At the outset of Scream 2, Jamie Kennedy, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Joshua Jackson are in a film class obnoxiously discussing which sequels are better than their predecessors. Allow me to jump in on the conversation: Scream 2 is way worse than the first Scream. That's not to say it's a bad movie, it's just an astoundingly middling movie (which makes it among the best post-Scream slashers) that shows all the marks of something rushed out for profit less than a year from the original. The movie is self-aware in a way far smarter than the other Scream films, it knows how dumb its own existence is, especially as anything but the redundant cash-in sequels the first Scream was rallying against. After Killer #1, Mickey1 (Timothy Olyphant, mouthful of scenery as he departs the mortal coils of the celluloid universe he inhabits) declares his motive is to blame the movies for driving him to murder, Killer #2, Debbie Salt aka Billy Loomis' mom (Laurie Metcalf, aka Roseanne's sister, only slightly more restrained in her ham) shoots him dead saying that his motive is dumb - she's here for good old-fashioned revenge. Long after Drew Barrymore paid the price for forgetting Pamela Voorhees' original reign of terror Mrs. V gets her fan club after all.
1. In all of these movies once the killer is revealed they go completely (and often hilariously) psychotic. Eyes all bugging out, screaming and flailing about. I'm not sure where this came from outside of bad acting or directing. Billy and Stu were delightfully restrained once revealed which made them seem that much more unstable in, you know, a real way.
Scream 2 feels like Kevin Williamson rolled over on a hungover Sunday to a call that he needed to have a finished sequel script in pronto. What results is a checklist of "Things Scream Did Kinda Okay" for its interminably long run time 2. Let's go down the list, shall we?
1) Opening murders referencing the movies. This pre-credits death honor goes to Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett (pre-Smith) in a scene that's both too on the nose and confused all at once. The couple are out to see the premiere of Stab, a rushed-out cash grab based on the events of the previous film.3 Maureen (Pinkett) doesn't like horror movies for the same reasons we heard in Scream but she still manages to portray the stereotype of "black woman who talks during movies" because why the fuck not? Maureen is stabbed to death during Stab-Drew Barrymore (Heather Graham)'s death sequence, surrounded by Ghostfaced-costumed fans who are none the wiser. Get it guys, we're desensitized to violence thanks to movies. Herp derp.
2. Two hours is not okay for a movie where so little happens.
3. The movie-within-a-movie directed by an uncredited Robert Rodriguez is amazing and I found myself wanting more of this and less of, well, everything else.
2) Jamie Kennedy. He has suspects because this is a sequel and these are the rules of the sequel. Movie reference, movie reference. Surprise death in one of the best scenes of the film. Probably a huge mistake to kill him off here since the entire cast of Scream 3 manages to be simultaneously more annoying and less interesting than Randy ever was.
3) Phone menace. I don't know why Sarah Michelle Gellar is here. Additionally, I don't know why she was always cast as the blonde in peril when she should have been playing The Final Girl. She's motherfucking Buffy. She is famous for playing a role that was LITERALLY DESIGNED in opposition to the characters she's always brought in to play. A lot of this can be that, in all fairness to Buffy because that show is great, SMG is not a fantastic actress. She does what she does just fine but I'm not sure she could ever carry an entire film on her own shoulders in the way Neve Campbell does.
4. I'm aware how this sounds because what the fuck did Neve Campbell ever do? I guess in the same way SMG is Buffy and no one else could be Buffy, no one else could be Sidney. Their ranges just don't extend outside of these characters whatsoever.
She has the honor of being the girl who gets menaced by Ghostface on the phone in a scene that feels like a total afterthought. "Oh yeah, that phone scene was the driving point of the entire film. Guess we should do it again. Right?"
4) Maybe the boyfriend did it! Hoo boy. Jerry O'Connell is no Skeet Ulrich and that's saying a whole lot in very few words.
And it goes on like this for the extent of the film. The bodies pile up, people are chased the whodunit is in name only (by the end of the film there are only a handful of people left who had lines) and a pointless sequel will lead into several more.
This isn't to say the film is without merit. Once again, Craven turns the wide open into the claustrophobic - Randy's death takes place in broad daylight in a crowded area, but as the scene builds everything seems to collapse in on him until it's too late for him to realize the killer is right behind him. Sidney's escape from a crashed car while climbing over an unconscious killer is the only moment in the entire series that comes close to the intensity of Scream's opening eight minutes5. Gale's chase through the campus production studio is the best in the franchise. What's most baffling is how not scary Scream 2 is. Sure, outside of the opening maybe the original wasn't very frightening but Scream 2 plays more like an action movie, ala Terminator, than even an action-horror film, ala Predator. Somehow the man who created Freddy has forgotten that a man with a knife is, on its own, not especially scary. Scream 2 ends up worse than Scream but on a tier far above 3 or 4. As we'll see, sometimes it's better to not have anything to say at all than to say something and sound like a goddamned idiot.
5. Despite ending with one of the most egregious uses of Voorhees Scale Killer Teleportation I've ever seen.
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