Scream 3 [MA]

For many people the Woodsboro murders are buried in the past, but for Sidney, Dewey, and Gale they are still very real. The nightmare begins yet again when newly successful Cotton Weary is brutally murdered and the production of ‘Stab 3’, a third movie based on Sidney’s story, comes to a grinding halt. All too soon the film’s cast are being picked off one by one, each body being left with a picture of Sidney’s mother. With the body count increasing, Sidney is forced out of hiding and has a new horror to face. 

It’s the third movie people and this is the one where all the rules go out the window. Wes Craven teams up with screenwriter Ehren Kruger (horror movie fans feel free to give that irony a little giggle) and the result is this gripping and gory third instalment of an unexpected trilogy. This is the movie that did was the sequel was expected to do. The body is count is phenomenally higher with two games of slasher hide-and-seek going on within the very first scene. 

Whilst it doesn’t capture the fun of Williamson’s original bubblegum-blonde-Drew-Barrymore-movie-trivia opening scene, it still proves gripping, fun, and enthralling. The classic and addictive metafiction that Williamson injected into the first two movies is still ripe in Kruger’s script; in fact it proves to work better and in a more balanced way in contrast to the sequel. 

For the majority of the film it is a slasher movie and one that successfully delivers the contractual thrills of the genre: the body count, the blood, the suspenseful stalking scenes all work to achieve the expected thrills and chills of the genre. But more than that, the balance between the actual scary slasher-stalking story and the scenes of metafictive information dumps is really well done. The scenes where the movie provides commentary on its genre and itself as a third instalment are spread evenly apart and it’s really nice because it allows us to become emotionally involved with the characters, get into the story, get psyched up about the appearances of the killer, and then provides us with this nice and refreshingly funny bit of metafictive humour. Hell, we even get a revisit from Randy with his know-how on the subject. 

On the negative side, the story itself is a bit of a wild card. Adhering to the idea that third movies bring up unresolved issues from the past, the central drama centres around the mysterious character of Maureen Prescott, and Sidney is almost literally haunted by ghosts in this flick with the connections between her mother and the murders being a little stretched. Whilst the connections technically do work and there isn’t really anything wrong with them, they do feel a little bit loosey goosey and there is a slight reaction of ‘ugh, oh really?’ when the identity of the killer is revealed. 

Having said that, that’s the only real problem there is with this film. The performances are all just as good, the writing is still witty and glorious, and it provides more creativity in terms of the body count, the murders, the motives, everything really. 

Starring Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courtney Cox, Lieve Schreiber, Scott Foley, Roger Corman, Lance Henriksen, Josh Pais, Deon Richmond, Matt Keeslar, Jenny McCarthy, Emily Mortimer, Patrick Warburton, Parker Posey, Lawrence Hecht, Patrick Dempsey, and featuring a sneaky appearance from Jay and Silent Bob, Scream 3 is a fun and gripping slasher flick that I really enjoyed. I actually found it more fun than the sequel because it does deliver everything a sequel should with the added surprise elements of the third movie promises. At the end of the day, this is a really fun movie.