Cry Wolf [Blu-ray] [2005]

Owen (Julian Morris) shows up at some rich kids boarding school, having been kicked out of more than his share of such places. The first person he meets is Dodger (Lindy Booth), who turns out to be the leader of the local pack, one of who is Owen's new roommate, Tom (Jared Padalecki). In the middle of his first night Tom wakes Owen up and takes him to the church on campus where everybody antes up and they play a game run by Dodger. It has to do with figuring out who is telling lies and who is not, making much of the distinction between wolves and sheep, with some shepherds tossed in for good measure. The game proves to be relatively easy for Owen, who has no problem taking advantage of a bunch of bored rich kids. Dodger also does not find it challenging to be playing chess with a bunch of kids who are playing checkers. So the two come up with a new game in which their group will be the wolves and the rest of the campus will be the sheep.

So they decide to take the recent murder of a local girl and spin a story about her being the victim of a serial killer known as the Wolf. They give him a few iconic characteristics (big knife and an orange ski mask) and come up with gruesome deaths for his victims, who are thinly disguised versions of various group members. They put together an e-mail, send it out to their classmates, and sit back to watch the rumors spread. Then, the things they made up start coming true and it appears there are games within games within games.

It is not really fair to say that "Cry Wolf" stays a step ahead of you because the script by director Jeff Wadlow and his co-writer Beau Bauman knows how you are supposed to think when trying to figure out who is the serial killer and then they proceed to play with your mind. They know that you are trying to eliminate suspects and that you worry more about opportunity rather than motive (movies like this either make the motive absolutely obvious from early on or seem to pull one out of a hat at the end to explain what made the killer do it), and you just cannot make things add up in this one. It is like being halfway through a Sudoku puzzle and suddenly realizing you have two sevens in the same box and you cannot figure out how to backtrack to undo your mistake.

The cast is filled with young actors and actresses who will be leaving behind good looking corpses and besides the old groundskeeper for most of the film the only adult on the premises is the journalism teacher (Jon Bon Jovi), who also knows something about playing chess (with an antique set no less). There is not a lot of blood and gore in this one, and in some ways when we see the killer is the least interesting part of the film. It is much more fun to watch the spoiled little rich kids all turn on each other.

However, in the end I rounded up on this one becaue of the DVD extras, which includes Wadlow and Bauman's previous efforts, a pair of shorts from 2002. "Manual Labor" is but a trifle, but "The Tower of Babel" gives us Earl, who is one of those billion chimps banging away on those million typewriters trying to write Shakespeare and the local weather report between now and the end of time. You might find that things get too cute, but the gimmick is to have different situations with different characters in which the dialogue is the same but the contexts are, well, different. It has its moments, thanks to Earl.

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