"But while Scream has its frights, it feels more like one of those solve-the-mystery jigsaw puzzles than a real movie."
"The movie itself, for all of its ironic in-jokes, also functions as a horror film--a bloody and gruesome one, that uses as many cliches as it mocks."
"By the end of 'Scream,' characters who have argued about whether horror movies are really harmful are being hacked, chopped and otherwise shown that horror can be very harmful indeed."
"The problem with "Scream" is that it utterly fails as a parody and is actually more violent and ugly than the movies it's supposed to be needling."
"The first teen horror film comparable to both Psycho and Clueless, Scream uses its hall-of-mirrors self-referentiality as a source of comedy and vise-tightening suspense."
"While this is intended to separate "Scream" from traditionally bad horror by providing more realistic back-story, it instead makes the film darker than it should be by reminding us that in reality a dozen teenagers being slaughtered wouldn't be all that entertaining."
"There are also a few too many twists and turns in the script, and the ending is unnecessarily protracted."
"Eventually this film just falls in with the rest of the mediocre horror films where the characters do the wrong things (even though they all talk about how stupid people are in horror movies) and end up getting killed themselves."
"The movie itself, for all of its ironic in-jokes, also functions as a horror film--a bloody and gruesome one, that uses as many cliches as it mocks."
"By the end of 'Scream,' characters who have argued about whether horror movies are really harmful are being hacked, chopped and otherwise shown that horror can be very harmful indeed."
"The problem with "Scream" is that it utterly fails as a parody and is actually more violent and ugly than the movies it's supposed to be needling."
"The first teen horror film comparable to both Psycho and Clueless, Scream uses its hall-of-mirrors self-referentiality as a source of comedy and vise-tightening suspense."
"While this is intended to separate "Scream" from traditionally bad horror by providing more realistic back-story, it instead makes the film darker than it should be by reminding us that in reality a dozen teenagers being slaughtered wouldn't be all that entertaining."
"There are also a few too many twists and turns in the script, and the ending is unnecessarily protracted."
"Eventually this film just falls in with the rest of the mediocre horror films where the characters do the wrong things (even though they all talk about how stupid people are in horror movies) and end up getting killed themselves."