Scream 3 (Scream 3)

Stanislav F. Rostotsky

Director Wes Craven Film and Video Rights - West Video

(Photo: West )

The first Scream was released four years ago and not only became the highest-grossing horror film of all time, but was immediately hailed as a groundbreaking work. Moreover, the revolutionary in this case was not the patriarch of the genre, director Wes Craven (The Last House on the Left, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Vampire in Brooklyn), but the young and then unknown screenwriter Kevin Williamson. It was he who came up with the idea of immersing the traditional plot of a maniac methodically destroying terrified teenagers into a cinematic context. Not only the killer, but also the victims clearly realized that they were the heroes of a horror film, and therefore endlessly quoted classics of the genre, threw around cult names and titles (including revealing an impeccable knowledge of Craven’s films) and implored the ripper with phrases like: “Don’t kill me, I really want to appear in the sequel!" All this was exciting and funny, but faithful adherents of scary movies were still annoyed by such an obsessive game of quotes. This irritation, however, disappeared by the time the second part was released, when it became finally clear that “Scream” was not a horror film after all, and not even a film at all in the usual sense, but something else. Something like a post-modern film quiz. An ironic encyclopedia of genre cliches, the characters of which are more important not to avoid death, but to die in a strictly defined order.

The third - and, according to the authors, the last - "Scream" was filmed without Williamson's participation, but they remained true to his precepts. So, although the film’s advertising slogan calls for “forget all the rules,” the inviolable laws of any trilogy inevitably come into play: in the last part, the ghost of the past must appear, turning the whole story on its head and revealing the true reasons for what is happening. Therefore, at the scene of the latest crimes (and this place is the set of a film based on the “real” events that took place in the last episode), old photographs begin to be found, further confusing the investigation. Meanwhile, the flow of young blood is expanding and seething.

In principle, the new "Scream" is no worse than the previous ones. There are a lot of truly entertaining scenes and dialogues, and iconic actors appear in small roles, making fun of their screen masks - take Carrie Fisher, who played the actress who was once rejected for the role of Princess Leia in Star Wars. "(this despite the fact that it was Fischer who played the princess). But impeccably drawn up rules turn out to be much more interesting and more important than the game itself. Horror, once the most democratic of genres, is becoming an intellectual diversion for the initiated. Instead of jokes, the viewer is told their numbers. Film buffs are happy as usual.