While the hero of Cry_Wolf runs for his life roughly halfway through the movie, he passes his school’s cafeteria menu board touting the dish of the day: “TOASTED CHEESE.” It’s the perfect summation of the film itself: well-done junk.
Newly transferred to Westlake Preparatory Academy, British high school student Owen (Julian Morris, Donkey Punch) is befriended immediately by cute redhead Dodger (Lindy Booth, 2004’s Dawn of the Dead), who invites him to join her bored, rich, mostly deplorable friends to play a “lying game.” Owen’s victory and a recent unsolved homicide in the nearby woods sparks a bigger idea in Dodger: Convince the student body that the murderer is a prep-school serial killer who has made his way to Westlake and is just getting started. The budding lovebirds concoct an entire backstory and outfit (orange ski mask, camo jacket, hunting knife) for “The Wolf,” and let one mass email do the rest.
Anyone can guess where Cry_Wolf goes from there, in part because director Jeff Wadlow (Kick-Ass 2) flat-out shows you, flashing-forward with quick clips of students encountering The Wolf — scenes which play out in full an hour later. That baffling choice defuses some of the suspense … but not all, as Wadlow and fellow scribe Beau Bauman (who later co-wrote 2007’s Prey) planted twist after twist after twist. That’s not to say all of the curves pay off; the exposition-packed final scene in particular collapses under its own weight.
Cry_Wolf came too late in the teen-slasher cycle beget by Wes Craven’s Scream a decade earlier to make a mark, yet it’s a better effort than most of the imitators. That includes 1998’s Urban Legend, which Cry_Wolf resembles in theme. Wadlow’s work is now dated, with quaint plotlines reliant upon the Nokia 3300 mobile phone, AOL Instant Messenger and Jon Bon Jovi. —Rod Lott