quite the while. Besides the inclusion of a well versed actress in the Tingle character, the film falls just as flat as other films of the genre like Urban Legend, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and The Rage: Carrie II (I’ll at least admit that there is very little that this film could do to fall below I Still Know What You Did Last Summer). The normal weighty screenplay from Williamson seems much more frothy in this, I’d come highly close to saying that this is more a comedy than a horror film. The comedy falls flat throughout and the action is laughably bad (I’ve never been the biggest of fans with camera’s showing the eye-view of a bullet, and this film’s arrows are no exceptions).
The film is off-putting and over-long, a terrible experience to sit through and the official end to any and all respect for Kevin Williamson.
