It's billed as the slasher saga's final tranche - but don't count on it.
The show's not over until the fat's been cut off the lady. Wes Craven's third outing for the ghoulish freak who winnows the cast like a master chef offers video-store geeks - who think they know all the genre rules - another post-modern horror show, but warns that, in the finale, "forget the rules".
The frights this time are in-house generated. A killer is loose in a Hollywood studio. A slasher flick called Stab 3, based on the "true" story of Scream 1, is being shot when it's suddenly beset with real murders, taking out the actors in the order of their deaths in the script.
Tele-reporter Courteney Cox Arquette rushes over to the set, sniffing prime-time blood, but finds her former fiancé David Arquette now bodyguarding Parker Posey as the film-within-the-film's Method star.
Nothing stops the masked bogeyman who looks like that Edvard Munch image pertinently called The Scream. Roger Corman has a one-line appearance, to pontificate that "violence in cinema is a big deal right now." (Where's he been?) Someone else says: "Hollywood is full of criminals whose careers are flourishing." With their money in the bloodbank, producers of movies like Scream can afford to smirk at the risk of self-incrimination.
But it all seems a bit past its prime. In spite of being nudged in the ribs by satirical gags and stabbed in the back by serrated blades, the monotony of formulaic murder is only intermittently relieved by the occasional sharp in-joke, like offering a "final cut" on a movie in return for sparing your life. An offer of video rights in the Scream trilogy might have been better thinking.
Scream 3
Cert: cert18
