Somewhere, Wes Craven is laughing.

Craven's come a fairly long way since his debut film, the profoundly offensive Last House on the Left. The man has degrees in English and psychology, and master's degrees in writing and philosophy, which may seem antithetical to his career in slasher cinema. Of course, they're not -- horror has a long tradition in English literature, arguably dating all the way back to Beowulf, and Craven has always been a keen observer of the relationship of horror stories to the human psyche. And finally, with the arrival of the Scream series, Craven clambered to some degree of mainstream respectability -- huge box-office receipts, a gig directing the new Meryl Streep film, an appearance on the Charlie Rose show, all that.

So it's easy to forgive him when he takes shots at the new kids in Hollywood. He is, after all, smarter than most of them. Yes, he's made his share of turkeys, a few of them embarrassingly bad. But A Nightmare on Elm Street is a bona fide classic, and Wes Craven's New Nightmareis something else entirely -- an audacious metacinematic defense of horror movies featuring the director himself in a key role.

Even so, hooking up with the young, movie-mad screenwriter Kevin Williamson is probably the best thing that's happened to Craven's career so far. Williamson conceived Scream, a comic horror movie that both criticizes and pays tribute to its own genre, and Craven brought it to the screen under the auspices of Dimension Films, the genre distribution label of Miramax. The screenplay's sly self-reflexivity gave Scream credibility with reviewers who wouldn't touch a "straight" slasher film, while the gathering of an attractive young cast to be stalked and murdered helped it hit paydirt with audiences.

The main problem with the Scream series is that Drew Barrymore is rather spectacularly offed in the opening 10 minutes of the first movie and, well, it's awfully hard to top that. Despite protestations from everyone involved that Scream, like Star Wars, was always intended as part of a trilogy, the real defining moments were in the first film -- the off-handedly brutal Barrymore murder, the invisible omnipresence of the cell-phone killer, and the truly unsettling truism that "movies don't make psychos, they just make psychos more creative."

Scream 3, written by Ehren Kruger (Arlington Road), makes no such politician-baiting declarations (perhaps in deference to nerves rubbed raw by the Columbine high school killings and various follow-up atrocities). The best it can manage is Sidney Prescott's admonition to her would-be killer that psychos need to stop blaming movies and, rather, take responsibility for their own violent actions. OK, fine. But the playful spark that enlivened the first film has burned out, and the precise crafting of Williamson's nerve-wracking set-pieces is sorely missed.

That's not to say there's nothing here to like. The story is crafty, and the missing oomph is compensated for somewhat by clever self-awareness -- particularly good is a sequence in which the killer stalks Sidney through the film-set version of her own house. It yanks Sidney back into her own past even as it taps our memories of the first film, forcing a frisson of recognition in our own minds that parallels Sidney's. Nice work, although I still prefer New Nightmare for Hollywood reflexivity. And a cameo appearance by Jamie Kennedy, who appears as the deceased Randy on one of those "If you're watching this, I'm already dead" videotapes, kicks things into gear for a few minutes.

Courteney Cox Arquette and David Arquette, as TV reporter Gale Weathers and former sheriff's deputy Dewey Riley, dominate the proceedings, aiming for something resembling screwball comedy. The joke, however -- the two of them are really in love, though Gale can't let go of her career as a professional busybody -- has grown stale over three movies. Things perk up considerably when the squinty Neve Campbell arrives on the scene, after spending the first section of the movie isolated from the rest of the cast (Sidney lives more or less as a hermit, and takes phone calls on a women's crisis center hotline), and then slow right down again. None of the new characters (hey, doesn't Lance Henriksen make an awfully shady movie producer? and what about the starlet with the push-up bra who always disappears just before the ghostface killer shows up?) are worth spending much time with -- though if we had been forced to endure Jenny McCarthy for another 30 minutes or so, her big death scene would have been that much more satisfying.

The most damning criticism is that, for the first time, a Scream movie isn't particularly scary. After shooting two movies that explored the power and the boundaries of the slasher film, Craven has made, well, an utterly conventional slasher film. He lurches uncommittedly from set piece to bloody set piece, and the Panavision frame can't disguise the story's TV-show banality. (He even wastes Parker Posey.) Miramax made a big deal about "secrecy" while the film was being shot -- and disinvited online critics from press screenings, ostensibly out of fear that we'd spoil the ending -- but not once does Scream 3 surprise or even startle during its running time, and that makes it easily the worst of the series. The very smart Mr. Craven may not be a pariah, but it looks like he's back in a rut.