Scream (1996 Wes Craven)

Neve Campbell plays a gutsy heroine who continually manages to kick back and slip past the knife of the hooded killer, who alarmingly rushes around at you all over the place, but similarly falls over most pleasingly in an almost comedy pratfall style. Knowing film uses movie references throughout (Kevin Williamson, who also created Dawson's Creek) as part of the parlance of the youth, who seem totally unaffected by the slayings going on around them.

An unsubtle movie, for sure, with some good laughs, such as film buff screaming at Jaimie Lee in Halloween, as the killer stands over him - whilst later that film acts as a way of bumping off one of the (unexpected) bad guys.

Drew Barrymore. Skeet Ulrich, Lawrence Hecht, Courtney Cox, W. Earl Brown, David Arquette (the deputy), Matthew Lillard (who I think is better when he's reigned in, cf. the Descendants) Henry Winkler and Jamie Kennedy. Leiv Schreiber - who plays the innocent man in jail - I don't think we see?

The reason everything looked too close up was that BBC3 ran a 16x9 crop of Mark Irwin's  Panavision original.  (He shot eighties horrors Videodrome, The Dead Zone and The Fly. And 10 Things I Hate About You.) Thanks. We should have watched it on Amazon: