Courtney Gruenholz's Reviews > A Midsummer Night's Scream

I'm going to round this one up to three stars for GR.

To call this a "reimagining" of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream would be an understatement.

There are nods with a love potion and a man named Benny "Puck"erman as well as the main character having a "Sweet Seventeen" party with the theme of the play. A horror movie made in the 1960s is being remade or in this case...finished by actors instead of them putting on a play like Bottom and his crew.

Mayhem Manor had three young actors die on screen for real life but now a studio on the verge of shutting down wants to remake it and finish the supposedly "cursed" film. Claire Woodlawn auditions for a role because her father owns said studio and she has always wanted to be an actress along with her best friend Delia.

There is some teen drama craziness because Claire has lived next door to Jake Castellano for a long time and is crushing on him. Their parents are partners in the movie studio and Jake is going to be working on the crew despite the fact he believes it is a bad idea to go back to that cursed movie set, haunted by the ghosts of three dead teen actors.

The police did a lot of investigating but they could never find any foul play...just a very tragic circumstance aof so many "accidents".

That isn't why Claire's life is so dramatic...it's because Jake has a huge crush on Delia and treats Claire like his "sister" while Delia is hung up on a surfer guy named Shawn. The kicker is that Shawn really wants to get with Claire and both teenage boys are clueless to the girls throwing themselves at them.

Another factor is a girl named Annalee, a girl with a killer body who is a sort of "frenemy" with Claire and Delia. She thinks the girls are besties but Annalee has a habit of going after every living, breathing teenage boy...including Jake.

All because Claire just had to let it slip to Annalee that she has a crush on Jake and Jake is dumb enough to think that hooking up with Annalee will make Delia jealous. Instead all he is doing is breaking Claire's heart and driving her crazy...

When Claire gets lost looking for the make-up trailer the first day of shooting, she stumbles on a different trailer instead. It is filled with tons of bottles and a short and hairy looking man who calls himself Benny Puckerman, saying he has been waiting for Claire. She laughs off the claim that his bottles contain potions until he sprinkles one on her which momentarily makes Claire madly want to kiss him.

He takes the whammy off with another powder and tells Claire that the love potion is not what she needs...Benny is there to make Claire a star. Claire is sent out of the trailer while pretending that Benny's next potion made her forget everything but Claire knows she needs that love potion to use on Jake...so she'll be back to get it.

What a time to think about boys when it is clear that finishing this remake of Mayhem Manor is not in the cards because things start going wrong and soon become fatal like they did sixty years ago...

All of the teen characters in this book are supposed to be seventeen...nineteen at the most but they mostly act like twelve...thirteen year olds. All the girls are so catty to each other and the boys are just plain dumb but then again it is accurate to what I remember of being a teenager myself so...

I have been told that Stine stopped writing his Fear Street books because it is easier to write for that younger audience of his Goosebumps books and I can see that here. I like a good black comedy but it just doesn't seem to fit with the making of the horror movie and the shenanigans with the love potion...it should have been one or the other.

The horror part is excellent and could have worked more in favor alongside that these teens drink beer and live in California and are so acidicly wit and snarky. I was expecting at least a sort of PG-13 kind of book, an R would be pushing it, and instead it borders on PG...the kind that created the PG-13 rating in the first place.

Also, the ending was totally more of a Goosebumps sort of ending that could have been better if the tone of A Midsummer Night's Scream wasn't such a Comedy of Errors.

I said what I said...