unintelligent, lacking innovation...but watchable

Rating: 3/10 (27 March 2002)

Its hard to understand why everyone considers this movie to be so ground-breaking. It is not being creative and original to use a tired, cliched plot and garnish the script with 'ironic' self awareness. You could achieve the same effect by sitting through a regular slasher movie with a group of friends discussing and laughing at its cliches with them. Theres no real innovation here, same old characters, same old twists, and despite Craven's attempts to achieve an ultra modern feel, it will seem as dated as the camp slasher horror movies of the 70s in 20 years time. So many movies in the horror genre fall in to the trap of being too 'of the time', and this is no exception.
You almost get the feeling that the jokes about genre cliches and the intertextual references are there simply to cover Craven's back from criticism - as if he wanted to make a slasher movie but didn't want to face the film being denounced as an unoriginal piece of trash, so acknowledged how bad it is within the script. While it is likely that Craven's motives were probably less simplistic than this, it certainly seems that this is the majority of fans reason for liking it - they want to watch a slasher movie and feel smart doing it. Which doesn't seem likely.
On the plus side (i hate reading one sided reviews criticising movies i like, so i better be fair writing this) the film is fairly well directed and acted throughout, and manages to capture the atmosphere of the films it was inspired by. The tension is well established, and its good for the odd scare. It's certainly watchable, its just a shame that a director so clearly aware of how stagnant the horror genre has become can only point and laugh at the existing cliches rather than try to come up with something ground-breaking to revitalize the genre.
If you want to see a good horror comedy, steer clear of this and go for Evil Dead 1 or 2, both of which are funny and scary through their innovation and spectacular visual techniques rather than through pretentious self mockery (who'd have thought self mockery could ever be pretentious?! and yet Craven managed with this!). While neither are intelligent films, they dont aim to be, merely to entertain, amuse and terrify - which they achieve, and this is a real rarity.
I give this movie a 2/5, simply because to give it a 1 would be to say it was as awful as its sequels, or even the dire 'Scary Movie', and it deserves (a little) more respect than that.