Starring Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox Arquette, David Arquette, Liev Schreiber, Patrick Dempsey, Lance
Hendrickson, Parker Posey, Scott Foley, Jamie Kennedy, Kelly Rutherford, Jenny McCarthy.
Directed by Wes Craven. Written by Ehren (not Freddy) Kruger.
Stab 3 is being produced by veteran schlockmeister John Milton (Hendrickson), another knockoff on the Woodsboro
Murders. Gail Weathers (Cox) has written a best-selling expose and has parlayed that success into an anchor
job on a tabloid TV show. Dewey (Arquette) is acting as creative consultant on Stab 3. Sidney (Campbell)
is hiding at a house in the mountains, working as a phone crisis counsellor. Cotton (Schreiber) is now a LA
shock-talk Talk Show host. Suddenly, one of them is murdered. And then a cast member of Stab 3 is killed.
Each time a picture of Sidney's mother is left at the murder scene. Dewey and Gail are hired by a police
detective (Dempsey) to help catch the killer. Eventually, the murderer contacts Sidney by phone, so
she drives into the city to work with the others to find and have the final showdown with the killer.
Kevin Williamson was unavailable, or unallowed to write the final chapter of the series he created. And the
change shows. Gone is the ironic humour and imaginative turns of events. There is occasional humour,
much of it involving Dewey personifying the dumb yokel, but often it's due to a character doing something
obviously stupid - the kind of humour where we laugh at the characters because they are making the mistakes
the original Scream made fun of. That film was well written, snappy and skewered Hollywood and many
of the stupidities inherent in horror films. Scream 3 is just another stupid horror flick, with dishonest
red herrings and events which don't make sense. You are unlikely to guess the killer, because you are fed
patently false information so you won't supect him/her. Characters over and over again split up when going after
the psychotic spook instead of staying together. For example, Sidney goes walking alone onto the Woodsboro
set just after a cast member is murdered, and surprise, surprise, encounters the spook. And how many times
must Sidney or some other character ask "Who is it?" when the spook is on the line? Do they think he (or
she) going to tell them?
The ending of the film does at least explain why the spook is going after Sidney, why he hates her mother
and why the deaths of the protaganists in the first two films didn't truly end things. But the ending goes on
and on, filled with implausibilities that somewhat diminish the satisfaction of understanding how the trilogy
fits together. Jamie Kennedy (who died in Scream 2) comes back to give a video-from-the-grave warning
to our heroes that in a trilogy, "all bets are off" in the third installment. More like, from Return Of The Jedi
to Alien 3, the third installment is the crappiest of the bunch, often because logic and previous character
development is thrown to the wind to ratchet up the action and/or body count. It's not the worst horror film
around by any means, it's just that it's so inferior to its original.
The actors do what they can with the weak
material, and are not part of the problem. Heck, even Jenny McCarthy is not embarrassing. She has one
of the best lines, containing some perhaps unintended irony that the rest of the film could have used more
of, when after getting a crappy part in Stab 3, she says "Jesus, I should fire my agent." This could have been
said by the cast members of Scream 3.
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