Scream 3

Scream 3

For an artist, when does the line start to blur between what is a passion project and what is just a mere paycheck job? For Wes Craven (a guy with a literal laundry list of horror classics on his resume), that line may very well have become hazy when he took on the job of directing the first Scream in 1996 (which one can imagine that he was made the offer after John Carpenter said no and they then set out to get the absolute best horror director out there whom they could find, and succeeded). Scream was indeed a game changer for the horror genre (again, something Craven was already well used to), reinventing the slasher movie for a hip new audience with its singularly brilliant conceit that just like its viewers, most of its CHARACTERS were raised on the very same horror classics that we had enjoyed in real life and (in the case of the killers) were even heavily enough influenced by them to carry out murders of their own. But the concept had not sprung from the brilliant mind of its esteemed director (who himself had cornered the market on horror franchises by being the creator of one Freddy Krueger) but rather instead was written by Kevin Williamson, the creator of Dawson’s Creek which had inspired the trend of “beautiful young people” soap operas up to and including One Tree Hill. Having also been a horror fan, Williamson envisioned a series of savage murders being committed by an almost basic looking killer (the now iconic “Ghostface” costume) while using a distinctly enhanced phone voice to taunt his victims before moving in for the kill. Meanwhile the other characters (especially Jamie Kennedy’s video store employee Randy) start seeing the parallels between the murders of their friends and the murders that were done in some of their favorite (real life) horror movies, even figuring out what the specific rules of survival would be. While Williamson’s original script was as airtight as a drum, it was Craven using his director for hire status as a means to bring tremendous energy to the material, lighting up all the scary moments as only a scholar of the genre could do, resulting in not only a slew of inferior wanna be horrors of that era trying to replicate if not its story than its style, but a full fledged franchise that would stretch out for 4 movies (all directed by Craven who would pass away in 2015) with Part 2 also being scripted by Williamson’s sure hand but when Part 3 came up on the docket to be made in 2000, Craven was already on board but Williamson found himself curiously shut out, possibly because his script involved one of the original killers from Part 1 returning and actually orchestrating murders from prison, an idea that wasn’t well received and saw Williamson being replaced by Ehren Krueger, who wrote his own well received script that revolved around the idea (started in Part 2) that the original film’s killings had inspired their own horror movie franchise (with the Ghostface killer’s costume being just as iconic in the fictional movie world as it is in ours). The film opens with Part 1 and Part 2 survivor Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber literally phoning it in), now a successful talk show host, becoming the celebrated “opening victim” basically filling the same role of Drew Barrymore in Part 1 and Jada Pinkett Smith in Part 2. The killer this time is really determined to find out the whereabouts of Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott, the intended target for all the wrong reasons (through no fault of her own) in the first two films and now living a quiet life in the boondocks far away from everything as she works from home under an alias on a hotline for a women’s crisis center, tucked away and safe where nobody can find her except for David Arquette’s Dewey. Meanwhile, the third film in the ubiquitous fictional horror franchise based off the real murders (Stab 3) is filming with Dewey as a technical advisor and the actors and director involved (Jenny McCarthy, Deon Richmond, Matt Keeslar, Emily Mortimer, Parker Posey, Scott Foley) are as vacuous and boring a bunch as has ever been seen in a horror film (with the exception of Posey who has the market cornered on ditsy airheads even though a little of her goes a long way here). Naturally the death of Cotton and others involved with the film brings along Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox Arquette sporting a terrible looking hairdo that would make Margot Kidder blush), Dewey’s ex whom he still loves and the trickiest of the franchise’s starring trio acting wise since Weathers is meant to be unlikable yet still winds up being heroic which is not always the easiest thing to pull off. We also get Patrick Dempsey as the cop investigating the case, Patrick Warburton as the asshole celebrity bodyguard who talks down to Dewey as if he were a little boy, Lance Henriksen being a welcome presence as the sleazy producer of the Stab films, a strange, cheap way to briefly work Jamie Kennedy’s Randy back into the story despite his death in Part 2 (at one point the plan was to have had him actually survive and then gone into hiding) and the near unforgivable cameo given to none other than Jay and Silent Bob which makes no sense whatsoever and takes us as viewers out of the film completely. At one point or another, nearly every one of these characters (except for the already dead Randy along with Jay and Silent Bob of course) is given heavy overtones at possibly being the mystery killer which was always the most fascinating thing about the series as the killer wears the same costume and uses the same phone voice (using a special voice modulator even as it’s always the same voice actor playing him) but usually turns out to be a “surprise” in terms of their actual identity (or be more than one person). Here, the killer doesn’t just use the original “phone voice”, they actually have an upgraded modulator that allows them to capture and impersonate other people’s voices as well (including Sidney and Dewey) either over the phone or even behind closed doors. As far as the “mystery motive” is concerned, it once again concerns the actions of Sidney’s long dead mother (who had been murdered by the killers of Part 1) and the idea of there having been a so called “mastermind” who had been behind the murders from the very beginning of the franchise, but the real theme here seems to be the trend starting in the first installment that for a young, photogenic movie actor or actress who would seem right at home on The WB Network’s fairy tale dramatic series, coming in here and being brutally murdered as part of this film’s storyline is something that would be considered “cool” and definitely earn some “credibility points”. At least while Williamson’s scripts for Parts 1 and 2 were well thought out all the way to their conclusions, this chapter as it would be was actually pretty much made up as they went along with whole entire scenes being written just prior to filming and worse, being filmed in 2 or 3 alternate ways with different outcomes on each of them, reportedly over there being much paranoia about plot spoilers (especially the killer’s identity) being leaked out over The Internet but even moreso because they really didn’t know in which direction they were going with only Craven really steering the ship right in order to keep everything coherent. That would work fine as per the flagship characters of Sidney (given a vastly reduced role here due to Campbell having other commitments at the time of filming), Dewey and Gale were pretty much established enough with these three actors to hit all of the right notes amongst themselves when it came to chemistry, but the results with the other characters were near disastrous, shallow and one dimensional sketches of next to nothing which was a real departure from the other characters of the previous films who despite being victims, were also written and portrayed well enough to make us actually care about their demise. Even Schreiber’s Cotton (who in many ways was the hero of Part 2) in the opening scene comes across as such an unlikably pompous ass that we can do little more except wave him off and lower our heads while waiting for him to get done in so that we can finally start the movie proper (a far cry from Barrymore’s opening death in Part 1 which really set the tone for the entire franchise). Still, a frenetic finale and a couple more (seriously) surprise cameos show us that at least Craven’s heart was still enough into this to keep it entertaining and suspenseful, proving that he really should get the due credit for enabling this series to reinvent horror (again)…

7/10

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