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SCREAM

Director Wes Craven has long been obsessed with the idea of exploring the boundaries of fantasy and reality through the medium of horror films. His pop classic A Nightmare on Elm Street was about a ghost who could inhabit people's dreams and strike out at the real world through them. In The Serpent and the Rainbow, he mixed the Twilight Zone of magick, hypnosis, and biochemistry. Shocker featured a villainous ghost who lived on in an electronic reality. More recently, Wes Craven's New Nightmare blurred the boundaries between reality, film reality, and fictional film reality as no other film ever has. Scream continues this exploration of the relationship between cinema and audience, and manages to be a tremendously fun thriller while doing it.

The setting is purposely stereotypical to the point of outright cliché. In Italian giallo thrillers, a figure in black goes about committing grisly murders - but in the American variation, the killer's targets (and often the killer himself) are teenagers, bringing them closer to horror's core audience. The teens here are well-off California Valley Kids. A masked killer begins knocking off teens (including gorgeous Drew Barrymore), but the center of his attention seems to be Neve Campbell. Is the killer her boyfriend? Her father? The nerdy video store clerk with a crush on her? School principal (and unbilled) Henry Winkler? The guy she sent to death row for her mother's murder the year before with her testimony? Stalking tabloid TV reporter Courteney Cox?

Everyone knows that murder thrillers are half shocker and half guessing game. Cheap thrills and gags are strung together by the fun of guessing the killer's identity - and guessing which character will make the mistake of wandering off to be butchered next. The twist to Scream is that all the characters have some level of knowledge about this, too. In fact, slasher film history and trivia are woven deep throughout Kevin Williamson's script. The killer tortures his victims with trivia questions over the phone before attacking. Police deputy David Arquette seems to know that the police are usually no help in these cases. Horror fan Skeet Ulrich declares his virginity to everyone, believing this will give him a better chance of surviving through the final reel.

All this multilayered detail adds greatly to the fun, especially for horror fans depressed with the doldrums the genre has been suffering from the past few years. Heroine Campbell is wised up enough to fight off her attacker time after time, yet she can't help attending a big party the next night - a situation where we know she'll be unsafe.

In an era where the only theatrical horror films to be released are either disguised as science fiction and psycho thrillers or smothered by "respectable" Classics Illustrated renditions (ala Mary Reilly), Scream is a welcome self-examination - and a just as welcome unapologetic shocker.

SLING BLADE

What would have happened if Forrest Gump had killed his momma and her boyfriend with a gardening tool? Guess you never know what you're gonna get.

In this independent feature, writer/director Billy Bob Thornton plays a strange misfit trying to find a place in the world after spending most of his life in a mental hospital. While many filmmakers have used this premise as a basis for a violent bloodbath, Thornton is bent on a more introspective examination. At first, Thornton's anti-hero Karl appears to be a creepy hillbilly in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre mold, but eventually a more accurate inspirational model takes shape - that of Popeye the Sailor! Karl is simple, rough-hewn, honest, strong, and has an amazing underbite. His habits are unorthodox, but he's dealing with life in the only way he knows how.

Returning to his small town, for a time he finds a haven with kind-hearted folks like young Lucas Black, his mother Natalie Canerday, and gay family friend John Ritter. Yet, when confronted with redneck misanthrope Dwight Yoakum, who's been intruding on everyone's chances for happiness, Karl finds that his social responses to the problem are very limited.

The casting provides some real surprises - many people don't recognize Ritter or Robert Duvall in their roles here. Country singer Yoakum's performance has amazing depth. And Thornton has crafted for himself a part deserving of major award nomination.

Though some of the minor performances are a bit wanting, and the pace is often slack (Jim Jarmusch cameos as an ice cream vendor), Sling Blade is a fine character study of a truly unusual character which is amusing but not condescending, touching without becoming trite.

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