Herald rating: * *
Running time: 116 mins
Rental: Today
Review: Ewan McDonald
Scary Movie is out there in the cinemas, and you can warm up for Saturday night by watching this, one of the movies that it sends up. Of course, this is a send-up too. Spooky.
In the final part of Wes Craven's
self-aware slasher series, in which the movie-buff characters know all the horror cliches but get trapped in them anyway, the surviving actors from the previous Screams move to Hollywood, where a horror film named Stab 3 is in production.
Soon the killer is slashing the actors in the same order they die in the screenplay.
The third victim is hard to predict. "There were three different versions of the script," a studio executive explains, "to keep the ending off the internet. I don't know which version the killer read."
No matter: the killer thoughtfully faxes a revised script.
Neve Campbell is back as Sidney Prescott, now so traumatised she has changed her name, moved to Monterey and works for a crisis hotline.
Look, here are a couple more Arquettes: David as the former deputy, now a would-be security guard who's still in love with Gale Weathers; his real-life wife, Courteney (who's a Friend, too) as Weathers, the TV journalist; and Parker Posey as the actress hired to portray Weathers in Stab 3.
Everyone from Carrie Fisher to Jenny McCarthy has a life-or-death cameo.
And if these names mean nothing to you, Scream 3 is probably a joke too far as well.
Those who've enjoyed the first two will probably stick around for the ride; my feeling is that Craven and Co should have quit after the second, while they were well ahead.
