'Wolf' is a sheep in wolf's clothing

"Cry_Wolf" is a sheep in wolf's clothing: a mystery-thriller disguised as a routine dice-and-slice teen horror flick.

Give it points for trying something different — and then take them back for botching the job. This is, after all, a movie in which nubile young women say things like, "I'm all congested from crying. I'm going to take a shower; the steam might help."

After an opening scene in which a terrified girl is butchered in a nighttime forest — a sequence contractually stipulated by California state law to appear in all movies marketed to teenagers — the setting shifts to nearby Westlake Preparatory Academy. The school resembles a kinder, gentler Hogwarts, and the students are all rich, bored and in their mid-to-late 20s.

New kid Owen (young UK heartthrob Julian Morris, obliging Gary Cole to adopt a British accent as his distant dad) arrives at Westlake on double-secret probation from other schools and quickly falls in with the bad kids. And a multicultural group they are: punker Randall (Jesse Janzen), Asian-American Regina (Kristy Wu), Latina hottie Mercedes (Sandra McCoy), African American Lewis (Paul James), Graham, the nerd (Ethan Cohn) and Owen's roommate, Tom (Jared Padalecki), who hails from the country of Biganddumb. Owen has eyes only for Dodger (Lindy Booth, "Dawn of the Dead"), a slim bottle-redheadwith a penchant for mind games.

Said games begin with an after-hours round of "Murder" (some of you know it as "Mafia") in the school chapel, then turn ambitious when the group decides to freak out the entire student body. Taking the recent murder as a starting point, they concoct a serial killer, "The Wolf," and send out a mass e-mail that details his past crimes.

Wouldn't you know it? The Wolf turns out to be real, and he prefers to be his own publicist.

At least, that's how it appears from the spooky instant messages that keep popping up on Owen's computer and from the "gotcha" shots of a hulking figure in an orange ski mask (who may be a Mexican wrestler who's lost his way; it's not clear). But even as the hero's friends start disappearing faster than you can say "Ten Little Diverse Ethnic Representatives," "Cry_Wolf" is suspiciously light on gore and dismemberment. Is the PG-13 rating to blame, or is it something more . . . sinister? Either way, hardened fans of movie splatter may be tossing their Big Gulps at the screen in contempt.