A "Wes Carpenter" Flick

Rating: 8/10 (19 May 2010)

The characters in Wes Craven's meta-fest are in a horror film, and since they've seen so many horror films, they know what to do, and what not to do. "Don't say 'I'll be right back,'" Jamie Kennedy cautions a friend, "because whenever anybody says that, he's never right back." In a way, this movie was unavoidable. A lot of modern film criticism concerns plot deconstruction. Kevin Williamson's script does this to itself, using conventional slasher procedure with an ironic combination of genuine scares with dialogue that satirizes slasher film customs: Rather than leaving it to the audience to expect the horror banalities, the characters discuss them candidly. "Horror movies are always about some big-breasted blonde who runs upstairs so the slasher can corner her," says a character in this reference-happy film. "I hate it when characters are that stupid." The movie starts with Drew Barrymore at home alone, naturally. She gets an abusive phone call. All in all, she gets the Janet Leigh Treatment. It's a dry run.
Then, we meet another young woman. Her father has left for the weekend. Her mother was murdered . . . why, precisely a year ago tomorrow! Her boyfriend climbs in through the window. At high school, grapevine of cult killings spreads. The killer masquerades in a creepy Halloween costume. There are more phone calls, more attacks. The suspects include the boyfriend, the father, and a lot of other people. The Fonz as the high school principal is a likable little dash.
All of that is the plot. This revitalizing tongue-in-cheek genre piece is not about the plot. It is about itself. That is to say, it is about characters who are aware they are in a plot. These characters read Fangoria magazine. They even use movie-style dialogue: "It's called subtlety! You should look it up!" or "I was attacked and nearly filleted last night." or "Life is like a movie. Only, you can't pick your genre." The heroine has been declining her boyfriend's advances, and as another character brings up, virgins are never victims in horror films. Just bad boys and girls get slashed to pieces. Understanding they're among the thick of a slasher plot, the characters talk about who could play them, Tori Spelling, a young Meg Ryan. The movie itself, for all of its unexpected in-jokes, also works as a horror movie, a bloody and gruesome one, that employs as many clichés as it parodies, usually the same ones. That is it's wittiest charm: By exposing the conventions of the genre, the audience expect something else to happen, but the film then plays by those very same conventions.
One old linchpin is the scene where someone abruptly enters the frame, scaring the heroine, while a menacing musical chord stings. These scenes are ripe for parody, because the chord carries a theme of emergency, but in fact the surprising person is always an innocent friend, and although we can't see the newcomer because the framing is so tight, in the real world the scared person would naturally be able to see the newcomer all the time. Williamson is also educated about the way TV reporters are depicted in horror movies. The reporter this time, played by Courteney Cox, canvases delightful inquiries, such as "How does it feel to be almost brutally butchered? People have a right to know!" As dogged and crafty as she is, she still touts to a local deputy that they shouldn't drive to a remote country house when it's a nice night to walk down an unoccupied rural trail in the dark while a slasher is loose.
As a cinephile, I liked it. I liked the in-jokes and the behavior-conscious characters. At the same time, I'm disappointed in how many audiences have been duped into taking it seriously. It is truly ironic that it indeed resuscitated the entire horror genre and spawned countless take-me-seriously imitations. Even fellow filmmakers made a franchise out of spoofing it, when it's already a spoof. It's the violence and the gore, which are plentiful and sometimes intense, that deliver on the same note as it would if it were a normal cash-in slasher. The key is that the graphic violence and gore are disarmed by the ironic way the film utilizes and annotates it. Craven and Williamson have their cake and eat it too.