Get excited everybody, we finally got ourselves a really good movie in the year 2000! It only took a little over a month but SCREAM 3 has arrived, tagged to a solid storyline, bloodstained action, a great cast, slick dialogue, an unpredictable ending and cameos all around. If you liked 1 & 2, you'll scream for numero 3!
PLOT: Poor l'il Sydney has moved to L.A. and isolated herself from the outside world. In the meantime, the third movie based on her life, called STAB 3, is being filmed in and around the Hollywood lots. It isn't until the actual cast members of the film start getting killed in real life, that Sydney decides that it's time to come back out into the world and face up to her past...and a nutjob who goes by the name of ghostface!
CRITIQUE: The end of this trilogy is a solid hit on all counts with plenty of suspense, intrigue, bloody murders, big boobies and cool in-jokes to satisfy any SCREAM fan who had been patiently tolerating all of the lame-brain wannabees over the past few years. This one kept me and my buddy guessing about the killer the whole way through, and with typical Craven pinnache, everyone in the cast seemed to be a suspect at some point or another. Of course, I won't spoil it for you, but suffice it to say that I was satisfied with the conclusion, and certainly didn't guess it before it was revealed. It was definitely a much better finale than the lame one that the sequel had tossed our way a few years back. The cast in this film was another thumb up, with everyone involved doing their share to make this film as authentic as any other. This time around, most of the story seemed to center around the Cox and Arquette characters, and both actors came through on their respective counts. In fact, Arquette and Parker Posey are both excellent in this film, with each one coming up just enough laughs to keep things light between killings. Jenny McCarthy also clocked in a decent performance alongside her boobs who delivered their lines perfectly while demonstrating great versatility and range.
The twists and turns in the film were also well handled and intelligently written, and will likely leave the proverbial scary movie "that doesn't make any sense" complaints outside the theater. The big opening scene is just that...a big opening scene, which lives up to its predecessors and delivers the bloody goods as always. Overall, I guess I am also kind of glad that this will be the final one because it is a very good movie, and I would rather remember this trilogy as just that, instead of it turning into a tired ol' parody of itself over and over and over again. In fact, that's probably the only thing that I did hold against this film, and that is the fact that despite it being an original tale set among actual Hollywood soundstages, the overall framework of the movie is basically the same. Ghostface wants to kill Sydney...ghostface kills others who get in the way...now let's guess who ghostface is. Thankfully, they ended the trilogy on a real high note with this winner.
And contrary to some initial reports, the violence in this film is still all there, in fact, I got the impression that this installment had an even higher body count than either one of its previous incarnations...but don't quote me on that. The pacing was also solid with a little setup, some action, some blood, some background story, more action, more murders and so on and so forth. Pretty neat if you dig that kind of shtuff. The one thing that is for sure is that you definitely have to be a fan of the first two movies to truly enjoy this one. In fact, I would suggest re-watching them both before checking this one out, cause this is definitely a continuation of the story, and many references to the previous films abound. All in all, this scary movie is the perfect bookend to the successful trilogy that jumpstarted the teen horror genre back in the late 90s. It's packed with murders, humor, suspense, cheap scares, pretty girls, hip dialogue and a legitimately surprise ending. Sound like something you'd like? Well what are you waiting for then...get out there and scream your ass off! And what is your favorite scary movie??
Little Known Facts about this film and its stars: Okay, so we all know by now that the girl who once appeared in Bruce Springsteen's 1984 "Dancing in the Dark" video, Courteney Cox, married SCREAM co-star David Arquette in June of 1999. But did you know that one of David's earliest big screen roles was as "Benny" in the original BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER movie, and that Courteney dated the original BATMAN, Michael Keaton, for about six years? Courteney is also infamous for having been the first person to say the word "period" on American TV (it was a Tampax commercial), and David leads the band Ear 2000, whose single "The Race" appeared on the SCREAM 2 soundtrack, and whose next single "Click Click" appears on this film's soundtrack. Neve Campbell recently admitted to having suffered a "nervous breakdown" at the tender age of 14, which resulted in complete hairloss. Intensive acupuncture grew it back. When actor Patrick Dempsey got married in 1987, he was 21 years old. His bride was 48. Jenny McCarthy was Playboy Playmate of the year in 1994. In 1998, she had her breast implants removed. Remember when the producer of this film, Kevin Williamson, was the screenwriting "toast of the town"? Well, the latest kid on the block is the writer of this flick, Ehren Kruger. He was the man behind the pen for last year's ARLINGTON ROAD (7/10) and he also wrote the upcoming Ben Affleck thriller, REINDEER GAMES. Two of the working titles for this film were SCREAM 3: GHOSTFACE KILLER and the simpler GHOSTFACE.
