We all go a little mad sometimes

Rating: 7/10 (4 May 2010)

***SPOILERS*** Director Wes Cravens, who plays Fred the janitor at Woodsboro High School, craven attempt to make the ultimate teenage slasher film hits the bullseye with his 1996 smash hit "Scream" that has all the elements of every slasher movie known to man, or the movie audience, in it.
Played along the lines of the 1978 horror thriller "Halloween" which is seen on TV all throughout the movie "Scream" has this masked psycho tearing up all of Woodsboro in pursuit of Sidney Prescott who for some reason he has it in for. The cues to the psychos maniacal hatred towards Sidney are many with the most obvious being that her deceased mom was up to something no good when she was brutally murdered a year ago. But as the movie goes on it becomes evident that all the movie, and Wes Craven, is trying to do is out do every teenage slasher film that proceeded it and does an excellent, and gory, job in doing it.
We have such a diverse cast from a wild eyed Linda Blair paying an obnoxious and shrieking reporter as well as Henry ' The Fonz" Winkler as the strict disciplinarian principle Arthur Himbry, of Woodsboro High. It's in fact principle Himbry, together with about two dozen other Woodboro residents, who ends up being one of the Psycho's many victims in the movie. Himbry is attacked murdered as well as, thank God off screen, gutted and hung from the high school's football goalpost for sticking his nose where it shouldn't belong! The psycho killers business! The killing goes on at such a fast pace that you eventually don't seem to care anymore for those who get offed by the masked psycho in that they, like in almost every other teenage slasher films, are made to look, by their wild sex and drug parties, like they more then deserve what's coming to them.
The ending sequence that takes some 15 minutes is so off the wall and ridicules that by then you get the feeling that you've been had by Director Wes Craven's attempt to out do the teenage slasher genre to the point where the film, despite the massive blood letting in it, is more of a comedy then a horror movie. All you have to really do in finding out who's to be killed or not to be killed in the film is to see who's either naughty, besides the psycho killer, or nice in it. With those being naughty, fooling around and getting high on booze or drugs, making up almost 98% of the, movie's cast members!