After the success of 1996’s Scream, we were flooded with knockoffs. Now that the franchise has been resurrected with legacy sequels, respectable box-office earners themselves, another (smaller) wave of imitators has hit — few more brazen than That’s a Wrap.
In the movie, piggish director Mason Maestro (The Sex Files veteran Robert Donavan) and his wife (erotic-thriller royalty Monique Parent, Busted) gather his cast members — no plus-1s, no phones — to a premiere party for their new slasher film’s teaser trailer. That’s right: just the teaser trailer.
Maestro’s actors include the Black one, the gay one, the weird one, the stoned one, the prude one, etc. — all treated at surface level because they’re just here to be murdered, anyway, between discussions of the casting couch, going full-frontal and dying off-camera. Both in the Maestros’ masterwork of mayhem and then at the shindig, they’re stalked by the bewigged psychopath of the movie they just made.
If the meta-on-meta setup reminds you of Scream 3, congratulations! The difference being, That’s a Wrap is the one where a character jokes, “Girl, by the end of the night, I bet you’ll be getting nailed on a side stage,” and you know instantly and exactly where that’s going.
Among the large cast of partiers, only the always welcome Sarah French (Bermuda Island) is memorable. The others get lost in exchanges of truly moronic dialogue:
Girl: “Get your D-O-N-G hard.”
Guy: “Prepare your T-W-A-T.”
Girl: “It’s already marinating.”
That’s a Wrap is at its most entertaining in the prologue, in which the radiant Cerina Vincent (2002’s Cabin Fever) vamps her way through the Drew Barrymore role. Meanwhile, Dave Sheridan, perhaps best known for the Scream spoof Scary Movie, self-reflexively cameos as the studio’s night-shift security guard.
This sequence whips up a decent chill or two as Blood Feast remake director Marcel Walz tries his best to give this show some stylish suspense. Then he abandons the tone — but not the light gels, oversaturating each setup in a crutch of primary colors. From here, the movie sweats an overt campiness that feels one international cut away from becoming pornographic.
If it’s gore you’re after, Walz will do you proud, staging kill scenes so graphic and suggestive, Carol J. Clover might be rushing to her word processor to crank out yet another updated edition of Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. It’s often difficult to determine whether we’re supposed to interpret these acts as hellish or humorous. When one of those examples is a guy throwing his own disembodied dick at the killer, off whose head it bounces in slow motion, that’s a problem, That’s a Wrap. —Rod Lott