Where i Watched it: Paramount Plus

english Audio Description?: No

Yes, I am continuing to push forward through the Scream franchise on paramount Plus just in case at some point they decided to add audio description. Sadly, they did not.

Scream 3 features our Core 3 Sidney (Neve Campbell), Gale (Courtney Cox), and Dewey (david Arquette) pulled back in when another survivor is killed, and the cast of the current Stab films start becoming the new victims. The script seems to outline who will die next, but it’s been rewritten so many times, what version does the killer have?

it’s the worst of the three, because it has these weird tonal shifts. For example, it needs you to believe in the possibility that anyone could be a killer, include the cop protecting Sydney, played by Patrick Dempsey. He’s a nice guy, and in one scene, to get the characters to run from him, he is uncharacteristically creepy for no reason whatsoever. Fun fact, Sydney marries this dude later in the timeline, so him being a creep is bizarre. It’s also the only film he ever appears in (thus far).

The character that made the biggest impact for me was Gale’s double, played by Parker Posey. There’s a character I was rooting for. Sadly, Scream 3 has one of the larger body counts, needing to introduce several new faces to portray all the kids from the first movie. So, Sidney has a double, as does Dewey. but, there are also doubles for other original characters like Randy and Tatum.

Scott wolf and Lance Henriksen round out the cast as behind the scenes talent who could be the killer. Patrick Warburton and heather Matarazzo make brief but memorable appearances.

I’ve seen Scream 3 a bunch of times. of the original trilogy, it’s my least favorite, so it’s also the least repeat watched. Even Scream 4 is better. But, it does have some interesting moments, they just don’t come at you non-stop.

For me now as a blind person, it was hard to remember how everyone dies. I remember some of the deaths, and i remembered who was behind the mask, but many of the kills, the visual reference in my memory was gone. I would have loved to watch this with audio description. Some of the kills don’t even make sense if you don’t know who Ghostface just stabbed. Eventually, you just realize someone hasn’t spoken in a while, so it must have been them that died.

There’s also a scene a little like in Scream 2, where one character was in a sound booth, and the other couldn’t hear them, to warn them of Ghostface. Here, someone is behind a mirror, and our heroes can’t find them until it’s too late. You wouldn’t know that without audio description.

Again, I’m beating a dead horse here, but if Paramount is going to continue to try and make the new Scream films a thing, then they can’t expect a generation of teens/young adults who weren’t old enough to watch these movies originally, to even know what the hell is going on. We can’t start at Scream 5, just because that’s the first film Paramount feels obligated to include audio description on. This is a franchise that is 27 years old. If you were born the year Scream came out, you’d now be 27, and even with that, you would have been a child for the first three Scream films, and would want to go back and watch them. But if you were born blind, Paramount is pretty much telling you that this is not your thing, and to move along. But, to move along only to Scream 5, which is covered in nostalgia and references to the first four films, and the 6th film is even more fan service. It makes no sense to make fan service sequels, but expect your audience to not know what the hell is going on.

Paramount. Make it make sense.

Final grade: unwatchable

(Having seen this before, I’d say the film is probably a B+ for me, but all Scream films skew upwards for me)