Starring Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Jamie Kennedy, Sarah Michelle Gellar Jerry O'Connell, Jada Pinkett, Tori Spelling, Liev Schreiber. Written by Kevin Williamson. Directed by Wes Craven.
It's two years since the spook with the bad mask said hello to Sydney. Now Sydney (Campbell), Randy (Kennedy) and cutthroat reporter Gale Weathers (Cox) are back again, this time with Sydney and Randy in film school at college, and Gale promoting her book that has been turned into a movie called Stab, based on their experiences in the first Scream. The film opens with a screening of Stab, where a teenager (Pinkett) and her boyfriend are brutally stabbed to death. No one notices, since free spook costumes were distributed at the movie, and the killing was thought at first to be a publicity stunt. Soon, other bodies start to "drop". Pretty young co-ed Cici (Gellar) takes a stabbing and a dive from her 3rd story bedroom. It appears there is a copycat killer on the loose. Is it Sydney's new puppy-dog boyfriend (O'Connell), Gales new cameraman, who is never around when the killing starts, the wrongly-maligned ex-con that Sydney pinned for killing her mother, or even one of Gale, Randy or deputy Dewey (Arquette) who has arrived on the scene to protect Sydney?
There are several interesting touches, besides the film-within-a-film bit with Stab. Sydney predicted Tori Spelling would play her if they ever made a film about her story, and Stab stars Spelling. Randy is asked what his favourite scary movie is, and he says "Showgirls. Absolutely frightening." In discussing serial killers, Randy lists the big boys including O.J. with Ted Bundy and the rest. In an early scene, the film school geeks discuss sequels and one guy says "Sequels suck!". They give special exception to Aliens, Godfather, Part II, Terminator 2, and later to The Empire Strikes Back (but they forgot The Wrath of Khan, clearly better than the weak initial Star Trek movie), but they are clearly trying to give this film an excuse to be bad. If this sucks, well we told you sequels suck.
Well Scream 2 doesn't suck. But it is not nearly as good as the first. The stab sequence is not near as scary as the opening Drew Barrymore gutting scene in the original Scream. The cast is pretty good, especially Cox and Kennedy, although O'Connell is a bit dead as the too-earnest-to-be-true boyfriend. And as the film geeks observe, sequels require a higher body count and gore factor. While the movie starts pretty well, with snappy and clever dialogue, the movie degenerates into a pretty standard illogical and excessive slasher flick. While the first was quite clever in selecting the killers, this film's killers are pretty much grabbed out of nowhere without motivation that the audience could have predicted. And the dead body coming back to life again is getting old. If you like horror flicks, you'll like this one, because it does have its good parts. Otherwise, rent the original Scream, or even Frankenstein, Psycho or Alien, and stay home, bake some Jiffy pop, and save your money.
