The 2000s Movie Project: 'Scream 3'

The third entry in The 2000s Movie Project was the first blockbuster of this young century Scream 3. I won't lie to you, when it was released on February 11, 2000, I was a Scream 3 apologist. I defended the movie even as the critical consensus was dire. Naturally, I never revisited the movie again so as to preserve my opinion. Watching it again, from a more mature perspective, it's not that I was wrong, it's that I did not yet know how to determine how wrong I was.

Scream was a phenomenon of the late 90s and early 2000s, a complete reinvention of a genre that really needed one. By 2000, however, and the release Scream 3, the cracks were not merely beginning to form, they were beginning to crumble all over again. The genre that Wes Craven had reinvented had begun, in a short period of time, to eat itself all over again, cannibalizing itself on the new/old tropes that Craven had exposed in the original Scream.

Scream 3 arrived on February 4, 2000 with the anticipation of a massive blockbuster, and did not disappoint in terms of the box office garnering more than $160 million dollars on a $40 million dollar budget. I recall liking it, though not reviewing at the time. Critics who were writing at that time however, were not kind. The critical consensus was that the franchise had fully run its course, and that Scream’s cultural moment had ended as the series had become a parody of itself. Those critics were not wrong.

Scream 3 picks up the story of the Woodsboro Murders with the same shocker, main cast kill, that the first movie turned into a genre trope. This time, it’s Liev Schreiber’s Cotton Whirry, the mistaken killer of the original Scream, who bites it early in Scream 3. Why Cotton? Because he had made a cameo appearance in the movie within the movie, Stab, and had been the first person to die in that meta-movie.

Scream 3 was the genesis of the meta-movie, a movie that painfully bends over backwards to refer to itself as a form of a joke. Wes Craven and screenwriters Ehren Kruger and Kevin Williamson, even go as far as writing themselves into the movie with Lance Henriksen portraying Craven as the director of Stab and Scott Foley standing in for Kruger and Williamson as the self-referential screenwriter of Stab 3.

Where is Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott? She’s living in seclusion in the hills above Hollywood, locked away from the world. That’s a rational choice considering she’s survived two mass murders, and the murder of her mother over the span of less than a decade. Who wouldn’t hide away and keep the demons at bay with a name change and cutting themselves off from the outside world. Of course, that’s not about to last.

With Cotton’s death comes the first warning shot. The death of an actress named Sarah, and played with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, by Jenny McCarthy, is the first indication to the rest of our main cast that something has truly begun again. Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) and Deputy Dewey (David Arquette), are each back on the case as reporter and former police officer looking to protect Sidney from the killer. While Gale is looking for the story on Cotton and Stab 3, Dewey is playing consultant, and on set security blanket to Gale Weathers’ onscreen avatar, Jennifer Jolie (Parker Posey).

Gale and Dewey reunite on the set just in time for Sarah’s murder to shut down production on the movie. This is followed by the killer arriving at Jennifer’s house to murder her security guard, and another of her co-stars, Tom Prinze (Matt Keeslar) and if these name jokes, Jolie, Prinze, aren’t making you laugh, then too bad, references like this are pretty much all that Scream 3 has in terms of a sense of humor. That, and an unnecessary and unfunny cameo by Kevin Smith and Jay Mewes in their Jay and Silent Bob guise.

Wes Craven is an incredibly talented director, but when he goes on auto-pilot he can be a painfully, maddeningly average director. Craven brings the bare minimum of effort to bare on Scream 3. Set pieces such as Cotton’s death have pro level staging, but contain odd little cheats to achieve the needed roadblocks to drag out the time needed to make the scene appear suspenseful and shocking, without actually achieving suspense or shock.

There is a slickness, a Hollywood-ized stylishness to Scream 3. That’s not to say that the original or the first sequel weren’t slick, Hollywood productions, but they had an originality and flair to them that didn’t feel as forced as it does in Scream 3. Forced is a good way to describe Scream 3, there is a mercenary quality to the film that undermines the effort. Where the first two movies had an underdog, genre feel, this is a movie of, and for, the Hollywood machine.

This is especially true of the scene that Scream 3 is remembered for, the return of Jamie Kennedy’s video store geek Randy. In this scene, which featured heavily in the marketing of Scream 3, Randy breaks down the rules of horror trilogies, in a fashion akin to the same scenes he enacted in the original Scream when he opined on the rules of surviving a horror movie, a scene that famously lampooned the things that had become tired and predictable about the genre.

The attempt to capture that same lightning in a bottle from the original Scream, feels manufactured in Scream 3. The scene exists solely as a sales pitch for Scream 3, a way to convince audiences that this is still the genre redefining franchise that they fell in love with just a few years earlier. But it’s not, and this scene exposes that fact even as it is intended to hide that fact. This kind of look at me nonsense, only underlines the sellout, corporatized, product oriented natured of Scream 3.

Look, I am not intending to get on a soapbox and opine upon the purity of Wes Craven’s vision for the original Scream, I’m merely getting to the heart of why Scream 3 is such a remarkable failure from a creative standpoint, the film is soulless, and does little to hide that fact. There is an emptiness at the core of trying to drag this series to another sequel. Instead of making a movie that organically extended this story to something we could believe in, in this universe, the makers of Scream 3 are nakedly trying to cash in on past success.

That would have worked if the movie had any sense of humor or self awareness to offset the obvious cash-in. Really, that should have been Scream 3. The characters should be trying to cash in on their fame, and the movie should be calling the characters out on cashing in. it’s so obvious, if they had any real invention at all, the filmmakers would have provided a send up of their very own greed instead of turning out a rote, obvious cash grab.

What an amazingly missed opportunity.