The Professionals
Lee Marvin, Woody Strode, Robert Ryan, and Burt Lancaster are hired by Texas millionaire Ralph Bellamy to enter Mexican and take his kidnapped wife, the lovely Claudia Cardinale, back from Jack Palance, a Mexican bandit. While this is basically a wild west heist film exploring themes of love and jaded adventure seekers, the team-building aspect is taken care of within the first ten minutes of the movie. From then on it's almost pure action as four men who are the best at what they do go off to face a man who is also the best and find out that the situation really isn't what they were told. That's fine though, as they still do the job, even if they are having to kill their old friends.
I love where this movie sits in the pantheon of 1960s Westerns as they steadily grew more violent and exploitative, culminating in The Wild Bunch's glorious machine gun massacre in 1969. The Professionals was released in 1966, the same year as both The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and the original Django. These films showed the dark, gritty, violent side of the American West, in which scarred men with nothing left to lose did their damndest to find something worth caring about. In The Professionals they find it in the end, but at great cost to their bodies, the deaths of former friends, and in a bloody exclamation point to a long history of violence, war, and lost innocence.
Another aspect that intrigues me is how late this movie occurs in history. The film takes place in the late 1910s, with automobiles, automatic weapons, and aging men. The age of the characters is punctuated by the technology, which also heralds the end of the Wild West. But what I really like is how these guys argue about the myth of Mexican revolution and the harsh reality, a great statement that also applies to how the Western was mythologized versus the cold truth of America's expansion. This theme is further explored in The Wild Bunch to its inevitable violent end, but here there is still just enough magic left to have a somewhat happier ending.
Scream
Ah, the other Scream. I decided I would follow watching a great film with watching a truly awful one, and this 1981 slasher film really is awful. It also has a relation to The Professionals: Woody Strode stars in both, The Professionals coming at the height of his career, while Scream came at the end. But even if you are a Woody Strode fan(and I am. He has a physicality and an intensity that reminds me of Yul Brynner, and I believe he was every bit as capable of an actor but was criminally underused and relegated to B-movies), this movie is so awful that it isn't worth watching for the 4 minutes in which he appears to give what little backstory there is. Even he seems bored of it.
Basically a bunch of folks ride a river to a ghost town and spend the night, only to see their rafts destroyed and their friends picked off one by one in the night by a never shown assailant. The killer is implied to be the ghost of a long dead sea captain, but the audience never finds out, and the characters definitely never figure it out. That said, these characters probably couldn't figure out how to escape a wet paper bag if they had a buzzsaw and a guidebook on how to do it. They quarrel, they harass each other, they complain, but they don't really try to help themselves and end up effectively letting the biggest asshole run the group, and he's pretty much an idiot who is too busy giving shit to the fat, unintelligent, fearful comic relief character. They do at least attempt to put up booby traps to give away their assailant and then later bar the door, but they even manage to screw up these basics and nearly get killed off until an elderly couple shows up in a pickup truck and saves everyone after the ghost is "shot" by someone off screen.
In fact, most of this movie takes place off screen. Just about everyone dies there, the rafts are destroyed off screen, the final fight takes place off screen, and what is on screen is usually too dark to see. The audio is a mess(the soundtrack overrides all the dialogue...which mostly comes from off screen), the contrast is off, and what we can see is mostly characters sitting around arguing while the audience wonders when the next person will eventually die in one of the boring kills.
If there is anything that this movie does differently from the rest of the slasher genre, it doesn't kill women. Only one woman is chased by the mysterious assailant in the entire film, and she survives with little more than a bump on the head. It's only the men who get slashed, stabbed, cleaved, or hung. This might have made for an interesting change of pace if there was any other substance to the movie, but it just isn't there. Just like the characters in the movie, the film seems to be waiting around for something to happen. And when it does happen, there's a momentary freak out, it acts like an idiot, and then it sits back down and waits for something else.
Do you guys remember a few pages back where I said Mortuary wasn't very good? It's way better than this, and it's pretty bad. I would say Scream is probably the worst slasher I have ever seen, because it is both amateurish and completely boring.
So yeah, the other Scream is better. Way, way, way, way, way better.
I did watch that scene three times. Definitely the best part in the whole movie. 
