In 1996, Scream revitalized the slasher flick, the genre born from John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween, in which a knife-wielding maniac attacks teenagers. Seriously, they're called "slasher" films because, without many exceptions, the killer uses a knife to kill his victims. A knife is far more intimate than a gun -- you could shoot someone from one hundred yards away, but that doesn't inspire terror. The goal of the maniac in a slasher film is to inspire terror in his victims, letting them see him and come to a horrible realization that they're about to die.

Wes Craven, the guy who brought you a new twist on the slasher flick in 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street with the novum of a supernatural killer, once again turned the genre on its head in 1996. Scream was self-aware unlike any slasher film before it. It was at once a prototypical slasher film and a film that made fun of the clichéd conventions of the genre. For a while, everyone was making slasher films. And they then stopped because they ran out of good ideas.

Cry_Wolf is not a good idea. See the underscore in the title? The movie attempts to be tech-savvy, bringing the slasher film to the "IM generation" of teenagers at college right now. These kids are connected to their friends via instant messaging on the computer, via their cell phones, and via instant messaging on their cell phones. Early slasher films were morality plays in which no character got any less than he or she deserved. Cry_Wolf could be a commentary on the depersonalization of the college environment through the use of electronic messaging, but it decides part of the way through the film that it doesn't want to be about that.

But wait? Isn't Cry_Wolf set at a prep school? Isn't this high school? Not on your life. This movie is about college, and anyone who disagrees is a stupid baby. "Prep school" is used as a proxy for "college" for some reason. I don't know why screenwriters Beau Bauman and Jeff Wadlow decided to make a film set at college and then called the college "prep school," but it's clearly college. Do you know of any co-ed prep schools? And I don't mean private school. I mean "prep school" as in, you get sent off to this place for nine months out of the year. You live there and you go to school there. This is not Lake Catholic High School. This is college.

And at college -- I mean, high school -- we use AOL Instant Messenger to communicate. I thought maybe AOL wouldn't agree to have its name used in conjunction with this film, resulting in a nebulous, generic IM program that looks a whole lot like AIM. But I was wrong. Again. The words "AOL Instant Messenger" are prominently displayed in close-ups of computer monitors. Looking back, why not? AOL's got a good thing going. They're setting up the current generation of high school to think that AIM is just what college kids do, like going to keggers and hooking up every night of the week. That way, they can justify higher ad rates and install more spyware on unsuspecting students' machines. Damn, I love product tie-ins.

So here's the deal: some girl gets killed at this prep school. A bunch of friends decide it would be a lark to make up a "forwarded email" in which the killer is a serial killer who's going to strike again. The only problem is that the stuff they made up actually starts happening. Man, it would be great at this point to talk about how anonymous electronic communication makes misunderstanding even more possible, and make it hyperbolic by having the "misunderstanding" turn into murder . . . but we're not going to. Heck, let's start in that direction and then totally abandon that line of thought. (This is what the screenwriters were thinking. I know. I was there.)

The main character is a transfer student who's been in trouble at lots of other prep schools. But he hasn't really been in trouble. He's just taken the fall for others because he's a Nice Guy. As the national representative for Nice Guys Everywhere, let me state that this guy goes beyond Nice Guy. He ventures into Stupid Guy territory. "Nice" is staying up all night with someone who's having some sort of crisis, foregoing sleep for yourself. "Stupid" is admitting to commiting a crime that you didn't commit just because you don't want to see the real criminal put in jail. Oh, and the guy is British for some reason. "Hey, here's this crazy movie, and let's make it exotic by having the protagonist be British!" Just imagine if they'd tried that for The Terminator. Sorry, this guy doesn't belong in the Nice Guy club because he's a big dope.

Why am I complaining so much? Because I was bored. Yes, this movie is actually boring. And the first half is really boring. A couple times I thought about leaving altogether. (Oh, and the dialogue was written by George Lucas while he was taking LSD.) If you're going to bill this as a scary film, let's see something scary!. There aren't even any real "jump" moments. Sure, there's a lot of chasing, but that isn't scary. That's vicarious exercise. By the end of some of these scenes, I had had a good virtual workout, but I wasn't any more scared.

Do yourself a favor and save your seven dollars for a bucket of popcorn for when you go to see Corpse Bride next week. Unless you want to spend seven dollars to see Hotty McHotterson Lindy Booth, who plays Nice Guy's love interest. But you could just wait until this came on TV to see her. So avoid this movie and go spend the money on nachos next week. Trust me, it's a better investment. At least the nachos won't be boring. And if you want to watch a good slasher film, go and rent Halloween or Friday the 13th. Heck, it's nearing Halloween time; one of them has to be on TV somewhere in the world.