I can’t say that I was a huge fan of the Scary Movie franchise. I’ve seen all of them, and yet I haven’t managed to truly like any of them. They provided me with a giggle here and there, and a chuckle every once in a while, but they haven’t been consistently funny to me. It’s either the lack of disrespect they have for the films they parody, or the lack of storytelling of its own, perhaps it’s just that the jokes don’t have any build-up, but they have never been amusing to me. That said, Scary Movie 3 turned out to be a big improvement on almost every front beside the acting.
How to Download Scary Movie 3 (2003)
You can download the film from a digital store. You can also stream it. Click on the Download button at the end of this review and make your choice. Check out also the two previous films in the series – Scary Movie (2000) and Scary Movie 2 (2001).
The Movie Review
The Ring (2002), Signs (2002), 8 Mile (2002), The Matrix (1999), and The Matrix Reloaded (2003) are all that Scary Movie 3 heavily parodies. The film starts out with a spoof of The Ring’s infamous opening sequence, then cuts to a man named Tom finding crop circles on his property in a direct parody of Signs. The guardian of a young psychic kid named Cody, who is similar to Aidan from The Ring, and a television news reporter covering a story on crop circles, Cindy Campbell, serves as a connecting thread between the two tales.
It helps that there’s an actual director this time around. David Zucker takes over the third installment, instead of having the Wayans brothers’ hand-made style of comedy that simply doesn’t work after that abysmal second film. There is a stylistic difference that is unquestionably attributable to the change in directors. In addition to Airplane! (1980), Top Secret! (1984), and The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988), Zucker is the true mind behind this film. As such, compared to the other Scary Movies, Scary Movie 3 is much more in the style of Zucker’s earlier works.
Zucker’s new direction works for this film, and it adds to the films that Scary Movie 3 is parodying. Quite a few of the gags, believe it or not, are very subtle digs at the source material. Take, for instance, the pillow fight in the opening scene. This was a direct subtext to The Ring’s original Japanese version, which included an almost romantic relationship between the two female characters. However, that doesn’t stop this film from still being a collection of gags for the most part, but the coherency is much better here.
The humor is better enforced here, and so is the coherency in the pretty badly written story. However, the acting is the real showstopper, as in it’s so bad that you want to stop watching the film altogether. Anna Faris and Regina Hall, who formerly played Cindy Campbell and Brenda Meeks respectively, are once again seen reprising their roles in some of the worst performances to date. Then we have Charlie Sheen, Simon Rex, Anthony Anderson, Kevin Hart, and Leslie Nielsen as new additions to the cast, who also deliver nothing short of horrible performances.
Visually though, this is a much more coherent film. The film has a style of its own, despite having two very separate stories going on in the form of the Ring parody and the Signs parody. The thematic style fits both parodies, and the visuals match it. The special effects aren’t too abundant this time around, but that’s what makes them better.
The music on the other hand is just as bad of course. There are typical themes for the ‘somewhat’ scary sounding scenes and the sound effects for the funny gags and slapstick comedy. Though, aside from that, there aren’t any stand-out tunes that keep chiming into your ear every once in a while.
Verdict
There were a few jokes in Scary Movie 3 that did not fall flat, particularly around the opening and ending of the movie. A quick, short parody movie seems to be all that Zucker wanted to do, this was a 75-minute long film, and it flew by way too fast. If there was a bit more time invested into the characters, the stories, and perhaps the build-up to jokes, I could see this being one of the funniest films in the Scary Movie franchise. However, in its current state, this turned out to be just as underwhelming as the others, although enhanced in many ways.
