Scream 2 (1997)

Movie Info

Hey going to a movie will be fun…trust me!

It has been two years since the slaughter at Woodsboro and Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is trying to move on. She’s a student at Windsor College, but she knows that the hell of her life is going to come back when a movie called Stab is released based on the book by Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox). When two people are killed at the movie’s premiere (Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett) a copycat killer is suspected. Sydney is a target once again and Randy (Jamie Kennedy), Gale, and Dewey (David Arquette) could all be targets since it appears the killer is making a sequel. With the deaths, there are all new suspects…Sydney’s perfect boyfriend Derek (Jerry O’Connell), film obsessed Mickey (Timothy Olyphant), or the man Sydney originally accused of her mother’s murder Cotton Weary (Liev Schrieber)…or someone they never expected.

Hey Cotten…are you really a killer now?

Directed by Wes Craven and written by Scream‘s original writer Kevin Williamson, Scream 2 circles around the idea of sequels. While well received, it wasn’t as groundbreaking as the original Scream, but many argued it was a better movie.

Scream 2 has a lot going for it for those who argue that is better than Scream. The plots just isn’t as juvenile as the first movie which feels way too melodramatic (which in the context of Scream worked). Scream 2 takes a much more adult approach and the danger is more amplified. Scream 2 just feels more dangerous than Scream and that is a plus.

Unfortunately, Scream 2 is a sequel so some of the freshness of the plot is worn thin. It was a bit easy to have two killers again since that was the big surprise of the first movie. The revelation that one of the killers was the mother of Billy Loomis help bring the plot around and back to Scream, but felt very cartoony. Originally, Williamson planned on having four killers, but early leaks forced him to change the script at the last moment. The end result was a bit of a sloppy ending that just ended up mirroring the first movie.

Lets sit & debate what we need to do get out of this car for a while…or we could take his knife and kill him.

Like the original Scream, the acting is pretty strong and the cast really worked well together. There didn’t have to be much character build up since the four original cast members were established. College allowed a logical reason for a whole new cast of supporting characters and the fun of more characters to be killed. Sarah Michelle Geller, Rebecca Gayheart, Portia de Rossi, Laurie Metcalf, and Lewis Arquette (David Arquette’s father) all make appearances, but the best joke has to be the Stab movie directed by Robert Rodriguez which featured Luke Wilson as Skeet Ulrich, Heather Graham as Drew Barrymore, and Tori Spelling as Neve Campbell (which famously was a joke in the first movie.)

Scream 2 is a fun movie…is it better than Scream? Technically probably yes, but due to the duplicate portions of the film, it comes in a little lower than the first movie. The cleverness of Scream is still there and the idea of what makes up a sequel…especially a horror sequel is fun. Scream 2 was followed by the much less creative Scream 3 in 2000.

Related Links:

Scream (1996)

Scream 3 (2000)

Scream 4 (2011)