Clever, highly self-referential

Rating: Null/10 (3 April 2000)

This is a clever little movie.
I'm 53, and go to see teen movies out of curiousity and to try to stay tuned to a quickly evolving, often intriguing culture. Sometimes I get discouraged at how mindless culturemakers think teens are. I felt this way after seeing Romeo Must Die.
But this movie gave me hope, as did the little gem GO last year. I know that there are many who would go looking to be scared, who would take this movie (or any one) seriously -- folks who even rank grossness as a thrill.
But this movie is like the first Scream movies in making fun not at slasher flicks, but at the people who come to see slasher picks, or more precisely, the reasons they do. However, this movie does so much better than scream because it uses a novel device: many of the deaths are extremely complex sequences of improbable coincidences.
It fits with the story, as only death could string these together. But it provides what Scream lacked: a greater distance from the actual slash. In fact this movie is NOT scary, nor gory by current standards. Instead, it spends its time on introspection about the medium. Andy Warhol sophistication finally hits teen culture. The level of this humor gives me hope about the future of the minds of our kids.
I only wonder what can come of it next. If every instance of distance requires that we carry the vulgar with it as referent, does this give new life to the base?