Yet another moronic slasher horror/comedy.

Rating: Null/10 (6 January 2007)

Forget all intelligence, all ye who view this...
As was to be expected, this is a sub-par horror film; a commercial and idiotic venture to cash in on the recent and inexplicable slasher-film revival, which the equally dumb first part helped start. It's a self-indulgent piece of crap, with its lame film-buff in-jokes and sad attempts to be original and funny by satirizing sequels, films in general, and even itself. Craven and his gang of "creators" are so concerned with misleading and confusing the viewer as to who the killer may be, that they totally ignore the need for logic, or at least a decent amount of credibility ("decent" being very little, since this is the slasher genre - the worst horror sub-genre; its ugliest offspring, so-to-speak). I quickly saw through Craven's "trick" to give all (key) characters motives for being killers, early on (an old, old Agatha Christie tool), and then have them suspect each other. So I tried thinking logically (a mistake, naturally) as to who this boring killer may be; I decided half-way through the film that it must be the black cameraman. Why? Because. No, sorry: that would be a WES CRAVEN EXPLANATION. I can do better than that... Here's why the black guy should be the killer:
1) He would be the first black killer in a slasher film (or?), and this would have been terribly original in Craven's book.
2) He was the film's comic-relief (and a very unfunny one, by the way).
3) It actually fits in neatly with a couple of scenes in the film.
& most importantly:
4) He has no motive whatsoever.
Alas, Craven decides that one of the two killers, the student, has a motive which is ten times more ridiculous than any I have ever witnessed in any film before, and ten times less of a motive than any other character in the film had: his motive is his hunger for O.J.-like court-room notoriety and media drama and fame. What does this teach us, that we never knew before? It teaches us that sometimes no motive at all is better than a Wes Craven motive.
The absurdity of the other killer, the mother(!) of the murdered killer in the first part, is equally impressive: this woman poses as a TV reporter (why??) (idea stolen from "Se7en") in the entire film without anyone recognizing her. No one from their small town - and there's half-a-dozen of those idiots hanging around the college and thereabouts - recognized her, apart from Campbell in the final scenes.
Then there is the film's finale... If I had any willingness left in me to forgive Craven for some of the many moronisms, it was all but destroyed by this laughable, manic, over-the-top, gab-and-shoot-fest finale which has to be seen to be believed! Horror films and thrillers are infamous and even feared for their awfully dumb endings, but this one surpasses even the most hardened skeptic's expectations. Yes, that's right: it's possibly as dumb as "Hitcher"'s ending.
Then we have David Arquette's atrocious acting... When will nepotism finally become punishable by electrocution in Hollywood?! This guy, apart from looking like a total loser, is the KING OF ALL OVER-ACTORS and hasn't got a clue what it means to act out a scene and not grimace his way through a scene as though to show the director your latest Beverly Hills facial aerobics exercises. (Craven must have gotten a threesome with the Arquette sisters in return for putting their brother in a major film.)
But we have to give Craven some credit, though: the service he provided the black culture in America by finally slaughtering blacks in a slasher film, is immeasurable. Hip hop hooray. Craven is an ACLU hero!
But the heaviest criticism is not that he is a commercial director, or that he works with lousy scripts, or that the plot is laughable, or that he is self-indulgent... No. It's that he is predictable. This film is in fact just that. There were at least half-a-dozen scenes which were predictable from the moment they began; it was always obvious who'd get killed and who'd escape, and sometimes even how. A sequel will be coming to cinemas near you, as soon as Craven and his gang of idiots think of a way of having even more absurd killers and even dumber motives.
Here are a few suggestions for "Scream 3" (& 4,5,6...):
1) The Killer: The great-grandfather of the murdered mother (in "Scream 2") of her murdered son ("Scream"), who lived on Mars and decided to go back to Earth after following the events in the previous two films.
His Motives: revenge, plus the fact that Martians threatened to kill him if he didn't amuse them by doing something violent on Earth.
2) The Killer: The great-great-great-grandfather of the killer in "Scream 3", who lived on Jupiter, and decided to go back to Earth after following the events in the previous three films.
His Motives: revenge, plus the fact that Jupiterians made him do it to prove that an Earthling can amuse them as well as he can amuse the Martians (who are their rivals for rule over that asteroid belt).
3) The Killers: all the innocent people in the previous four parts. They kill only Neve Campbell, proving once again that Craven can still think of original plots: having a dozen people kill one person, instead of the other way around. Isn't it brilliant!?
Their Motives: jealousy and anger over the fact that while all of them got injured and some even crippled through the series, she got away from all the violence with only minor bruises.
The Reason: Neve wants to finally get out of the series.
If you want a satiric biography of David Arquette (and other Hollywood morons) contact me by e-mail.