How the Sloppiness of "Scream 3" Nearly Doomed Wes Craven’s Meta-Slasher Series

https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/scream/scream-3-2000-problems-review-neve-campbell-kevin-williamson/

Satire and sequelization are a difficult combo to pull off, and the Scream series demonstrates what both success and failure look like in this regard. Where 1997’s Scream 2 retains a comfortingly familiar identity when lined up next to the iconic 1996 original from Wes Craven—a film that rescued the slasher genre from utter stagnation and obsolescence in that decade—2000’s Scream 3 is an illustration of what happens when such a franchise loses sight of its own unifying thesis. It’s an utter mess of a film, hamstrung by production woes and a chaotic filming process, let down by a change of screenwriter and inferior script, and generally a disservice to the beloved characters established in the first two movies. Although Scream 4 would eventually reclaim the honor of the series to some extent (and of course there’s another sequel on the way), the fact that 11 years passed between the third and fourth entry speaks to the severity of the damage that Scream 3 did to the franchise. It’s the black sheep of the Scream series, but how did it go so wrong?

First, a quick crash course on the plot structure of Scream, Scream 2 and Scream 3. If you’re trying to avoid spoilers in 20-plus year old movies, this would be the time to turn back.

The original Scream introduces Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), a high school girl whose mother was murdered a year earlier in a mysterious crime. Her small town is terrorized by a masked killer referred to as “Ghostface,” who kills using methods and motivation that would seem to draw inspiration from the tropes of golden age 1980s slasher movies. The killers (there are two) are eventually revealed to be Sidney’s boyfriend Billy Loomis and his slacker friend Stu, largely motivated by the fact that Sidney’s mother had been having an affair with Billy’s father, leading them to murder her. With the help of her newfound friends, particularly news reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and local deputy Dewey Riley (David Arquette) Sidney survives her ordeal. In Scream 2, meanwhile, the killings begin again and follow Sidney to college, even as a meta film-within-a-film series called Stab recounts the events of Scream. This time around, Sidney must overcome her innate distrust of the people around her, navigate the evolved rules of slasher sequels, and generally up the ante. The killers (two again) are eventually revealed to be her deluded friend Mickey and a local tabloid journalist who is revealed to be the mother of Billy Loomis, back for revenge.

By the time of Scream 3, Sidney has effectively gone into hiding, living under an assumed identity before a new rash of killings once again draws her back into the fold. The film’s cursory examination of “trilogy tropes” insists that the plot must return “to where it all began,” but unlike Scream and Scream 2, the time paid to examining horror cinema conventions is minimal. Instead, Scream 3 loses sight of any real attempt at satire of film tropes from our world, and instead moves in a direction of comic callbacks to its own increasingly complicated timeline, with quickly diminishing returns. The action largely takes place on and around the set of Stab 3, and the main antagonist is eventually revealed to be film director Roman Bridger (Scott Foley), who reveals himself as Sidney’s half brother, abandoned by Sidney’s mother during the period she ran away to become an actress in Hollywood. In this reveal, Roman retcons the series lore by revealing that it was him who killed Maureen Prescott, before then radicalizing Billy Loomis, Mrs. Loomis and others to go after Sidney in the years that followed. In effect, it returns the crux of the entire series to date to the secret life of Sidney’s mother, and makes Roman Bridger the de facto archfiend of the Scream trilogy, as it was meant to be at the time. Roman takes a seat at the head of the table as the architect of all Sidney’s misfortunes, and with his defeat Sidney Prescott can finally rest easy. Case closed.

At least, that’s the theory of Scream 3, and it’s not entirely unsound. The idea of Roman Bridger as a character, the Big Bad orchestrating all the events of the series to date, could probably have been made to work. But in practice, the execution of the film is so slapdash and so repeatedly clumsy that it undermines the attempt to add another layer of intrigue to the Scream mythos, instead making everything in Scream 3 feel painfully contrived and in direct opposition to the clever origins of the franchise. And ultimately, some share of the blame must fall on both a change of screenwriter and a less inspired directorial job by Craven himself.