SCREAM 3 (Dimension) Starring: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox Arquette, David Arquette, Patrick Dempsey, Parker Posey, Lance Henriksen, Scott Foley, Liev Schreiber. Screenplay: Ehren Kruger, based on characters created by Kevin Williamson. Producers: Kevin Williamson, Cathy Konrad and Marianne Maddalena. Director: Wes Craven. MPAA Rating: R (violence, profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 116 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
In the production notes for SCREAM 3, there is a heading titled "Rules of a Trilogy" which reads: "Chapter One sets the rules. Chapter Two bends the rules. But in the finale, forget the rules." That's as succinct a summation as any for why, as this particular trilogy draws to a close, it feels one chapter too long. SCREAM revived the moribund slasher movie genre by mining both laughs and scares from horror film conventions. SCREAM 2 kept the pace by turning the satire towards horror sequels, and even the first SCREAM. SCREAM 3, it turns out, does forget the rules. It forgets that a film based on scary parody of scary movie cliches had better be scary or funny, but not cliched.
A few more years have passed since the events in SCREAM 2 as we are re-introduced to our gang of survivors. Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is living in seclusion, working from home as a counselor on a crisis hotline. Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox Arquette) anchors an "Entertainment Tonight"-type program after flopping on "60 Minutes II." Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber) has become a popular T.V. talk show host and cameo actor in STAB 3, the latest film based on the Woodsboro murders, on which Dewey Riley (David Arquette) is working as a consultant. When cast members of STAB 3 begin turning up dead, accompanied by photos of Sidney's mother as a young woman, Sidney is drawn out of hiding to find out why. It seems someone connected to the film is creating his/her own murderous rewrites on the fly. Or perhaps it's someone investigating the murders. Or perhaps Sidney's mother herself has returned from beyond the grave.
The tortuous path to unmasking the killer(s) has, of course, become one of the series' trademarks -- and, for my money, the most annoying. There are suspects a-plenty -- homicide Det. Kincaide (Patrick Dempsey); STAB 3 cast members including Jennifer (Parker Posey) and Angelina (Emily Mortimer); none-too-subtly-named producer John Milton (Lance Henriksen); director Roman Bridger (Scott Foley) -- in a non-stop parade of hints, motives and opportunities. Director Wes Craven and screenwriter Ehren Kruger (stepping in for creator Kevin Williamson) get so focused on whodunnit, in fact, that they rarely give any juice to what the person whodunnit is doing. There are a couple of tense moments, including effective use of a one-way mirror and the surprising perils of a movie set, but there's nothing to match the nerve-wracking Drew Barrymore sequence in SCREAM or the crawl across the killer in SCREAM 2. As a chiller, it's fairly uninspired chase-n-shriek stuff.
The humor doesn't fare much better, drifting away from commentary on movies to linger on commentary on movie-making. Kruger tosses off some solid gags, but they tend to be of the industry-jokey variety (including a few cute but unnecessary cameos). He even misses some obvious opportunities, letting characters split up in a big spooky house with nary an ironic observation and making everyone too stupid to draw connections when the killer uses an electronic device to mimic voices. It becomes too easy to see SCREAM 3 as a step towards exactly the kind of formulaic horror film the series originally skewered. Even when the humor works, it feels too easy -- and too played -- to take shots at the people who make the movies than to take shots at the movies themselves. Kruger opts to chuckle at career-obsessed directors, bimbo starlets who don't know VERTIGO from PSYCHO and genre film actors getting absurdly Method about creating their "characters."
The height of irony is that you can see that kind of deadly earnest acting going on in SCREAM 3. The primary offender is Campbell, who looks as though she could only be dragged back to the set after being promised Sidney would grow as a character. She does her damndest to make sure we all understand how haunted she is, as though anyone could possibly care about the deep psychological underpinnings of Sidney Prescott. It's one thing for a character to make a reference to the developments in the GODFATHER trilogy; it's another for Campbell to pretend she's playing Michael Corleone. SCREAM 3 is a purely functional shocker, but it takes all the wrong things seriously and plays all the wrong things for laughs. Craven and company have forgotten the rules, all right. They've even forgotten why the series was worth a third installment in the first place.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 last stabs: 5.
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