"If this were a scary movie I'd be the prime suspect."

Rating: 7/10 (12 November 2000)

In the later stages of Scream Neve Campbell lambastes the heroines of horror movies, claiming it's always "some big-breasted girl who can't act." Well, Drew Barrymore might fill part of that quota, but she certainly can't be accused of not acting in the best twelve minutes of the whole trilogy. This is Scream as it should be: self-referential in its dialogue, yet genuinely scary too. This "lone girl in the house" trick is pulled off twice, and works both times, though thereafter the film degenerates into self-satisfied smugdom of the highest order.
There's perhaps a little more bad natured humour than might at first be evident, too. I remember laughing with friends at the humble reference Barrymore makes to Craven's back catalogue, when talking about Nightmare on Elm Street being scary. "Well," she replies, "the first one was, but the rest sucked." However, closer inspection shows that Craven had little input with many of the sequels - he wrote and executive produced the third, but had no involvement with any of the others. What would seem to the majority of the viewing audience to be a modest slice of self-mockery is actually a bitter filmmaker venting his spleen.
But the major praise heaped upon Scream is that it's what film students call "recursive". It's a horror movie about horror movies. It acknowledges that some horror movies aren't real, so therefore maybe it could be, blah de blah... Of course, all this could be quite fun were the point not made with sledgehammer subtlety. How many times does the word "movie" occur in this mov- film, anyway? Every two seconds someone's asking someone else who would play him or her in a movie, or claiming "this isn't a movie" only to be met with "Sure it is, Sid. It's all a movie, it's all one great big movie." Errrrr... is it a movie?
From the second half, beginning with the irritating video store scene, things start to get awry. No longer is the film scary, just roaming around it's own backside. For the last hour the film serves not to scare with occasional reference, but to show us all how "clever" and "ironic" it is - or thinks it is. The whole idea of satirical endeavours is that they're finely tuned and discrete, Mr.Williamson. Carving a script that goes "ha ha ha we're in a movie, it's just a movie, it's like an old horror movie don't you know ha ha ha is this a movie I think it's a movie it's like a movie" does not make you a candidate for Jonathan Swift's line of ascendants.
I probably enjoyed this more when I saw it on release. At the time Scream was probably one of the few horror films I'd ever seen, and so 90% of the references were lost on me. But now I've learnt a little more their gratuitous crow-barring into the dialogue really grates. You can almost imagine film nerds sitting there with a mental checklist, ticking them off one by one million. Sidney's boyfriend Billy Loomis (Oh, my sides! His surname is the same as the Doctor's in Halloween, and Halloween features in the film, too! And it's also the name of a character in Psycho, and we reference that too! And he looks a lot like Johnny Depp, who was in Nightmare on Elm Street; Wes Craven's other horror-revitalising movie. What a rib-tickler!!) enters, to be slated by another character "what's leatherface doing here?" Wait a minute - tee-hee-hee, snigger, chuckle! - wasn't Leatherface a character in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Well, I say! That really is superb!! What devastating wit! Ha ha ha! Oh, let's cap it all off by tossing in a reference to Carrie, and maybe you could talk about Jamie Lee Curtis being a scream queen. Oh, this is marvellous stuff!
Next, we get the much-touted "rules of horror films" sequence. If you have sex you die, if you drink you die... etc., etc., etc. The lovely Courteney Cox is watching all this backslapping goo on a hidden camera and concludes with "Uh... boring!" I quite agree Courteney. The problem with this "rules" scene is that the "rules" it exposes are nowhere near as clever or as revolutionary as they would like to assume they are, merely blatantly obvious. Only a pea-brained idiot would comfortably sit there going "Oh, how clever! I never realised that before!" Craven, who holds a Master's Degree in Philosophy, justifies the whole genre towards the end with: "movies don't create psychos. Movies make psychos more inventive." Is that the best you can do? Don't get me wrong, the genre has been unfairly derided, particularly in England, and Wes is a good spokesman for its plusses. But is that really all he could think of to say? Perhaps he was too busy, and hey, lest we forget, he didn't write the script, but this rollercoaster of smug inanity trundles on with a "can you guess how this movie is going to end?" bore-a-thon. Wes did try his hand at writing similar stuff two years prior, with New Nightmare. While this seems to be destined to be regarded as a "proto-Scream", it's actually the better film, and showed that Wes didn't need Kevin Williamson half as much as Williamson needed him.
Linda Blair does a cameo; a character peers into a mirror while saying, "after you branded him the Candyman?" It really does get very, very tiresome. As a historical document, this film will never lose its validity. It opened up a whole new subgenre within the field, albeit a short-lived one that has already passed. It is also made horror popular again, almost single-handedly upturning the fortunes of many genre directors. But as - I'll say it - a movie, it has sorely dated in under five years. Where it was once fresh and sparky, now it's glib and passÃ©.
Inevitable sequels followed, the second being arguably better. The third, written by Ehren Kruger after Williamson had moved on, was fine, but lacked impact. Maybe it was the familiarity of the characters, particularly the constipated expression of David Arquette (Who it's now impossible to take seriously after seeing his character reborn as "Doufus" in Scary Movie) and the hard-as-nails attitude of Cox. Moreover, it was a film whose time had now passed, and, the biggest irony of all, it failed to last as long as the movies it lampoons and unwittingly resurrected.