SCREAM (68)

Directed by: Wes Craven

Starring: Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Matthew Lillard, Rose McGowan

The Pitch: Teens menaced by serial slasher. Red syrup liberally splattered across the screen. And, of course, the "obligatory tit shot".

Theo Sez: "Is this some kind of joke?" asks the frightened girl of her scarily omniscient mystery caller in the splendid, giggly-but-creepy opening sequence ; "More of a game really," he purrs in reply - encapsulating the film's appeal and incidentally proving himself an unusually astute movie critic (for a deranged homicidal psycho, anyway). It is a game, and a funny and original one if perhaps a little repetitive - there's only so many times the characters can say things like "If this were a scary movie I'd be the prime suspect" before the joke begins to pall, especially since (like its heroine, with her unresolved "intimacy issues") this kind of movie is very much a tease : when someone actually gets killed it's not particularly interesting - all the fun is in the build-up, trying to guess who the next victim might be and (unusually for a slasher movie) who the killer is. It's like a song where the verses are better than the refrain, which is why it's not quite the modern classic some have hyped it as - though it's also, curiously enough, why it works as well as it does : the build-up is so enjoyable it overshadows the rather trite payoffs. Presumably, unless the slew of rip-offs currently in production can provide equally sharp dialogue and sympathetic characters (instead of just slasher-action and a pinch of joky Attitude), the scary-movie resurgence is set to fizzle out fast ; nonetheless, this one at least works very well - both as a horror film and a pastiche of horror films, both as a palimpsest for the cineaste (full of slasher-movie references, including a suitably mangled one to Craven himself) and a fun night out for the popcorn crowd. And, just in case you find its self-referentiality a tad simplistic - a small child's idea of post-modernism - it even manages (in suitably post-modern style) to anticipate and pre-empt that objection : as one clued-in teen explains to another, "if it gets too complicated you lose your target audience."