Reboot

UPDATED SYNOPSIS... In the dead of night, a young woman dressed in knickers and T-shirt is limping along a country road. Tracking her progress, her arms and legs are bloodied. She veers into dark, misty woods. She hides behind a tree. Close up of woman as she half hides, half peers over her shoulder, out of breath. A shadowy figure enters the woods and begins to stalk from tree to tree. Each time the woman in the foreground looks around, he is hidden, and each time she turns back, and the camera pulls focus back to her face, we see him move again, getting closer and closer until he is almost on her. Finally, he is behind her tree. Silence. An arm reaches around the tree to her. From nowhere, the girl does a huge belch into the camera. A director shouts CUT! Spotlights blink on around her. She giggles that she drank too much coke. TITLE - Six weeks later An open-top sports car drives down a country lane. A woman with a male passenger. The car pulls up to a picturesque, remote house near a lake. The girl is the 1st scene actor - Minnie Rhodes, the Jamie Lee Curtis-esque star of Quads. The young man is a British actor - Stamp. At the cottage, an older couple is sat alongside a young pair. Margo is the boss - as producer and writer, she holds casting and crewing power. Her husband Tommy has directed her last two films. Plus TC - glam, false eyelashes, hair extensions, selfie queen. And Felix - a ruggedly good looking bombshell. Felix asks Stamp the whereabouts of Fred - the actor who played Nathanael, the killer. Stamp simply replies with a line across his throat. Sacked. Then Margo introduces Fred's replacement Romeo to the group. Early evening. The group are at a lakeside table decked out with fairy lights and tea lights. Post-meal, Stamp recalls how he rented a horror film to try to look cool and get off with an older girl when he was 14 and how it backfired because he threw up at the gore and became the school joke. There is under table footsie. Everyone else recalls their first slasher horror. Plus, the careers they launched. Friday the 13th - Kevin Bacon, Halloween - Jamie-Lee Curtis, Nightmare on Elm Street - Johnny Depp, and so on. Margo explains the new script for their feedback. She splits everyone into groups. She adds that if this weekend goes to plan, the sales of the next film will skyrocket. Minnie and TC find a USB in their room and watch in horror it's contents on laptop. Minnie and Felix sit in woods, chatting through the script. They are lit from the front by ambient cottage lighting. Several times the scene goes dark as lighting in the house fades. Behind them, a silhouette of a figure holding a sword. As house lights come back on - he disappears back into the darkness. A twig snaps. They think Stamp is playing jokes, and Felix shouts at him. Tommy, TC and Stamp are reading the script and chatting. Suddenly, a fallen branch cracks in the darkness. Stamp thinks Felix playing tricks. He shouts back, then offers to get refreshments. Minnie and Felix are observed shakily at the cottage from outside. Felix makes a move, she kisses back. Minnie leads them to her room. Stamp is outside the bedroom window spying as Felix blindfolds and ties her up. Starts kissing her. Stamp pulls his fly down, enjoying the spectacle. A stranger enters the room behind them, wearing a fencing mask. Stamp whispers, 'You kinky fuckers, how come I wasn't invited to the party?' We see from Minnie's POV, obscured by the blindfold. She can just see the top of Felix's head moving towards her. Then it stops, and he is violently thrown about. A brutally severed arm lands on her stomach, splattering her. Minnie screams, and the stranger flees. Minnie tells the group what happened. Stamp says he saw a man with a fencing mask run away. Tommy tries calling the police; line dead. He tells them all to stay in pairs from now on. Talk turns to who the masked man could be. Why wear a fencing mask? Stamp points out everyone who's been to acting school could be the killer as they all did fencing at acting school. Group search for keys but all missing. There is a frenzied banging at the door, and eventually, Tommy opens the door to Margo. She asks why they are locked in? Tommy's keys miraculously turn up. He decides he will drive for help. As he gets in his open-top 2-seater, the camera follows a wire looped around a sturdy branch before feeding back down into the car behind the sun-shields and back to his headrest arm. Tommy sets off - at speed. We hear twangs as the wire pings off the sun-shields, then a whip as the wire's slack is taken up. It tightens around his neck. He is pinned to the seat momentarily, eyes bulging, before the car's momentum against the wire takes his head off. The rest of the group watch from the house. They just see Tommy's car crash. Margo, Stamp and Minnie rush to rush out to see if Tommy okay. TC waits at house. They find his headless corpse in the car. At the house, someone calls TC as she peers out the window. She spins to see Tommy holding his head between his hands. 'I'm okay', he says, 'I just really hurt my head'. Then the head drops to the floor, revealing the fencing mask. Now smeared with blood across the eyes; a slash across the mouth forms a crazed smile. The killer grabs TC by her long extensions, wraps them tightly around her neck and throttles her. With TC missing, Stamp and Minnie say they will find her. Margo wants to stay put. They head out with knives. Stamp and Minnie head toward noises in the forest; come upon a dilapidated tent. Inside it, Minnie finds a different REBOOT script. It doesn't include any of the original cast. She's confused. They hear a noise that sounds like TC. Seeing a silhouette of TC being strangled by a man, Stamp tries to separate the man but cannot and stabs TC's assailant. The sound of TC's screaming continues even though she is now still and silent. Her screams are taped from a Quads film. The man who Stamp has stabbed is, in fact, Romeo. The pair were rigged up, and the whole scene was made to set Stamp up to kill. Devastated, Stamp and Minnie trudge back to give Margo the terrible news. The sword comes through Stamp's chest right next to Minnie. He drops revealing killer. Unable to help, she screams and runs. Minnie hears muted voices of Margo and killer; bursts in and snarls get the fuck away from her! Margo reassures Minnie she doesn't need help. Minnie has realisation - 'I knew something stank'. 'Your affair with my husband stank!' 'That's what this was all about?' Margo says, 'No, this is about rebooting my franchise.' Explains that when Freddie here "accidentally" stabbed your predecessor back in film #3; sales spiked. 'Can you imagine what would happen to next film if whole cast died?' So that's what this is? Minnie holds up the USB stick. Minnie throws the stick to Freddie who catches it. Now you have only copy. Time to finish your job. Remember the plan? The killer plants sword in Margo's neck. 'The plan just changed.' Minnie drops and drives the knife through the killers foot stapling him in place. Minnie gets to Tommy's car. Pulls Tommy out; presses roof button, then finds reverse. She gets the car onto the road, but it won't go because of the wire. She sees the killer limp out of cottage. Backs the car up, unclips the carabiner. Floors the throttle, there is a bang on the roof. A sword rips through roof and pierces the seat between Minnie's legs. Sword slashes the roof open. Minnie weaves side to side; sawing stops. Then sword comes through again. She presses the roof button. Roof traps killer in folds. He frees sword and slashes at her blindly. Minnie buckles her belt, then pushes accelerator hard. At the revs climb, she pulls the steering wheel hard. They veer off the road into tree. The killer is thrown off the roof and hits the tree. She is briefly unconscious with her head in the airbag. Sun is coming up. A tear rolls down her face. Interspersed in titles. Killer shoots his kills and posts to Instagram. Margo's phone has post of her body. Likes clock up. A comment is posted CAN NOT WAIT TO SEE THE NEW QUADS MARGO!!