Directed by: Wes Craven
Starring: Max Thieriot, John Magaro, Emily Meade
On the night that a serial killer meets his demise, seven babies are born prematurely. Sixteen years later they are slain one by one.
You could view this movie as a dry run by Craven for his upcoming "Scream 4". If that's the case the Scream franchise is seriously screwed. This movie is a mess, yet another by a once horror-master who just can't capture the zeitgeist anymore. The script is written by Craven himself and has the worst teen dialogue outside a Diablo Cody screenplay. For half the movie I just didn't have a clue what these kids were talking about. For example the obligatory jock character gives our lead a dig in the ribs, referring to this as an "eight". Later the obligatory bitch character says he should have made it a "twenty". Wes, you're in your seventies, don't try and be down with the kids, just do your own thing.
.jpg)
Of course Craven is partly responsible, thanks to "Scream", for the insistence on horror being aimed at the teen dollar. If you compare it to John Carpenter after "Halloween", he rejected offers of countless teen oriented slashers. Thanks to this we got classics like "The Fog", "The Thing", "They Live" etc. Since "Scream" Craven has made two awful sequels, the laughable werewolf movie "Cursed" and this turkey.
If you were burying a time capsule and wanted to represent bad horror movies in the early 21st century this is the one to include. It's so cliched that even the asian character is the first to die (and nobody seems to notice he's missing from school the next day.) There's a twist near the end that's completely redundant to anyone who paid attention to the opening sequence. The kids are meant to be sixteen but all look 22. You get the idea.
If you've read my review of John Carpenter's "The Ward" you might think I have a problem with the seventies genre masters. That's not the case at all, I'm just being hard on them because I know they can do so much better. Leave the kids to their "Twilight" franchise and just do your own thing guys, after all great horror is timeless. "Scream" has dated a lot more in fifteen years than "The Hills Have Eyes" has in thirty-five. That's because the latter was made by a director who didn't want to be hip, just horrific.
1/10
.jpg)
.jpg)
Of course Craven is partly responsible, thanks to "Scream", for the insistence on horror being aimed at the teen dollar. If you compare it to John Carpenter after "Halloween", he rejected offers of countless teen oriented slashers. Thanks to this we got classics like "The Fog", "The Thing", "They Live" etc. Since "Scream" Craven has made two awful sequels, the laughable werewolf movie "Cursed" and this turkey..jpg)