I was 17 by the time this movie came out, so no more family time for me: I saw this one at the Mac Tri with my hetero life mate David Toth. I've seen many glorious movies at the Mac Tri with David, including the all-time comedy classic SON IN LAW and the obscure minor success, TITANIC. All joking aside, though, 97 was a great year for movie-going with David because we were both 17 and able to go to movies like JACKIE BROWN, THE BIG LEBOWSKI and U-TURN without parental guidance.
Anyway, Williamson is back as screenwriter as well, and this time goes all meta on the subject of sequels. Unfortunately SCREAM 2 suffers from the fact that SCREAM had already come along and shaken everything up – so all the in-movie talk about the conventions of sequels, and the story's attempt to subvert these, isn't as entertaining or fresh or funny as the first time out.
This time Neve Campbell's in college, along with Jamie Kennedy, and copycat killings start up, targeting Campbell's friends (including Sarah Michelle Gellar). This brings Courteney Cox and David Arquette to the campus. They had a budding romance in the first movie and are now on the outs. I wonder if it will work out?
The biggest strengths of this movie are when it works like the original. Probably the biggest weakness is that it kind of seems to be all over the place. It starts off with a self-contained scene, like the first movie, about a couple who goes out to see the movie within this movie that was made based on the events of the first movie, STAB. The couple is played by Jada Pinkett and Omar Epps, and Williamson takes the chance to give their characters some dialogue about racism and stereotyping in horror flicks. They make some good points, but to what end? None of this stuff ends up really being dramatized or addressed or fixed throughout the movie. They just bring it up and move on.
Additionally, the whole opening sequence is weird. The movie theater is out of control – the moviegoers are jumping up and down, dancing in the aisles, screaming, cheering. Both Pinkett and Epps get up and go in and out of the movie multiple times within the first few minutes of it starting. What universe does this take place in? I mean I saw O at the Ontario Mills one time and that was a huge mistake, but it wasn't nearly as bad as this free-for-all.
Later, we get to Courteney Cox's cameraman who is the stereotypical "fraidy cat." This is fine and everything except he's also played by a black actor, Duane Martin. So after the opening conversation about black stereotypes in horror movies, what are we supposed to think about this guy?
There are also wasted opportunities with the movie-within-a-movie concept. We see several clips from STAB, which are basically parodying familiar scenes from the original SCREAM, and they're re-cast with actors like Heather Graham, Tori Spelling and Luke Wilson. These scenes are mildly amusing but they seem like they could have been something more, in a movie that's about movies. SCREAM 2 seems more timid and afraid to go into the meta territories of SCREAM and NEW NIGHTMARE, and more content to just be a slasher.
Aside from these cameos, there are a million others, including my boy Joshua Jackson, and an extensive cast of both newcomers at the time and old hands including Timothy Olyphant and Laurie Metcalf. Everyone does great work, and again, anyone could be the killer, but the mystery is not as compelling this time because the script is thin when it comes to character development.
I read a little bit about the making of this flick and discovered that the original script was leaked shortly before or maybe even during production, so Williamson rewrote it and shuffled around characters so that the surprises would still be intact. This meant changing who kills and gets killed. This might be the reason why the whole thing seems so arbitrary. It works okay when it's dealing with the characters from the first movie, but isn't very interesting when it's dealing with the new blood.
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