I know it’ll never work. You know it’ll never work. What I’m asking is just . . . to see if we’re wrong.
We all know that sequels like to try to outdo the films that have come before. That’s probably especially true when it comes to the concluding chapter of a trilogy. And Scream 3 does it in at least one way. It somehow manages to have an even more chaotic and disastrous pre-production and filming than Scream 2. Scream 2 lost a significant amount of its script just before shooting because of internet leaks; Scream 3 lost its entire script not long before shooting, but not for any reason as mundane as internet leaks. No, Scream 3 lost its script, which would have revolved around a new cast of high-schoolers getting butchered, because of the Columbine school shooting. The studio was understandably squeamish about releasing a violent and bloody movie about school kids murdering each other after that whole thing. The studio was so squeamish that they actually floated to Wes Craven the idea of having NO ON-SCREEN BLOOD in Scream 3. Craven talked them out of that, but the gist of the situation was that Scream 3 needed a new script. For the first time, a Scream film ended up with a script with no input from Kevin Williamson, the author responsible for the first two films’ sharp, funny and smart scripts. Instead the assignment was handed to Ehren Kruger who started writing the script, due to the incredibly fast turn-around-time, without having even seen either of the previous two movies. Once again, pages are being written and re-written on the very day that they’re to be shot. As if all of this mess wasn’t enough, Neve Campbell had a lot going on at the time and so she was available for shooting for only three weeks out of the twelve week shooting schedule, leaving Craven in the position of having the MAIN CHARACTER of the movie for only a quarter of the time originally planned. Now, as we all know, Scream 2 pulled off the miraculous feat of being absolutely brilliant despite all the problems it had. Scream 3 . . . did not exactly manage the same feat.
Scream 3 is, in point of fact, an absolute disaster. The new, post-Columbine premise is actually pretty good; it’s 3 years after Scream 2 and Stab 3 is in the process of being made when cast members start getting murdered by a Ghostface who is trying to lure Sidney out of hiding. I don’t hate the idea of Sidney being in hiding and the new Ghostface trying to force her to come out of hiding; that’s a fairly reasonable way to cover for Campbell’s absence from large portions of the film. And setting this one in Hollywood, during the making of Stab 3, is actually just the natural progression of the increasingly layered meta-commentary of these films. This didn’t have to be terrible. But it is.
The violence and scares are toned way, way down and the film leans incredibly heavily into the campier, more comedic elements of the series. With Campbell unavailable for so much of the film, the script focuses on Dewey and Gale and, while I’ve loved their characters in the other films, they are certainly more broadly sketched characters than Neve Campbell’s Sid and without Sid there as a grounding force, Dewey and Gale only get broader and broader. Sid really is the heart of this franchise; I probably haven’t talked enough about Neve Campbell’s fantastic performances in these films. Sidney Prescott really is a fantastic character and Campbell inhabits her to perfection. Her more or less absence from two-thirds of this movie really hurts it a lot and the more comedic tone might have worked better with her earnestness alongside it. As it, Scream 3 just becomes sillier and sillier and if the violence had started to feel weightless in Scream 2, it’s practically filled with helium in this movie. This movie also just feels incredibly toothless. Craven had originally taken Scream because he wanted to make a mean movie again after a fan told him he was getting soft. And one of the best moments in Scream 2 is when a beloved recurring character is brutally killed. But in this movie, there’s just no chance at all that certain recurring characters will be killed and that lack of stakes is just so obvious. Scream 3 is so toothless that the movie was originally going to bring back the beloved character killed in Scream 2 and reveal that he had faked his own death. If that doesn’t speak to the way in which these movies had stopped being “horror” movies at all, I don’t know what does. This movie is so gutless it wants to reverse gutsy decisions made in previous films.
Speaking of previous films, I think one of the worst things about this movie is its attempt to retcon the first film. The original Scream is a brilliant film and this film really wants to tie this movie back to it by having the killer in this film turn out to be the real mastermind behind the first film’s murders, a never-caught third killer. I unequivocally hate this; it undercuts the killers in Scream, turning them into pawns, when they were fascinating characters. And it doesn’t help at all that the killer here, the supposed mastermind, is easily the most disappointing, least interesting and all-around dumbest villain of the series. It’s never believable for a second that this character has been playing three-dimensional chess for FIVE YEARS in order to get revenge on Sidney.
I’m not going to pretend there aren’t some decent moments. There’s a brief cameo by Jamie Kennedy that is one of the best scenes in the movie. And there’s a great sequence of Sid visiting the set of Stab 3, a set that has recreated her old home. That sequence starts with a great reversal of the bathroom scene from the original and then builds into a very creative chase where it seems that even Sid’s home has turned against her; on this set, doors that would have led to escape at home now lead to dead ends or drops. That’s about the only sequence here that really works; perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s a sequence created by Craven that wasn’t in the script. There are even a few decent jokes; Liev Schreiber’s return as Cotton Weary is a delight – he’s now a pot-stirring talk show host on a show called, brilliantly, 100% Cotton. And I have to give a shout-out to Parker Posey who gives the only performance here that really totally works; and, interestingly, it’s one of the broadest comedic performances as a brainless, eccentric actress that’s playing Gale Weathers in Stab 3. She’s just an absolute delight; maybe it’s that she’s actually funny – maybe that’s the difference between her broad comedy and everyone else’s. She got several laughs out of me.
But for the most part, this movie just rides its unfunny comedy until it dies and then beats it to a bloody pulp (bloodier than any of the actual kills in the movie). Jay & Silent Bob have a cameo in this movie, guys. Jay & Silent Bob. Also, in that scene is Wes Craven’s cameo. The fact that you’ll miss one kind of stupid cameo because you’re so distracted by two even stupider cameos happening at the exact same time really kind of says it all about this movie and its philosophy of throwing everything at the wall.
Everything builds to a frantic climax in a mansion and it seems to go on forever, a grinding repetition of running, screaming and slamming doors with not a drop of suspense to be had. The cast seems to become increasingly sweaty with desperation as it unspools, their performances getting more and more labored as they try to save the door-slamming farce that the movie has turned into by sheer energy. It doesn’t work. It’s no wonder this movie killed the franchise for a decade (though, somewhat surprisingly to me, the movie did well at the box-office). When it wraps up, there’s really nothing to look forward to. The franchise has clearly chosen to lean into the comedy side of the “horror-comedy” tone of the franchise, but Scary Movie is over there, so there’s only so far down the comedy side the actual Scream movies can go without running into the fact that the franchise has already been parodied and, frankly, Scream 3 is . . . well, it just can’t really get sillier and have any seriousness at all left.
There’s been something of a re-evaluation of this film in the wake of the MeToo movement, given that so much of its plot revolves around sexual abuse and rape in Hollywood. There’s something interesting about that, sure. But I do feel the need to once again underline that this is a COMEDY, actually a SLAPSTICK FARCE, about sexual abuse and rape in Hollywood, so I’m ultimately not sure it’s worth the re-evaluation. It certainly doesn’t stand up to it. 1 star.
tl;dr – unfunny, overly farcical, toothless satire isn’t even a horror movie and lacks all of the heart that grounded the first two Screams; the saddest death here is the franchise. 1 star.