By :Berge Garabedian
Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
Rating: 3
Normally, as a critic, we are exempt from the cost of seeing a movie. Normally, we get in for absolute zero when we attend a press screener of a film. However, since Dimension, for what appear to be highly mysterious (and controversial) reasons, cancelled the screener of Scream 3 I had to pay.
This is one movie that I did not waste my money on. I saw this film in a theatre with about 700 other people, and the place was full to overflowing. Watching Scream 3 was reminiscent of watching a full-blown cult screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. People were dressed in full Mr. Ghost Face regalia (albeit without the knife), and the audience clapped, cheered, jeered, and chanted at practically every moment of the film.
To imagine the theatre I was in, imagine the theatre in the first ten minutes of Scream 2, remove the homicide, and multiply by ten.
In a lot of ways, seeing the movie in such a setting is probably for the best: I would have felt like such a silly ass loudly rooting for the killer in front of the rest of Cleveland's press contingent. My generation was raised on slasher flicks: they're our genre and our domain, and seeing Scream 3 with people of my generation was a refreshing switch from eating Thai food at the Ceder Lee cinemas with the rest of the critics.
Of course, it wasn't just the overwhelmingly `this is campy, and I like it'-atmosphere that made me enjoy the film… Scream 3 wasn't half-bad either.
Seeing as Dimension has already handed down their edict up on high from the Greenwich Village thrones of Bob and Harvey Weinstein that no one shall tell the details of Scream 3, and since I don't want them to have an excuse to bar the Internet critics from their next the-NSA-couldn't-break-this project, I will not tell you much. What I will tell you is this.
Mr. Ghost Face is at it again. I obviously won't tell you who Mr. Ghost Face is, only that he has had a few upgrades. One, he can imitate people's voices (this is revealed within the first scene), and two, this guy packs a second knife (not revealed until later, but I thought you should know). This time he's killing the cast of Stab 3 in the order in which they die in the movie.
Only one problem. Stab 3 and Scream 3 have comparable security levels, so Stab 3 has multiple drafts of the script so that no one quite knows who is going to be next. Of course, Mr. Ghost Face is going after whoever is left from the original cast (by now we have whittled it down to Courtney Cox, David Arquette, Liev Schreiber, and Neve Campbell) while he is at it.
By far the campiest of the Scream trilogy, Scream 3 is undeniably fun. It isn't even structured so that it is guilty pleasure. It is structured so that it is following the rules of a sequel, not a trilogy, and thus everything is much more elaborately planned. The pace is quicker, the jokes are funnier, the IQ of the movie drops by at least 20 points.
Scream 3 chooses as the target of its insults not the horror genre but the Hollywood system. Stab 3's cast is wonderfully postmodern (each person corresponds to a member of the surviving original cast), but plays its insults to actors, actresses, directors, and producers instead of to serial killers, shower scenes, axe murderers, and chesty victims.
Ehren Kruger is able to step into the voice of Kevin Williamson without missing a beat, but is sadly not quite able to pull off a script without plot holes. The biggest thing that Scream 3 has going against it is the plethora of plot holes that exist in this film.
But this is camp, and we don't care. In the end of Scream 3, when all is said and done, you are left with the feeling that you have just roasted marshmallows, made out in a drive-in, skinny-dipped in the lake, and done all of the other things that are both incredibly youthful and asking for it should you happen to find yourself in a serial-killer situation. The film is youthful. The film is Gen-X. But above all, it's fun, and it doesn't ever pretend to be anything more.
