At this point it goes without saying that the Scream movies are like episodes of Scooby Doo. Like the others, Scream 3 belongs on the Cartoon Network. This time for a better reason: the film is funny and brisk, with enough good lines to make the comedy more satisfying than the somewhat routine but still unsettling jolts to the spine.
The director, Wes Craven, and his group, which doesn't include Kevin Williamson, writer and co-creator, this time around (he was too busy on other projects), recognize that the franchise's real competition is not The Blair Witch Project -- which chose to deliver shocks on a Fotomat budget without a self-aware sense of humor -- or The Sixth Sense, with its heartbreaking austerity, but rather Scream itself. (Maybe its real competition is also Scream 2, in which the actors looked so miserable that they must have thought of litigating themselves out of the picture.)
Scream 3 doesn't skimp on jacked-up scares, but it's as much a personality show as it is a slasher film.
Sidney (Neve Campbell), having survived the knife-wielding maniacs of the first two pictures, is now a crisis counselor living in a secluded compound in California; she is treated like a guest star. She really doesn't get involved in the action, which focuses on a killer pursuing the cast of "Stab 3," a film based on the events of her life -- more movie-within-a-movie stuff -- until about a half-hour into the picture. (The murders are a gambit to lure her into danger.) Instead, Scream 3 gives the actors playing actors in "Stab 3" a chance to shine.
Parker Posey in particular glows as Jennifer, the actress playing the bullying reporter Gale Weathers. Posey, a specialist at jittery self-absorption, is like an up-to-the-minute version of Carole Lombard; she alone makes the picture worth seeing. Dizzy and nakedly -- hilariously -- ambitious, she's so flighty she seems to be levitating. When she has a moment, staring raptly at an important event happening before her eyes, she's so self-conscious she can't even honestly pay attention to what's going on. She draws attention to herself as she watches someone else.
Posey's nervous prodigiousness is just one of the assets of Scream 3. Patrick Warburton brings his disinterested, smug squint to the party, playing a celebrity security man who has guarded "Julia Roberts, Salman Rushdie and Posh Spice."
With his milk-fed good looks -- he's like a slightly melted version of Captain Marvel -- and that voice like chocolate pudding, Warburton seems to be lost in a very pleasant dream. And he gets a laugh every time he shows up.
So does Deon Richmond, playing a brother named Tyson who's very aware of the fate of black actors in Hollywood. This game is so well-played that Jenny McCarthy as Sarah Darling, the hungry actress, scores.Heartless and entertaining when it comes to sending up itself and the conventions of the genre it helped to resuscitate, the picture feels tired when it settles into the rusty mechanics of the Scream movies. There is a nifty cameo by Jamie Walters, the movie-obsessed video store clerk, who returns to deconstruct the genre and set things up by telling us all bets are off in the third part of a series.
Still, this is a series, and said to be the final scream, so we suffer through the constable Dewey and Gale love connection, which has hit a speed bump since the last installment. Courteney Cox Arquette, reprising her role as Gale, looks as if she hasn't eaten since Scream 2.
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