Review of Scream 3 (2000) by Deb S — 28 Apr 2011

Desperate to escape the demons of her past, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) now lives in a secluded high-security ranch house in the woods of Northern California, where she works as an over-the-phone crisis counselor. She's content to remain in quiet seclusion, but finds herself once again facing mortal danger when the masked psychopath Ghostface begins making deadly edits to the cast of STAB 3--the series of slasher films based upon the Woodsboro and Windsor College murders. There seems to be more mysteries and unanswered questions surrounding the life and death of Maureen Prescott that even her daughter, Sidney, didn't know about.

Sidney is forced out of hiding as one by one STAB 3's stars meet grisly deaths at the hands of the psychopath, who gleefully hunts down and eviscerates his victims. She returns to "Woodsboro" recreated as the set of STAB 3 and team-up with cut-throat reporter Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), small-town deputy Dwight "Dewey" Riley (David Arquette), Hollywood detective Marc Kincaid (Patrick Dempsey), and the remaining cast of STAB 3 in order to stop the killer before he makes his final cut.

The usual gratingly awful and highly clichéd "who's the killer?" conversations follow. Still it is entertaining to guess who the killer was, and there was always a twist, and I am not knocking the ending completely, but given the state of the Scream plot line, I guess there was only so much you could do.