What's the big fuss all about?! Just another OVERLY self-conscious movie

Rating: Null/10 (1 April 2002)

After watching this film numerous times, I still can't figure out why it is hailed as one of the greatest horror movies of our time, or why its cleverness' is so eagerly acclaimed. I thought that the we're talking about horror movies within a horror movie' gimmick drastically ran out of steam after the first few references. From then on, it seemed a blatant case of Craven and Williamson saying "we're not going to bother coming up with anything new, we're just going to make a point of saying Hey, we ACKNOWLEDGE that it's been done before so therefore you can't criticise us about it!'" And this feeling permeated the entire movie- Hey lads, you can't base a film solely on in-jokes & movie references. Oh yeah, and DO NOT drag the classic Halloween into this poor imitation- if you wanted to produce a truly scary, chilling movie, then just put up the money for Halloween to be re-released, or else rent out The Blair Witch Project to see how it should be done.
The performances were nothing special, with only Lillard and Kennedy keeping the film afloat with their jokes, and, I don't know about the rest of you, but Marco Beltrami's musical effect that came on EVERY time a character reappeared into the frame annoyed the hell out of me!! The ending I found particularly poor: *SPOILER* I've seen less hemming and hawing about killing people in a James Bond movie, yet here the killers seemed so obviously uncoordinated that its a miracle they got away with it until now- I mean c'mon, even with a smidgen of common sense they would have surely killed Sidney and her father BEFORE stabbing themselves!! As for the identity of the killers, well yes, I wasn't expecting that, particularly the 2 killer twist. But hey, I doubt if ANYONE could've guessed that-- with the amount of red herrings that were given, I could've started a fecking fish farm!
All in all, a bog standard horror flick that we have to blame for the I know-what-Urban Legend-you-told-last-Valentine's-in-Cherry-Falls H20' trend that followed, not to mention two pointless sequels. Only watch if u must, but don't expect it to live up to the hype.