Review of Scream 3 (2000) by Doctor S — 24 Oct 2010

The inside jokes keep this series fun, even if the horror aspects don't measure up. The Scream movies are more horror-parody than scary, although Wes Craven doesn't seem to fully realize that. Can't take it seriously as a slasher movie because then you could pick it apart. A few examples: the killer miraculously shows up at exactly the right place with no possible knowledge of where characters will be (wardrobe closet, on street at bottom of hill), the power is cut yet a fax machine still works, and a character's pulse is felt and determined to be dead but reappears later.

If you forgive that this movie is not meant to be taken that seriously, then you're better off. The first sequence gives a jolt as a major character from the first two films is killed, giving the impression that anything goes which is explicitly outlined in the 'trilogy rules' of moviemaking by Jaime Kennedy in a 'beyond the grave' cameo. As I said, those are the fun bits: Jenny McCarthy lamenting that she's 35 playing a 21-year-old and having to do another shower scene for the film-within-a-film Stab 3, Carrie Fisher as a studio records clerk who claims she missed out on the role of Princess Leia because she wouldn't sleep with George Lucas, and Courteney Cox telling her actress impersonator that she can give up her film career and crawl back to Must-See TV. (Although the sling about getting dumped by Brad Pitt comes off in an entirely different way now that he's split with her former Friends co-star Jennifer Aniston. Life imitating art??) I didn't guess the killer like I did in Scream 2 which I did early on so that was a surprising reveal. The killings are more random here though, and plot devices are discarded or ignored as events proceed. In other words, the screenplay construction sucks but I still mostly enjoyed this tongue-in-cheeky ride.