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But viewers who just wander in off the street to find out what all the fuss is about may wonder whether they're watching a scathing horror parody, a loving horror homage, a Hollywood satire with a few slashings thrown in or a high-minded critique on the evils of making movies. For the most part, "Scream 3" is too wrapped up in its own admittedly clever gamesmanship, and in making sure its convoluted story works out, to deliver the goods in terms of old-fashioned Wes Craven edge-of-your-seat terror.

Scream 3 Directed by Wes Craven Starring David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox Arquette, Patrick Dempsey, Scott Foley and Parker Posey

Much of "Scream 3" is set on the paranoid, closed set of a horror film called "Stab 3," whose cast is being carved up one at a time by an unknown assailant. (Mind you, "Scream 3" is surrounded by its own paranoia. Miramax was so concerned about protecting the movie's plot secrets that no journalists were allowed to see the finished film until two days before it opened.) The actors are apparently getting killed in precisely the order that the characters they're playing were -- that is, the "real people" we got to know back in the small town of Woodsboro in the original "Scream." Or maybe they're just being killed in the same order as their characters in the script of "Stab 3." As one of the actors-playing-actors remarks, "I can see why Tori Spelling and David Schwimmer didn't want to come back," which I guess is a "Stab" in-joke rather than a "Scream" in-joke. (Are you paying attention? There will be a quiz.) Whatever's going on, the original Ghostface Killer in the Edvard Munch mask is back -- or at least somebody who looks, acts and even talks just like him.

As the series has progressed, its focus has gradually wandered away from haunted ingénue Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) toward the feuding couple of prima-donna newswoman Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox Arquette) and Dewey Riley (David Arquette), the perennially befuddled former sheriff's deputy. Cox and Arquette got hitched in real life between "Scream 2" and "Scream 3," and their screen personas seem made for each other as well. Maybe they have a future as a gender-reversed Desi and Lucy, with David as the self-confident ditz and Courteney -- who looks thinner and scarier in each succeeding film -- as the exasperated genius.

Here, Cox's Gale is of course up to her old unscrupulous tricks in trying to break the story of the "Stab 3" murders, while Dewey, now a consultant to the film's producers, can't resist telling her everything he knows. In one of the movie's most amusing touches, Gale can't escape someone even more self-important than she -- actress Jennifer Jolie (Parker Posey), who plays Gale in "Stab 3" and keeps insisting that her Gale is superior to the real thing.

Jennifer, whom Posey imbues with just the right combination of artiness and trashiness, isn't the only character with a name that movie fans may find faintly familiar. There's also Angelina Tyler (Emily Mortimer), who apparently worked the casting couch to get the part of Sidney in "Stab 3," and Tom Prinze (Matt Keeslar), who plays a buffed-up version of Dewey. Sometimes it seems as if Craven and wunderkind screenwriter Ehren Kruger (who took over from the series' burned-out creator, Kevin Williamson) are more intent on mocking the current Hollywood scene -- which Craven and Williamson surely helped create -- than on keeping the characters moving.

We get a celebrity guard with 'tude (Patrick Warburton) who tells Dewey that his résumé includes Julia Roberts, Salman Rushdie and Posh Spice. We get Jenny McCarthy as an aging starlet playing "the chick who gets killed second." We get Carrie Fisher as an embittered onetime starlet who's now the studio archivist. (For hardcore film geeks, we even get "Dogma" director Kevin Smith doing a walk-through as his Silent Bob character and legendary B-movie director Roger Corman as a studio executive.)

Next page | "The past will come back to bite you in the ass"