Overrated and criminally dull

Rating: 4/10 (29 October 2013)

'Scream' hit theatres in the mid 90's, and alongside 'Clerks' and 'Pulp Fiction', quickly became a shrine for smug Generation X teens to gather around and worship as visionary new icons of cinema. Of course the irony was that all of said films simply thrived on stealing scenes and ideas from older films the creators had dug up on VHS.
The difference is that whilst Tarantino and Smith crafted their films as loving tributes to what had been, 'Scream' is content to just pretend to be clever.
The set-up is the typical slasher fair, teenagers are getting knocked off one by one and there is a very vague plot about one of them being the killer. What stood out at the time was that occasionally, one of the characters would reference a classic slasher movie, stopping just short of staring into the camera and winking. It's a lousy attempt at being self aware, and does little more than con the audience into believing that what their seeing is a satire rather than a rip off.
Our actors are a typical mix of unlikable, drop dead gorgeous teens who make it absolutely impossible to see them as anything other than victims in waiting. There's few with any personality or emotional impact, and shamefully most don't even die in interesting ways.
Production wise it's all well and good. Wes Craven knows how to direct a film and there was clearly a budget to this. The problem is that the world feels far too glossy. Even the worst slasher films that crawled out from beneath the 80's felt raw and intense. This film with it's hyper clean look and flawless inhabitants is too fantastical to take as horror. Even the gore is lit in just the right way to show off the actors.
Overall it's really just boring. Now that the self aware horror film has been beaten to death, resurrected, and beaten some more the whole fascination with 'Scream' is gone. If you were a teen in the 90's you might find it a bit of gleeful nostalgia, but for Generation Y it's a stale formula with a head-scratchingly large following.