DECEMBER 30, 1996/JANUARY 6, 1997 VOL. 148 NO. 29
The holiday Wes Craven wants to be home for is Halloween. Even on Christmas he'll try to scare you. Here, the auteur of A Nightmare on Elm Street offers a Crueltide treat about a serial killer with an enshlocklopedic knowledge of scare-film tropes, from the Friday the 13th hockey mask to the Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer TV helmet. In one of the cute touches from Kevin Williamson's script, this psycho wears an Edvard Munch "Silent Scream" mask while taunting and then killing a frantic young woman (Drew Barrymore) alone in the dark. But that's just for practice. The next victim is a teenage virgin (pretty, plucky Neve Campbell, one of the preternaturally bedimpled kids on TV's Party of Five).
Craven began his career by imitating better directors (Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring was the source for his 1972 debut, Last House on the Left) and kept at it until he was mature enough to imitate himself. Scream, which has won some unaccountably indulgent reviews, is like his self-reverential Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994): an idiot-savant movie, knowing but not smart. For viewers who are not scholars of the slasher genre, the latest Craven will seem one more exercise in voyeuristic sadism, an excuse for the torturing of teens in tight sweaters. And that's exactly what this Scream dream is. --R.C.