Wes Craven moves the murders to a Hollywood backlot and finds a good joke, mostly in Parker Posey. But Ehren Kruger’s script knows the rules of a trilogy better than it knows how to frighten anyone, and the phone calls have lost their sting.
Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) frightened people first and joked about it second. Four years on, the third film has moved the whole business to Hollywood, where a studio is shooting Stab 3, a film about the murders Sidney Prescott survived, and the killer has started working through its cast. It is a decent idea. Ehren Kruger’s script, taking over from Kevin Williamson, who stays on as a producer, gets a fair amount of comedy out of actors complaining about their parts as the parts are cut. What it does not get is a scare, and 116 minutes is a long time for a slasher to go without one.
Parker Posey is the reason to watch. Her Jennifer Jolie is the actress playing Gale Weathers in Stab 3, and when the real Gale (Courteney Cox) arrives the two spend the film in near-matching suits, Abigail Murray having dressed Posey as a slightly louder edition of Cox, each appalled by the other. Posey delivers every line as though she has been personally wronged by it. We laughed more than once, and nearly every time it was her. Cox plays the straight woman and lets her.
Neve Campbell has less to do than before, and the film is honest that this is the point. Sidney is hiding in a house in the hills with a false name and a crisis line, and the script spends much of its first hour away from her. When she does come to Hollywood, Campbell’s stillness is still the best thing the series has. David Arquette’s Dewey is now a technical adviser to the film-within-the-film, limping around a soundstage while Matt Keeslar’s Tom Prinze plays him as a hunk, and Arquette’s quiet hurt about that is the film’s warmest joke. Patrick Dempsey’s detective is pleasant and there to be suspected.
Bruce Alan Miller’s production design gives the film its one great set: Sidney’s Woodsboro house, rebuilt on a stage in plywood, the staircase in the right place and nothing behind the walls. Peter Deming shoots the real world in flat Californian daylight and the sets under working lamps, so that when someone runs from one into the other the light changes and so do the rules. One sequence in that fake house, later on, is the only time we sat forward: one woman, one corridor, a door that should not be open, Craven doing what he did in 1996. Patrick Lussier cuts the rest like a metronome, the jolt landing exactly where you expect it. Marco Beltrami’s score brings back the low Sidney theme and swells hard at every kill.
Here is what we felt, plainly. Somewhere in the first hour there is a killing on a studio lot, a person we have met twice, a knife, a photograph left behind, and we watched it as one watches a scene change. Nothing. The earlier films had us flinching at telephones for a week. The killer has a gadget that lets him speak in anyone’s voice, and the script uses it to move people around like chess pieces rather than to frighten them; every phone call is a plot device and none is a threat. And the answer to who is doing it, which we will not describe, is the thinnest of the three films, explained at length in a room while everyone stands still.
Craven had done this before, and better. New Nightmare (1994) put a horror film’s own cast in front of its monster and took the idea seriously. Scream 2 (1997) opened in a cinema and made the audience the victims. Scream 3 has a film crew explain how the third part of a trilogy works, then follows the rules without much conviction. Knowing the rules was the series’ joke; here it has become its excuse.
Most critics are split on this one and so are we, though we lean down. See it if you liked the first two and want Sidney, Gale and Dewey in the same room once more. Watch it at home, with someone who will enjoy Posey as much as you do. It carries an 18, which is generous; it is not violent enough to have earned it and not frightening enough to need it.
