SCREEN: Trailer Review

CRY_WOLF

Martin Stein

Occasionally, movies come out that are so bad, studios refuse to screen them for critics. To help give you a heads-up, here's our take on the trailers.


Opening with text messages about murders on a high-school campus, what follows in the first of two trailers are lots of fast cuts of people screaming and running, and a hooded figure in a camouflage jacket with a big knife attacking students. Nothing creative about the killings, just hacking in showers, stairwells and swimming pools. Despite the editing, suspense is as absent as coherence.


The second trailer gives us more of the weak plot, consisting of a bunch of students conspiring to make up a serial killer on campus called the Wolf after an actual murder occurs—because we all love to taunt psychopaths. Naturally, as the kids send out e-mails of fake killings, the real murderer enacts them. You just know the killer will soon be going after his sources of inspiration, knocking off each of them one by one until reaching the most attractive stars, at which point the tables will be turned in a well-telegraphed twist.

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