Harefooted Halloween: Scream 3

What I Liked: Sidney (Neve Campbell (54)) and her father attempt to disappear from the world after the events of the previous films by moving out to the middle of nowhere and changing their names.  It doesn’t end up working (through no fault of their own) but at least they tried to put the killing, deception, trauma, etc. behind them and start over.

One homicide involves an entire house exploding into total scraps.  It looks nice and is the most ostentatious death to date.  Man, they do a huge full fucking frame fireball in all its glory just to knock off one dude in a Rube Goldberg-esque fashion.  It’s stupid as hell but the blast is very satisfying.

What I Didn’t Like: It’s all kinda bad so I’ll harp on the aspect that annoyed me the most.  It’s too meta.  They finally pushed this shit too far and took a sledgehammer to the fourth wall.  The plot centers around the making of the film Stab 3 (what happened to Stab 2?) so now we have a movie within a movie and characters sharing names and familiar locations and such.  The absolute worst part of the franchise (so far) is the shoehorned Jamie Kennedy (Romeo + Juliet) cameo as Randy Meeks.  He recorded a video message sometime before getting his throat slashed in the previous film stating that he must be dead if you’re watching it.  He goes on to predict there will be another chapter to the Woodsboro murders and then proceeds to explain the rules of a part 3 and trilogies in general.  And all the shit he brings up eventually happens.  He avoids specifics but it’s still too much of a tip of the ol’ hand and a hard ass wink to the audience.

Overall Impressions: Ok, this is a dumb fuckin’ movie.  It doesn’t pretend that hard to be existing in the real world anymore.  First off there was a conscious effort to make this one more humorous (more on why later).  Just about all the characters except Sidney crack a joke every other line.  Whether it’s commenting on horror movie cliches, taking shots at Hollywood, actors being stereotypically egotistical or slinging straight up puns, I did not find the majority of it to be very funny.

Second, there’s the updated voice changer Ghostface uses.  It’s a magical device that can alter anyone’s voice to sound like literally anyone else’s.  So throughout the film when a character gets a phone call and it sounds like Sidney or Dewey it’s really the killer.  And I mean it’s a dead on replica.  Nevermind the killer needs to convincingly employ the right word choice and speech patterns to truly be effective.  Worse yet is the overreliance on this fuckin’ gadget to move characters around and drive shit forward.

Third, Ghostface teleports around just as, if not more, easily here which is kind of a problem considering how many killers there end up being this time.  Plus he’s got a dozen knives in his arsenal including one scene where he throws a blade at Dewey and then, presto!, pulls out another one from inside his sleeve like a magician.

Fourth, they detrimentally retcon the backstory of the first film.  I won’t spoil it but this decision feels extremely contrived as an excuse for a juicy twist ending.  And what they came up with is a pretty lazy piling on instead of offering an alternative explanation of events in previous installments.  So everything we know is actually true, however, there are more people behind it and there’s more to the conspiracy than we initially knew.

Everyone supposedly loathed
Courteney Cox's bangs in this one

The big reason why part 3 is a minor disaster is they were writing it as they were shooting.  Usually when you make shit up as you go nothing makes sense and this is proof of that.  Writer for part 1 and 2 Kevin Williamson was busy working on other projects so they hired Ehren Kruger (Arlington Road, Top Gun: Maverick) who did what he could but ultimately wasn’t up to the task.  Craven and others stepped in during production to take over resulting in the goop in front of you.

It also didn’t help that in the wake of the Columbine school shooting the producers mandated the violence be reduced including gruesome close ups, gore and blood.  That along with a significant bump up in humor was thought to mitigate offense to the public at the time.  That’s the reason why this one comes across sorta different, almost like a sitcom half the time.  The movie still did amazing numbers at the box office though so these choices worked out.