Cry Wolf

Cry Wolf, a teen horror-thriller riddled with hairpin twists, was the winning entry in the inaugural Chrysler Million Dollar Film Festival competition.

Writer-director Jeff Wadlow and co-writer Beau Bauman beat hundreds of other aspiring film-makers to the $1 million grant needed to finance their picture.

If Cry Wolf was indeed the cream of the crop, the other entries must have been an exceedingly wilted bunch.

For all its audacious narrative plotting, Wadlow and Bauman's thriller is little more than a diluted cocktail of Scream, Urban Legends and the little-seen 2000 thriller Gossip.

The teen protagonists display the same disregard for common sense in the face of impending carnage and are totally blind to double-bluffs which are signposted well in advance.

A daring and somewhat outlandish denouement delivers one surprise, which we don't see coming, but this final flourish stretches credibility to breaking point, relying on luck and split-second timing.

As the film's certificate suggests, bloodletting and gore are thin on the ground - a necessity perhaps of the $1 million budget - not that a flurry of make-up and special effects could inject life into the formulaic script.

The good-looking, fresh-faced cast play their parts with the minimum of effort. Leading lady Lindy Booth was far more compelling in her other recent horror outings, Wrong Turn and Dawn Of The Dead.

Every year at Westland Prep, an elite boarding school recently shocked by news of a brutal murder close to campus, a select group of students forms the liars club.

The participants play late-night games of subterfuge and deception: The aim is to construct a lie so convincing and compelling, the other players believe it without question.

New boy Owen Matthews (Morris), his room mate Tom (Padalecki) and savvy veteran player Dodger (Booth) decide to take the game to daring and ghoulish extremes.

With input from the rest of the liars club contingent - Lewis (James), Mercedes (McCoy), Randall (Janzen) and Regina (Wu) - the youngsters invent a fictitious, ski-mask clad, knife-wielding serial killer called The Wolf, who is apparently stalking the campus.

When undergraduates begin to die in the manners described by Owen and Dodger in their hoax email, the liars realise they have given birth to a monster.

And they are set to be the deranged killer's next victims. Morris, the token Brit amid a rogue's gallery of high school caricatures, looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights for most of the film, while Booth slinks through every frame like a wild cat preparing to devour him.

There's little sexual chemistry between the pair, and Jon Bon Jovi is wasted as the journalism teacher who is wise to the gang's ruse.

It's a pity he doesn't put a stop to all the smoke and mirrors sooner.