LATEST OUTING A `SCREAM,' EVEN FOR CRAVEN AFICIONADOS : THE FACTS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

You've got to hand it to Wes Craven. The former humanities professor turned gore-movie maven may have unleashed some unforgivable monstrosities on our pop-culture psyche, but at least he has a sense of humor about it.

Well, not always. The last time he attempted a self-aware slasher movie, the director came up with ``Wes Craven's New Nightmare.'' The thing was such a post-modern goof on the ``Nightmare on Elm Street'' series Craven created, it eventually lost what humor and thrills it could muster in a tedious thicket of ``What is reality?'' game-playing. It became a dry exercise in academic hacking.

``Scream,'' more happily, stays visceral and amusing from beginning to end. Written by Kevin Williamson, who was clearly warped by childhood viewings of ``Halloween'' and ``Terror Train,'' it's the best-acted, most suspenseful slasher movie in a month of Friday the 13ths. And the comic premise here is, indeed, a nonstop scream.

Warning, though: fans of Drew Barrymore should not go in expecting much. She plays a sweet teen-ager at home alone when the movie commences. A series of increasingly alarming phone calls, in which an unknown sadist grills her on horror-movie trivia, soon leads to the movie's first ghastly murders. If Drew's your reason for going, I'd recommend the Woody Allen musical instead.

Anyway, the story proper commences when Sidney (``Party of Five's'' Neve Campbell, an unexpectedly fine young actress) is likewise left to fend for herself when her widowed dad takes a business trip. Her classmates' murders dredge up unpleasant memories of her own mother's killing, a year earlier, by a secret lover who's now sitting on Death Row.

But did that guy really do it? Sleazy tabloid TV reporter Gale Weathers (a very funny Courteney Cox, with superglue hair and suits the color of fresh-sprouted barley) never thought so. And when the new killer, who runs around in a cheap death-mask and funeral-shroud Halloween costume, starts taking out every sexually active adolescent in sight, Gale is pretty sure she has a scoop.

Sidney's just darn lucky that she's still a virgin, despite the most persuasive efforts of her ultra-cute boyfriend Billy (Skeet Ulrich). As we all know, movie psycho-killers only target bad boys and girls. But even though this particular ghoul seems abnormally obsessed with punishing people who act like they're in a stupid slasher film, he has a wider agenda, too.

Of course, everyone from frustrated Billy to Sidney's humiliated father to the creepazoid school principal (Henry Winkler, and he's really funny!) could be the murderer, and half the fun of ``Scream'' comes from keeping count of the over-obvious clues that pile up and point to just about everybody.

But Craven and Williamson have an overall scheme that's much more subversive than simply cutting up slasher-movie cliches and the cardboard characters who live and die by them. By the time they reveal what's really going on in ``Scream,'' they've whipped up a contemporary social satire as wicked and disturbing as a Jonathan Swift broadside.

It makes you wish more directors knew how to mix master's degrees with scare tactics.

The film: ``Scream'' (R; violence, sex, drug use, language).

The stars: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Skeet Ulrich, Matthew Lillard, David Arquette, Rose McGowan, Drew Barrymore.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Wes Craven. Written by Kevin Williamson. Produced by Cary Woods and Cathy Konrad. Released by Miramax Dimension Films.

Running time: One hour, 47 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: three stars.

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Photo: Sidney (Neve Campbell) is left to fend for herself in ``Scream.''