SCREAM

This Wes Craven film starts conventionally enough with high school student Casey (Drew Barrymore) and her boyfriend getting murdered in horrific slasher-fashion.   Initially though the killer has a telephone conversation with Casey about horror films, and then forces her to answer horror film trivia questions in order to save her boyfriend's life.

This hints already at how this film is going to give the horror genre a shot in the arm by introducing a meta element, by having the teenage protagonists aware of slasher movie tropes.  This is at its most obvious when a movie buff informs his fellow students of the three rules which films of the type we are watching must follow. 

The first of these is that you are safe if you are a virgin, which is amusing given that at this precise moment our main character Sidney is losing her virginity to her boyfriend Billy.

Sidney has been having a bad time of it: there's a slasher killer on the loose, we’re just coming up to the anniversary of the horrific rape and murder of her mother, and her father has chosen this moment to abandon her for a business conference.  To cap it all she herself is then attacked by the killer, who she begins to suspect might be Billy himself.

To add insult to injury her fellow students aren’t very sympathetic but then again they are a remarkably unpleasant bunch, who show little grief at the murder of Casey and her boyfriend. 

This points to one problem, that I didn’t really care much what happened to these characters, and when that is the case it is hard to feel much suspense, not that Craven makes much effort in that direction.

Instead the tone is more comedic and playful, in which it generally succeeds although the line “it’s school, you’ll be safe here“ may not have been intended to be as funny as I found it.

There’s a whodunnit aspect to the story which kept me engaged, even if the reveal at the end doesn’t make much sense.  

It’s not central to the plot but the biggest mystery I was left with concerned Sidney’s dad.  His conference was sufficiently far away that he was flying there yet somehow at the end of the film he turns up, tied and gagged, in his own house.

Quite mystifying.

I understand that one of the things that ‘elevates’ this sort of film is the ‘quality’ of the kills, in which case the only one that stood out to me was that of Sidney’s friend Tatum, involving a garage door.

I guess I was disappointed that not more was done with the meta aspect, but maybe that is developed in one or more of the many sequels. 

RATING: ✓ Cheers