With all the coverage of the upcoming return of the other Ghostface Killah in Scream 4, lots of pundits have decided to retroactively poop on the series' most recent entry, 2000's Scream 3, as though it were somehow a franchise-destroyer. So with Lionsgate reissuing the first three Scream movies this week for the first time in Blu-ray, let's revisit this maligned chapter. After all, Toy Story 3 notwithstanding, it's hard to get respect when you've got a numeral above "2" in your title.
The story begins with our heroine Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) hiding out in an undisclosed location after all the victimization she faced in the first two movies. But wouldn't you know it, Mr. "Do You Like Scary Movies" comes a-calling again, so Sidney heads to Hollywood where the Stab franchise -- the movies-within-the-movies based on Sidney's travails -- is shooting its third film.
Former deputy Dewey (David Arquette) is on the scene as a technical advisor, and reporter Gale (Courteney Cox, who was appending "Arquette" to her name at the time) gets called in by LAPD detective Mark (Patrick Dempsey) when Cotton (Liev Schreiber) gets skewered. Cotton, you'll recall, was Sidney's mother's lover who was wrongfully imprisoned for her murder, and in this movie, he had just filmed a cameo as the first person in Stab 3 to get killed.
And if you thought that was confusing, wait until you see the Stab counterparts of Sidney, Dewey, and Gale, played by Emily Mortimer, Matt Keeslar, and Parker Posey, respectively. (Did Mortimer use one of those Men in Black mind-wipers to make us all forget she'd been in this movie?) Not to mention the fact that several murders take place on a movie set that is designed to look like Sidney's real hometown of Woodsboro. When Posey's actress character decides she's going into Gale-like investigation mode, we get the film's highlight: a glorious and all-too-brief three-way of sarcasm when Cox and Posey pump studio archivist Carrie Fisher for information.
Scream 3 allowed director Wes Craven to expand on ideas he'd first toyed with in the underrated Wes Craven's New Nightmare. In that earlier film, the Nightmare on Elm Street series was brought into "real" life with Freddy Krueger now pursuing actress Heather Langenkamp (playing herself) and not the character she played in the Nightmare movies. It's an unnerving horror movie with a Brecht/Pirandello twist, and Scream 3 has lots of fun with the movie-Scream- versus-the-"movie"-Stab stuff.
The result occasionally touches on the stuff of actual nightmares -- in dreams, after all, geographic locations get mushed together (the way that Sidney opens one door in the movie set of her house and then emerges in another house altogether) and people we know are "played" by someone else (Scream characters and their Stab counterparts interact throughout).
Granted, the revelation of the killer at the end of the film strains credulity -- but has there ever been a franchise where the actual identity of the murderer matters less? And one wonders what Cox and Dempsey did to anger the cameraman, but that's another matter entirely.
Sure, Scream 3 is the culmination of the snake-head-eating-the-tail brand of self-referentiality for which the movies were popular in the first place. But it does so cleverly, keeping both the laughs and the jolts coming. We should be so lucky to have Scream 4 be as good.