director
Wes Craven
screenwriter
Ehren Kruger
based on
characters created by
Kevin Williamson
producers
Cathy Konrad
Marianne Maddalena
Kevin Williamson
cinematographer
Peter Deming
music
Marco Beltrami
editor
Patrick Lussier
cast
Courteney Cox Arquette (Gale Weathers)
David Arquette (Dwight 'Dewey' Riley)
Neve Campbell (Sidney Prescott)
Parker Posey (Jennifer Jolie)
Patrick Dempsey (Kincaid)
Emily Mortimer (Angelina Tyler)
Scott Foley (Roman Bridger)
Deon Richmond (Tyson Fox)
Lance Henriksen (John Milton)
Jenny McCarthy (Sarah Darling)
Patrick Warburton (Steven Stone)
Matt Keeslar (Tom Prinze)
Liev Schreiber (Cotton Weary)
Kelly Rutherford (Christine)
Jamie Kennedy (Randy Meeks)
Heather Matarazzo (Martha Meeks)
Roger L. Jackson (Phone Voice)
Carrie Fisher (Bianca Burnette)
Richmond Arquette (Student)
Roger Corman (Studio Executive)
Kevin Smith (Silent Bob)
Jason Mewes (Jay)
Wes Craven (Man With Video Camera)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 116m
u.s.
release: 2/4/00
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
site
other wes
craven films
reviewed on this website:
- cursed
- last
house on the left
- red
eye
- scream
- scream
2
|
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. |