Product Description

A crowd-pleasing smash hit with a sizzling cast -- critics are calling SCREAM the hippest thriller of the year! Afer a series of mysterious deaths, a seemingly peaceful community becomes a place where no one is safe ... and everyone is suspect! That's when an offbeat group of friends rally to unlock the town's deadly secrets ... and get caught up in a lively mix of thrills, chills, and surprises! With hot stars Drew Barrymore (CHARLIE'S ANGELS), Courteney Cox (TV's FRIENDS), Neve Campbell (54), Skeet Ulrich (AS GOOD AS IT GETS), and David Arquette (BEAUTIFUL GIRLS).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8078 in DVD
• Brand: Disney
• Released on: 1998-12-08
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Director's Cut, Dolby, DVD, Letterboxed, Special Edition, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 111 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
With the smash hit Scream, novice screenwriter Kevin Williamson and veteran horror director Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street) revived the moldering corpse of the teen horror picture, both creatively and commercially, by playfully acknowledging the exhausted clichés and then turning them inside out. Scream is a postmodern slasher movie, a horror film that cleverly deconstructs horror films, then reassembles the dead tissue, and (like Frankenstein's monster) creates new life. When a serial killer starts hacking up their fellow teens, the media-savvy youngsters of Scream realize that the smartest way of sticking around for the sequel is to avoid the terminal behaviors that inevitably doom supporting players in the movies. They've seen all the movies, and the rules of the genre are like second nature to them. One of the scariest/funniest setups features a kid watching John Carpenter's seminal Halloween on video. As Jamie Lee Curtis is shadowed by Michael Meyers and the kid on the couch yells at her to turn around, Craven reverses his camera and we see that the kid should be taking his own advice. The fresh-faced young cast (including Drew Barrymore, Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette) is fun to watch, and their tart dialogue is sprinkled with enough archly self-conscious pop-culture references to make Quentin Tarantino blush. --Jim Emerson

Customer Reviews

These days you got to have a sequel !
The writing behind the film is excellent, the idea of teens imitating the movies with more twists than twister. An action packed slasher movie with mystery behind it all no imortal killer just messed up teenagers. It was impossible to guess who done the murders from the begining, you may think you know who is doing the killings then somthing happens and turns your eye to someone else. Overall a fantastic beginning to the best horror trilogy around. The DVD has a few interesting special features, go for this special edition rather than the standard DVD.

IT MADE MY LIST OF GREATNESS!! ACCEPTABLE!
YES!!! I HAVE TO SURPRISINGLY SAY ,SCREAM PACKS PUNCH, IT HAD A WEIRD PLOT BUT ENTERTAINING VIEW KEEPING U ON THE EDGE OF YOUR SEAT, AND THE KILLER KICKED A**! DIDNT TAKE 9 MINUTES FOR THE KNOFE TO COME DOWN, IT WAS ACTION PACKED, A BIT STUPID ON THE KILLERS STABBING THEMSELVES, A SCENE FROM SCOOBY-DOO, BUT THIS IS AN ENJOYABLE FEATURE NO DOUBT, GET URS HERE ON AMAZON TODAY A GREAT COLLECTORS ITEM, SAD TO SAY SCREAM 2 AND 3 SUCKED!! BIG-TIME!1

A HALF DECENT SCARE MOVIE
But once again actors in their mid-to-late twenties are playing teenagers and the effect of the film is totally ruined as they behave and act so unrealistic. While most people may consider this a cool movie just because of the scares and the over-hyped "irony" there is actually an intelligent plot with a pretty good twist. I notice this more as I am a writer and this is one of my fave horror/thrillers.

I advise you not to watch this for the pumped up scares (to a very loud soundtrack) but for how a typical "who's the killer?" plotline can be a little better than it is believed to be.

Some of the characters can be really annoying. In fact the only one that doesn't enrage me is Dewey. His idiotness makes me laugh and diverts my attention from the other characters in the very slow "character building scenes".

The direction and photography are very bland. Wes Craven did a much better job of a real horror film with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. Here it just seems as if he aiming at the teen/popcorn market. You'll notice that, with these kind of movies, most of the characters (not actors) are teenagers and the tone of the film is mostly "safe". In the Scream "sub-genre" there is never any REAL edge.

After this movie was made, many, increasing bad, movies that were all exactly the same rolled off a conveyor belt in Hollywood. They were easy moneymakers. Craven knew this beforehand but deep, intelligent movies do not sit well with mass audiences. The blander the style of film is, the more popular it will be with the majority of audiences.

The plot in this one redeems these bad qualities. I just wish for a real horror film to come out of Hollywood.

The DVD is in Dolby 5.1 and is letterboxed at 2.35:1. It is also NOT the more gory directors cut I mistakenly believed it to be.