Scream 3 -- the final cut: slash and learn
The third installment of any horror movie franchise is itself something of a zombie--a dead thing being forced to walk around, a re-animated corpse, just shuffling through the motions of life, pretending that the story which drives it is still vital, isn't just the first installment in a different setting, with a different cast and better effects. All the same, though, that third installment can't veer too far from what made the original successful. It is a franchise by now, after all; there has to recognizable features, characteristic 'franchise' traits. So it is with Wes Craven's Scream 3. Here we have Kevin Williamson's glib hip characters, all too aware of how intertextual their ongoing predicament is yet unable to get out of it, either. Next there's the trademark Ghostface slasher, who doesn't lumber around like Jason or change shapes like Freddy, but instead skulks about at high-speed, gets kicked a lot (a touch of verisimilitude for the doubters), and--most importantly--doesn't reveal his or her identity until the final frames, Scooby-Doo style. Thus everyone's a suspect, just as in Scream and Scream 2 , which fosters a tense, skeptical environment lightened time and again with comedy. Just when you think you know who the killer is, bam, that person dies gruesomely, someone makes a good joke about it, and then you're moving on, trying to deduce Ghostface's identity by elimination, if nothing else.
This is Sidney's (Nev Campbell) predicament: having to figure out who Ghostface is. Unlike the first two installments, though, this time she isn't in a sexually-charged, socio-academic setting, surrounding by friends who don't yet know they're fodder. Now she's done the Laurie Strode shtick, and isolated herself--insulated herself--taken an outpost in the woods, where she can see the bad guys coming from a long ways off (she hopes). The bad thing is, though, Ghostface saw H2O too, and is doing the Michael Myers thing, tracking her down, killing people to extract her location. Specifically, killing all the people involved with the making of "Stab 3," the movie-within-the movie which acts as commentary upon Scream 3 itself. Which is nice, yes, but too, familiar territory for Wes Craven. This is how he tried to inject new life into the Nightmare series (New Nightmare), after all, and, though it wasn't quite effective there, it does work here, if for no other reason than that it allows the Scream-formula to play itself out element by element, using as its excuse that it's modeled on the movie, and the movie itself was modeled on that initial event--which, for us, was the original Scream. Too, having all these sound-stages within sound-stages allows for some serious walk-ons: Parker Posey, Jenny McCarthy, Lance Henrikson, Patrick Dempsey, Carrie Fisher, Patrick Warburton (Seinfeld's Puddy), and, last but not least, Kevin Smith's Silent Bob and Jay. Add to this the usual suspects--'survivors' Courteney Cox, David Arquette, and Nev Campbell (as the heroin/e the horror audience is addicted to)--and Scream 3 has quite a retinue, each more killable than the last.
The big question with it, though, is does it still have enough juice, is it as powerful as the first installment? Because we all know that second, while decent, kind of lost it at the end, or, rather, when everyone was unmasked, it became apparent that we couldn't really have guessed it. Which insures the ending will be a surprise, yes, but does so with obfuscation instead of misdirection. And misdirection is what made the original Scream so good. Too, in talking about the third as compared to the first two, you have to take into account that to both be as original as the original and still remain 'faithful' to the original is a near-impossible task. That first Scream fundamentally changed commercial horror, by introducing some genre-awareness, and that same genre-awareness is what carried the second as well. All that meta-talk about the conventions of the sequel. Scream 3 continues the tradition, even resuscitating Randy (Jamie Kennedy) on videotape long enough for him to explain the trilogy they're in, how, as the trailer says, all bets are off.
And he's rights--the rules of the first two no longer hold. Scream 3 even goes so far as to hint at the 'real' supernatural (Sid's dead mom), which is perhaps it's one weak point. Well, one of two. The other is that, though you can't say for certain who Ghostface is going to be this time, you can nevertheless intuit who it's going to be in relation to the main characters, which is as specific as I can be without spilling many beans. That Scream 3 can still have still have beans to spill this late in the game is something of a feat, though, especially when it's kept itself to a minimum of contrivance. Most horror-series are just going through the motions by the third installment, troping around, playing the zombie, which is to say acting tired. Scream 3, however, shows few signs of fatigue. Maybe even a little reinvigoration, of all things, in the face of claims that, with the advent (success) of Blair Witch and Sixth Sense, the tennybopper slasher pic has run its course, is now making way for more mature horror, more cerebral horror, horror which reintroduces the supernatural which Scream and Phantoms disallowed. Lest we forget, though, horror is fundamentally about being young and scared, the 'safe' thrill of it all. However, if the naysayers are right, and Scream 3 is the last of its kind for a while, then the slasher pic couldn't have had a better send-off. Or, rather, send-up, which may have been Williamson's goal all along: by wearing the generic conventions on its sleeve throughout the trilogy, the Scream franchise pretty much insured that--even without Blair Witch and Sixth Sense--it would be the last of its kind. Any other teenybopper slasher pic which doesn't acknowledge those conventions and then do something with them will quite simply pale in comparison (e.g., I Know What You Did Last Summer, etc), be an insult to the audience of Randys Scream's cultured, who are already three steps ahead and grinning wide.
(c) Stephen Graham Jones, http://www.cinemuck.com
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