Scream 3

Scream 3 is the only film in this series that I don’t actually like. Don’t get me wrong, taken on it’s own it’s not bad. However, compared to the previous films, it’s lazy. It’s particularly annoying that the movie taunts us with the suggestion that one of the main characters will die, and all three of our leads are still alive when the credits roll. Furthermore, we’re told this in a posthumous videotape recorded by Randy (Jamie Kennedy), the main character who was killed off in the previous film.

That’s the problem with this movie: It’s supposed to be the concluding chapter. It’s the end of a trilogy, a finale, the close of the story. However, Scream 2 actually felt much braver in it’s decision to kill off Randy. This movie, however, doesn’t have any moments that are particularly shocking or surprising.

One point that is borrowed from the second movie: building the reveal around a brief line of dialogue from a previous film. That way, the movies feel connected, without getting too bogged down in continuity. For 2 it was the comment about Billy’s mother leaving town, setting up her reappearance. In this film it was the suggestion that Maureen Prescott had slept with a large number of men, setting up both her sexual abuse during her time in Hollywood, and the possibility that Sidney (Never Campbell) had an unknown sibling.

However, the movie chooses to expand and throw in new characters, when it should be slicing everything down to the basics, and building a film on established characters from the previous movies. All the elements for a good finale are here, but they’re assembled in the wrong way.

The set-up of the film makes sense: Sidney has gone into hiding, working on a womens’ crisis hotline. In order to get her attention, the killer begins a rampage on the set of the newest Stab movie, where Dewey (David Arquette) is working as a consultant. Gale (Courtney Cox) is contacted by the police and comes to the set after the first murder of the now-famous talk show host Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber). The killer begins targeting the actors in the order of their deaths in the film (Cotton had foolishly agreed to appear as himself in a cameo in which he would be killed off).

Eventually, Sidney is lured into the case. As she, Gale, and Dewey hunt for clues, it eventually comes to light that the killer’s motives relate to Sidney’s mother Maureen, who had spent some time in Hollywood under the name Rina Reynolds. It becomes clear that she’d been sexually abused by multiple men at the home of Producer John Milton (Lance Henricksen), who profited from her death by making the Stab films. Henricksen gives us a decent Wes Craven impersonation, although I kind of wish Craven had taken the plunge and played the role himself.

When the killer captures Gale and Dewey, Sidney is lured to his home, and finds out that her mother had a child who grew to be Stab 3 director Roman Bridger (Scott Foley). Roman had sought Maureen out before the events of the first film, and had the door slammed in his face. So, he groomed both Billy and Mrs. Loomis as killers in an effort to get revenge. From that revelation the film plays out as expected: Roman has a plan to frame Sidney as the killer, there’s a confrontation, and he’s killed. The only major deviation from the previous film is the lack of a secondary killer, and that only because a rewrite eliminated the idea of Sidney’s in-universe actress Angelina (Emily Mortimer) being his accomplice.

I don’t wish to give the impression that Foley does a bad job. Indeed, better established, I think Roman could have been an excellent villain. But, this wasn’t the time for new elements to take center stage. The movie also suffers from having Gale’s actress, Jennifer (Parker Posey), suddenly become a main character investigating the crime. While the idea of Gale competing with a fictionalized version of herself to be the best Gale Weathers is moderately amusing, it further distracts. This movie complicates what should be simplicity and humanity.

I spent a lot of time debating how I could criticize this movie without a better solution myself. And then it came to me: the perfect ending to this trilogy would be for Sidney’s brother to be a character known and beloved throughout the series. Ironically, Scary Movie got it right: the revelation of Dewey as the mastermind would have been both logical (why did the killers never finish him off in the previous movies?), and heartbreaking. While you could argue that Dewey would have little trouble finding Sidney, bringing her into an environment in which she was vulnerable would be far more difficult.

So, is this a bad film? Once again, no. However, if you’re going through the Scream movies and skip from 2 to 4, you won’t feel like you missed that much.

Scream 2

I first became a fan of the Scream movies in the mid-2000s when I was in High School. At the time Scream 2 was my favorite, but as I've gotten older the film hasn't aged well. It's still a good film, much better than Scream 3. However, in retrospect I think that I loved the sillier and more over-the-top story as a teenager, and as an adult I find the movie a bit immature in it’s tone. While the same issue could be raised with Scream 4, that film does an overall better job of hitting the right notes.

The single biggest weakness of this film is probably the new characters. The core characters of Sidney (Neve Campbell), Gale (Courteney Cox), Dewey (David Arquette), and Randy (Jamie Kennedy) all do excellent work. However, Liev Schreiber comes across as phoning it in his expanded role as Cotton Weary, and I really can't see Derek (Jerry O'Connell) without thinking Sidney is dating Quinn from Sliders. I'd say Hallie (Elise Neal) is the only new character who comes across as compelling or interesting, and she's given fairly little to do before being killed.

The single weakest point, though, is the villains. The concept behind them is clever: Billy Loomis' mother (Laurie Metcalf) returns to get revenge on the girl who killed her son, and teams up with Mikey (Timothy Olyphant), an attention-hungry troll who wants to kill people and then blame it on the movies so he can have a high-profile trial. Unfortunately, both of these characters are only featured in passing prior to the reveal, so neither is properly set up. This lack of development is just weird, since Mrs. Loomis goes out of her way to create a false identity when she introduces herself to Gale, and Mickey is a college classmate. Both of these gave the villains an opening to interact with the protagonists. Instead, we get a number of long scenes establishing Cotton and Derek as suspects.

Beyond their lack of set-up, the villains are just downright cartoonish. Where Billy and Stu from the original Scream came across as realistically disturbed, the villains here immediately jump into insane ranting. It doesn't help that the villains have no loyalty to each other, with Mrs. Loomis shooting Mickey shortly after the reveal, keeping him down until she'd been dispatched. While having two killers still helps to explain how Ghostface could pop up at random and never tire in a chase, having them turn on each other means that at no point do the heroes have to deal with two killers at once.

There is one thing that this movie does perfectly thought: Killing off Randy. The fact that 3 and 4 limit the deaths to new characters reduces the impact of both films. The Cassandra sequence in this film is taken by some fans to imply that Kevin Williamson intended to kill Sidney off in Scream 3. Personally, I would have offed Gale, since Dewey's survival is something of a running gag in the series.

I know that many people disagree with me on this point, but knowing that writers refuse to kill off certain characters kills the tension. Killing a main character is what made Psycho a classic, and in horror giving certain characters immunity from death just comes across as cheap. Anyone can die, that’s where fear comes from.

I know that I'm harping on the bad points here, of which there are a lot, but this is still a good film. It pales next to the original, and even next to Scream 4, but it still gives you the classic characters, a lot of tense scenes, and a mystery that works fairly well. If you feel like marathoning the Scream movies, include this one.