It's amazing what a big difference a writer can make. I mean, here we have a movie that basically features the same cast and crew from two previous movies but yet the movie feels totally different and is way worse. Thank goodness that for part 4 they brought writer Kevin Williamson back once again.
It's not necessarily the story in itself that is bad but it's more the treatment of its characters and also its horrible dialog. For one, there are some absolutely pointless characters in this movie, that also suddenly completely disappear out of the story after a while. Another thing is how the familiar characters out of the first two movies have suddenly completely changed in this one. For the first part the movie is all about the Courteney Cox and David Arquette character and it wasn't until very well half way through into the movie that they suddenly seemed to realize they had to put in Neve Campbell more, since she is actually supposed to be the protagonist of the entire series and all of the movies and their story revolve around her character. But it just feels very forced all and of course the multiple rewrites that got done while shooting this movie certainly didn't helped with its end result. With also feels very forced is all of its comedy. In a way the first two movies were also already spoofing the genre but this one does it completely wrong and often in a way too goofy way. The movie also has far too many cameos in it, which becomes an huge distracting and makes it obvious that this movie was taking itself not nearly serious enough.
It also really isn't much good as an horror, since the movie is lacking with its build up. Again, this is also mostly due to its writing but you can also probably blame director Wes Craven for this. It's as if this movie got done on the automatic pilot by him and he didn't had real interest in doing this third movie in the first place. Same goes for basically the entire returning cast members, who just don't impress all that much.
Actually I think this movie would had been a lot better without all of the returning characters from the first movies and make this a movie on its own within the series, featuring all new characters. I say this because the idea of having the killer wander around the set of "Stab 3", the movie within this movie, based on the Woodsboro killings from the previous movies, could had actually worked out quite well and interesting. It would had been a new, fresh take for the series but instead it now is something that is happening in the background all, most of the time.
But calling this movie horrible also wouldn't be right. It's just that this movie disappoints on about every level, when compared to the first two movies out of the series. But as a standalone movie simple fact remains that this is a quite bad and lacking genre movie as well. Thank goodness that the series didn't ended with this movie, since the series definitely deserves a far better faith than that.
5/10
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