Cry_Wolf

It’s clear to me that the writers of Cry Wolf were unable to prevent the ending from being completely predictable, so they resorted to the trusty “three different twists in a row” method in order to throw the audience off. Unfortunately, by the time the third twist came around, I just couldn’t care less what happened to these people anymore. However, despite the multi-faceted ending, the journey toward the conclusion was interesting enough to keep me from feeling pissed off.

Owen Matthews (Julian Morris) has just moved into a new boarding school after being kicked out of his previous one due to consistent insolence and speaking with a British accent. He meets a sly young lass by the name of Dodger (Lindy Booth), who is part of the in-crowd and likes to sneak out in the middle of the night to play “lying games” with her popular and appropriately multi-cultural friends. Dodger is the leader of the group, and she decides that this year they are going to up the stakes of the game by playing it with the entire school (unbeknownst to everyone outside of the group of course—I mean it’s a lot easier to win games when people don’t realize that they’re even playing one). The ingenious plan is to use the recent unsolved shooting death of a townie in order to create a serial killer who moves from school to school using the same pattern: kill a townie as a warning shot and then proceed to butcher all the members of the in-crowd. The only problem with their foolproof scheme is that they plan all of the details right in front of other students. (?)

Obviously, as we see from the previews, Owen starts to receive IM’s from The Wolf (as they dubbed him), and members of the in-crowd actually do start getting killed off. Or do they? Not quite sure whether his newfound friends are playing a harmless, innocent practical joke or whether they really are becoming the victims of an actual killer, Owen runs around the campus doing…well, basically nothing except hit on Dodger. I suppose that’s fairly reasonable considering.

The scares in the film mostly come from brief encounters with The Wolf, in which the characters attempt to determine whether they are the victims of a practical joke or about to be murdered. There are several times when the killer does turn out to be one of the friends, and several times when it appears that a character has guessed incorrectly—oops, you lose the game, haha! Eventually, all of the remaining in-crowd kids get together in a dark, scary chapel on campus and try to determine whether the prank has become real or not.

All in all, Cry Wolf wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t as scary as I had anticipated it would be, and I was particularly annoyed with the triple-ending tactic, but, nonetheless, it was interesting to watch. I’m still not sure why AOL would want to showcase their product in the context of a chat-happy serial killer, but perhaps I am just not familiar with current marketing techniques these days. I recommend Cry Wolf as a relatively decent horror flick, but it really wouldn’t hurt to wait for the DVD to come out.