The round-faced and game David Arquette, as the earnestly dim Dewey, the small-town cop who's one of the few survivors of the first two films, softens her. The gloppy music that bubbles up when they have one of their soap opera moments -- like Angelo Badalamente scoring All My Children -- still produces a chuckle. But this element has run its course.
The Scream franchise is still built around Campbell, and maybe it took three times for her to get it right. She shows real ability, no longer just the cupcake about to hacked with the phallic carving knife. She has developed as an actress; when her eyes go dark with concern and fear, she is nerve-racked and tormented, not play-acting.
Scream 3 fixates on helplessness and failure, in the way many of Craven's scare-series do. (The woman-in-jeopardy prologue, as rote as the cold opening of Saturday Night Live, uses a past character for a felon-as-celeb joke and also features a brief, compelling bit by the underused Kelly Rutherford.)
Craven has no condescension in him, which is why his best work, like the first of the Nightmare on Elm Street films and Last House on the Left, has a disquieting air of melancholy. He may be the most conscientious director ever to devote himself to the genre. Still, it could be that the comedy registers so sharply here because the emotional scenes in his film have a deadpan quality.
Scream 3 happens to be so transparently self-referential that it probably wouldn't even cast a shadow, but Ehren Kruger's script is breezily self-mocking, winking at the Scream phenomenon. (One such in-joke: the phrase "scary movie," the original title of Scream, is uttered on a few occasions. And the director of "Stab 3" is named Roman, no doubt in tribute to Roman Polanski's filmography.)
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