Scream 3 (2000): C-

Ghostface once again returns to kill Sidney (Neve Campbell) in Scream 3, but it’s the audience who truly suffers from this wretchedly unfocused, unscary third installment in the Wes Craven-Kevin Williamson meta-horror series. This time penned by Ehren Kruger (from a Williamson treatment), the film feebly attempts to keep its self-referentiality high by setting the action on the movie set of the based-on-Sidney’s-life Stab 3, where cast members die for real in the order they were set to die on celluloid. Rather than playing up the gratuitous pointlessness of cash-in sequels like itself, however, Craven’s latest merely adheres to the very convoluted whodunit formula (and mounds of inane exposition) that it outwardly addresses via a from-the-grave video recording by Jamie Kennedy’s genre know-it-all. Delivering another round of brunette suspects while delving into the mysterious teenage Hollywood exploits of Sidney’s mom, Scream 3 wraps itself up in nonsensical plotting – the killer magically appears and disappears, characters behave like the very horror clichés they mock, and Sidney herself is largely relegated to sitting around doing nothing – and yet, other than Parker Posey’s turn as the actress playing Courtney Cox’s tabloid reporter, it manages neither humor nor terror. Unlike its superior predecessors, this supposed trilogy-capper follows conventions without ever subverting them, thereby playing straight a story whose every twist and turn is so much ridiculous nonsense.