Overall Rating
  Awesome: 21.25%
Worth A Look: 33.75%
Average: 15.83%
Pretty Bad: 10.42%
Total Crap: 18.75%
13 reviews, 162 user ratings
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| Scream 3 |
by Rob Gonsalves
"Okay, and now we're officially over it."
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Somewhere near the middle of 'Scream 3,' a film nerd is brought in -- make that shoehorned in -- to explain the guidelines of the final chapters of movie trilogies, such as the 'Godfather' series and the first 'Star Wars' triptych. What he conveniently forgets to mention is that 'Godfather III' and 'Return of the Jedi' were easily the weakest installments in their trilogies. So it is also with 'Scream 3,' a tepid and depressing conclusion (can we really believe that?) to a once-hip and genuinely scary horror series.The sarcastic young audience for the Scream movies, eager to laugh and shriek and laugh at themselves shrieking, made the first two entries big hits. But Scream 3 offers very little in the way of laughs or scares. The previous two films had fun with the long-dead slasher subgenre, mocking it and resurrecting it at the same time -- its postmodern awareness gave the shocks a new vitality. Scream 3 doesn't have nearly as much fun with its genre or itself. The kids who weren't around to see the lame slasher films of the early '80s may now get to see what they missed: Scream 3 is pretty much a straight, cynical, and infinitely unimaginative slasher flick. This franchise has become the cheese it once subverted and transcended.
Neve Campbell returns, phoning in her performance (no pun intended) as Sidney Prescott, the traumatized heroine of the series. Her experiences with the Munch-masked, black-cloaked killer have inspired two hit films, Stab and Stab 2; the third movie is in production, but the actors in it are being killed -- in the same order as the murders of the characters they're playing. The director, Wes Craven, who has helmed all three Scream movies, gets far less mileage out of this life-imitates-script premise than you'd expect; then again, he's done it before, in New Nightmare, Craven's farewell to A Nightmare on Elm Street, his other popular horror series. Craven said all he had to say about the weirdness of moviemaking in that film; he's certainly said all he has to say about knives and blood.
The script, by Ehren Kruger (taking over from former Scream scribe Kevin Williamson), is top-heavy with red herrings and elaborate exposition -- yes, we hear even more about Sidney's mysterious dead mother. The other Scream films were also tricky and convoluted, but I don't remember them playing like the WB version of Murder, She Wrote, as Scream 3 too often does. Old characters (Courteney Cox Arquette's reporter Gale Weathers, David Arquette's goofy Deputy Dewey) and new characters (Parker Posey as a paranoid actress, Scott Foley as a movie director) all have the same function -- wandering around in the dark stupidly, waiting for the masked killer to isolate and butcher them. This is particularly inexcusable with the returning characters; don't they remember they were in the first two films?
Scream 3 is one of the casualties of Columbine: It's markedly less gory than its predecessors, no doubt because Miramax/Dimension (i.e., Disney) got cold feet in the wake of the national debate about movie violence. Craven stages the stalking and slashing as professionally as always, but this time the thrills feel anemic, as if we were watching a pilot for Scream: The Series, diluted for network TV. If there's less blood on the screen, there's even less in the movie's veins. The tacky, increasingly underattended dead-teenager films of the last couple of years (I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, etc.) seemed to spell the doom of the late-'90s slasher boom; Scream 3 may be sounding its death knell.Perhaps one day 'Scream 3' will be appreciated as Wes Craven's ultimate subversion of the slasher genre -- illustrating how dead the genre is by intentionally making a lame movie -- but right now it just feels like the studio's sorry attempt to make lightning strike a third time. It's time to hang up the empty mask of the slasher genre; it's time horror got a new face.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=719&reviewer=416
originally posted: 01/14/07 12:32:29
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USA
04-Feb-2000 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
23-Mar-2000 (MA)
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