(1 1/2 baby caseys)
All of you know that I'm a big horror movie fan. I loved the first Scream, and I really enjoyed the second one as well, sans the lame ending. So when I heard that Scream 3 was going to be released as well, I obviously was quite excited. It was frequently billed as the "last" Scream movie: the one that closes out the trilogy. From that I derived that the movie might actually have some balls and do something most horror movies don't do. And boy was I ever wrong.
It's hard to write a review for a movie like this and not give away any of the key plot points. Perhaps I can begin with the casting. Jenny McCarthy is perfect as the washed-up bimbo who can't get good acting jobs and whose career went to shit when she stopped getting naked, and she's not too shabby in this movie either. Parker Posey and Patrick Dempsey add a "where have I seen them before..." flair to the film as well. Basically what we have is an actor version of each of the surviving Scream characters. Basically what this means is there are twice as many people to be hacked into pieces.
But what happened to the movie having balls, you ask? Well, it left its balls in Scream 2, where it actually had the nerve to do some unexpected slaughter. We get several predictable kills, predictable screams, and an ending that makes you think "ahhh, that must have taken about 15 minutes to come up with such a giant load of bullshit. They must be gifted writers." Personally, I would have been a lot more pleased with the ending where Christopher Walken is the killer. No explanation why, he just kills everybody and at the end of the movie says "I'm Christopher Walken, i'm crazy, and I killed people."
However, it isn't the things above that bothered me that much. By the time you get to any third movie, it's hard to pull punches and really scare the audience (the only example that comes to mind is Nightmare on Elm Street 3, which Wes Craven also had a big hand in). However, the biggest problem with this movie is the (attempted) humor overload. I know Scream movies are supposed to be clever sendups of horror movies, that poke fun at their predictability and characters and so on, but when did the Scream movies turn into horror movie parodies? A movie can only be taken so seriously when every other line is a mockery of itself. And as much as I hate him, and boy do I hate him, Kevin Williamson's first two scripts had a certain flair to them. The characters were interesting, the whodunit aspects were hyped extensively, and the endings were at least moderately believable, especially in the first one. However, this movie degenerates into a series of one liners and goofy moments, and maybe I'm missing something, but that doesn't scare me. So to whoever makes Scream 4, which I know they will, correct the mistakes this movie made: make the characters interesting, stop trying to be so damn funny, and for God's sake, put in some naked girls. Three movies and not a single breast, especially when you have such boob potential as Jenny McCarthy, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Rose McGowan??? Stop jerking us off and let us do it ourselves.
February 5, 2000
Rating: Ok, here is how my rating is going to work. The more baby Caseys a movie gets, the better it is. The rating is zero to five baby Caseys. Simple enough? I think so.
Scream
3:
(1 1/2 baby caseys)