We tend to think of high-profile cinematic anniversaries and re-mastered re-releases to be reserved for the towering classics and the great prestige titles, stuff like the Kurosawa collection or the like-clockwork, once-a-decade “Citizen Kane” anniversary screenings.
But the cult classics and the modern era favorites deserve the same remembrances and recognitions, right?
Sure, most of them are on the streamers, and if you were smart enough to not get rid of your DVD collection, you might still have copies of them all on a shelf at home, but that’s not the same.
With younger audiences finally (mercifully) seeming to be getting bored with streaming and hungry for collective experiences, they want to get out and enjoy these modern crowd-pleasers with an actual crowd, like they were too young – or too not born – to do when they were released 20 or 30 years ago.
Luckily, some of the distributors are getting wise to that hunger and are dropping some of the most quietly influential and collectively exciting flicks of the past few decades back into theaters across the country (and across OKC) late this month and early next.
So dig through your closet (or your parents’ old clothes, I guess) and find your Ghostface cloak, your Guy Fawkes mask, and your snakeskin jacket, because we’re revisiting some favorites this fall.
‘Scream’ – Opens October 30th
After three decades’ worth of sequels, franchise overhauls, and innumerable imitations, it might be tough to remember just how groundbreaking and influential Wes Craven’s original “Scream” really was.
It revived the entire slasher genre while also elevating it to an un-killable box office mainstay and simultaneously deconstructed it into a formula that could be so easily reproducible that it effectively invited the whole endless glut of copycat killers that have come in its wake.
And that’s probably why it’s also tough to remember that the 1996 original was a comedy.
I mean, it’s a horror movie, yes. It’s got genuine scares, upsetting murders, and lots of blood that isn’t played for laughs. But it’s also a pretty brilliant and carefully designed send-up of the already tired tropes of the slasher genre, and a laser-focused satire of the cinema-obsessed cynicism of Gen X.
If you’re new to the franchise (somehow) this first installment is all about a group of high school friends being terrorized by a knife-murderer that’s killing them according to the “rules” of the same bloody horror films that they spend their time watching and dissecting.
While the wink-at-the-camera self-awareness of modern horror, action, and arguably just everyday life has become a sadly expected and eye-rolling part of practically every franchise picture and Hollywood offering, it was actually pretty hilarious and novel in the late-90s.
All these years later, the shambling, undying series spawned by “Scream” has been through a number of lives, first rising to become exactly the kind of big Hollywood franchise it was smartly satirizing, then becoming the same kind of redundant, schlocky film-and-television fodder that its characters were lampooning before being resurrected as an equally smart satire of the current reboot-obsessed industry.
But there’s still something electric and undeniably special about the ’96 original, and the opportunity for horror fans to relive that feeling – and for young audiences to feel it for the first time – might just make this 30th anniversary re-release a Halloween must-see this season.
‘Wild at Heart’ – Opens October 30th
Anyone that reads this column or that’s heard me speak for even five minutes about anything knows how deeply I love the legendary David Lynch.
The singular cinematic master of American surrealism left behind an immortal body of work, but the 1990s were surely his greatest golden period of output, with TV’s “Twin Peaks,” its terrifying theatrical companion “Fire Walk With Me,” the post-modern hyper-noir “Lost Highway,” oddities like “On the Air,” and the unexpectedly heartfelt “The Straight Story.”
But wrapped up inside that period is one of Lynch’s most enduringly emotional, most openly romantic, and most tightly realized film worlds with 1990’s “Wild at Heart.”
Laura Dern and Nic Cage star as young lovers Lula and Sailor on an odd, unraveling, and increasingly violent cross-country odyssey to reach California and escape Lula’s overbearing – and murderous – witch of a mother (played by Dern’s real mother, screen legend Diane Ladd, who snagged an Oscar nom for the role.)
As Sailor, Cage turns in one of his all-time quintessential film performances, and Dern’s Lula is maybe her first major step toward becoming one of the single finest screen performers perhaps ever.
And while it’s gory, shocking, deeply unsettling, and consistently uncomfortably funny, it’s all also kind of a post-modern interpretation of “The Wizard of OZ.”
But through all of the spiraling chaos and Lynch’s trademark strangeness, it also has one of the greatest and most deeply felt love stories of its generation, not to mention one of Lynch’s most iconic endings.
With some big laughs, big screams, major cringes, and a bristling soundtrack spanning from Elvis classics to thrash-metalers Powermad, “Wild at Heart” is one of Lynch’s most theater-ready films, so if you haven’t seen it big, now’s your chance to catch it in a brand new 4K restoration.
‘V for Vendetta’ – Screens November 1st and November 5th
It’s been a whole 20 years since the Wachowskis decided to follow up their gloriously divisive and blockbusting “Matrix” trilogy with a relentlessly stylized adaptation of one of the most subversive and groundbreaking comics of its era.
When “V for Vendetta” hit theaters in 2006, audiences largely weren’t really sure what to make of it at first, with ads flying over a lot of heads and causing some confusion as to whether it was meant as a superhero action yarn or a heady political sci-fi.
Of course, that’s exactly the intersection where the Wachowskis already lived.
When word of mouth caught, though, the film actually ended up raking in some good money and becoming a pretty surprising success with its thinly veiled (if veiled at all) critique of the nationalist, xenophobic, and homophobic rhetoric that was taking hold in the wake of 9/11 and the Patriot Act-propelled surveillance state that had followed.
Luckily, all of those concerns are behind us now and “V for Vendetta” stands as a simple reminder of just how far we’ve come as a society.
Unfortunately I’m joking (obviously) and the Wachowski’s take on Alan Moore’s seminal 1980s comic series is now sadly more relevant than ever (even if it still willfully misses much of the point of the deeply nuanced and thoughtful anarchy-versus-fascism study of Moore’s original comic.)
20 years ago, the world of “V for Vendetta” represented a stark vision of possibility, with its book-bannings, black-baggings, detention centers, panicked police shootings, criminalizing of the LGBT community, and open vilification and retribution against even critical talk show hosts.
Now, of course, none of those developments is the stuff of dystopian science-fiction. It’s just the news.
It’s never a good feeling to realize that a movie still holds up two decades later because the real world has caught up to its cautionary tale, but here we are.
In keeping with the Guy Fawkes Day theme that the violent anarchist hero, V, maintains throughout – a theme that still regularly flies over a lot of American heads – the 20th anniversary re-release of “V for Vendetta” has been timed to coincide with the 5th of November.
Something tells me the fireworks are going to hit even harder this year.
Catch Brett Fieldcamp’s film column weekly for information and insights into the world of film in the Oklahoma City metro and Oklahoma. | Brought to you by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Brett Fieldcamp is the owner and Editor in Chief of Oklahoma City Free Press. He has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly two decades and served as Arts & Entertainment Editor before purchasing the company from founder Brett Dickerson in 2026.
He is also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
