SCREAM 3
Craven's first mistake may have been trusting his old formula with a
new screenwriter. While Kevin Williamson penned the first two Screams,
this time his characters have been handed over to Ehren Kruger (Arlington Road), who tries to make more of
them than they were to start with. If there were a more talented troupe,
this could almost be a straight murder thriller (except for the cloaked,
masked figure jumping around), but Craven and his stars Neve Campbell, Courteney
Cox, and David Arquette are still firmly in the slasher mode, so watching
them wade through the voluminous expository material just makes us say,
"Get to the killing!" I was having more fun watching the couple
making out a few rows in front of me in the theater.
This film, as with it predecessors, follows in the tradition of parodying
the horror film genre. There are numerous references to how unlikely events
in horror movies are, and numerous phone calls from the killer, who now
has an electronic device to make his voice sound like that of anyone in
the film. Convenient, eh? This time he attacks the people who are currrently
filming Stab 3, the movie depicting the ongoing murders in the lives
of Neve's character Sidney Prescott. So this time, we not only have the
usual cast, like opportunistic reporter Gale Weathers (Cox) and ex-cop Dewey
Riley (Arquette), but the actors playing them in the film. Gale's double
is Jennifer Joile (Parker Posie), Sidney's is Angelina Tyler (Emily Mortimer),
and Dewey's is Tom Prince (Matt Keeslar). There's also the film's director
(Scott Foley) and producer (Lance Henriksen).
After a few cast members are offed during filming, we learn that the
killer is really looking for Sidney again, and, against all logic and good
reason, she shows up to help in the investigation. The set is closed down,
production is halted, and our intrepid cast spends the rest of the film
running around the fake houses dodging the knife. The killer, still dressed
in the familiar, now un-scary mask and cloak, runs amok, disappears, reappears,
gets killed over and over, and still lives to stab again. But alongside
the killing is the complex story of the on-again, off-again romance between
Gale and Dewey (incidentally, Cox and Arquette married during filming),
and a vague sub-plot involving the murder of Sidney's mother long before
all this other stuff happened.
Campbell looks bored. Cox is awful again, and her pretender, Posie, is
almost as bad. Arquette is more interested in playing with his new wife
than doing this film. And Roger L. Jackson's phone voice, which doesn't
match any of the characters' voices or that of the eventually uncovered
killer, sounds ridiculously unconvincing in its pretended ominousness.
Traditional slasher movies of the '70s were like pornos with a knife. Scream and Scream 2 moved out into the realm of quasi-intelligence. But Scream 3 goes way too far in trying to be clever. However, there is one thing I liked: Scream 3 purports to be the final chapter in a trilogy. We can only hope. **½