SCREAM
A film review by Michael John Legeros
Copyright 1996 Michael John Legeros
(Dimension)
Directed by Wes Craven
Written by Kevin Williamson
Cast Neve Campbell, Rose McGowan, Skeet Ulrich, Courteney
Cox, David Arquette, Matthew Lillard, Jamie Kennedy,
Drew Barrymore, Henry Winkler
MPAA Rating "R" (presumably for violence, gore, and profanity)
Running Time 105 minutes
Reviewed at The Colony Theatres, Raleigh, NC (21DEC96)
==
This splatter spoof from long-time genre director Wes Craven (A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET) wraps with a finale so uproarious and over- the-top that I left the theater almost giddy. The sequence, one of the year's more-memorable and pure gold for anyone with a taste for blood, is set at a Friday night slasher-movie marathon, with a trivia-testing masked killer knifing everyone in the house, from the obligatory teenage girl in the tight top to the wiseacre half-nerd horror-expert. That guy also gets the biggest laughs in the movie, both on-screen and off, when he stands up to recite The Rules: "Never have sex. Never drink or do drugs. And, never, ever, say 'I'll be right back.'" And, of course they do, and they are, and more than one person exits a room, never to return. You'll die, too, laughing as Craven recreates a scene from HALLOWEEN, and then cross-cuts between it and the original, the latter playing on a VCR. If only the rest of the movie were as ingenious. In fact, the first hour so closely (cheaply?) resembles the source material that you may just fall asleep.
Grade: C+
--
Mike Legeros - Raleigh, NC, USA, Earth legeros@pagesz.net (h) - legeros@unx.sas.com (w) I'm also on the Web! http://www.pagesz.net/~legeros/
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