Scream 2 (1997) - film review

One year on from the Woodsboro massacre, the two survivors Sydney Prescott and Randy Meeks have resumed their studies at Windsor College, Ohio, hoping to put their past behind them.  Unfortunately, their past has other ideas.  During a screening of Stab, a film based on Gale Weathers’ account of the Woodsboro incident, two students are stabbed to death.  A short while later, Sydney is herself attacked by someone wearing the same mask and gown as the Woodsboro killers, and so it looks as if a copycat psychopath is at large.  As the bodies pile up, it appears that someone is determined to replay history - but why?  The obvious suspect is Cotton Weary, the man whom Sydney had put away for the murder of her mother.  Is he out for revenge, or could the culprit be Gale Weathers, looking for a subject for her next bestsellling book...?

With Scream (1996) proving to be a phenomenal box office hit, director Wes Craven would have been madder than Norman Bates not to try his hand at a sequel, particularly as he had managed to reinvigorate the slasher genre at a time when it was beginning to look decidedly dépassé.   Unfortunately, screenwriter Kevin Williamson couldn’t be bothered to come up with any new ideas, and so what we get is a virtual re-tread of the first Scream film, employing nearly all the same plot twists and even repeating most of the gags.   Okay, so the copycat killer plot idea justifies a certain amount of déjà vu familiarity, but when the denouement ends up feeling like a shot-for-shot duplication of what we had in Scream, the copy-and-paste  exercise has probably gone a bit too far.

Craven’s direction is a sharp and imaginative as ever and, from a purely technical point of view, Scream 2 is a slightly better film.  However, the film's impact is greatly diminished by its lack of real surprises since, having seen the first film, you know exactly what is coming next at every turn.  (The only real surprise is when Gale Weathers drops the superbitch journalist act and gets all dewy-eyed over Dewey.)  As sequels go, Scream 2 is not a bad effort, well-directed, well-acted and fun.  But lacking the element of surprise it is far too dependent on its tongue-in-cheek humour, and this starts to run dry by the mid-point.  Not content with parodying the slasher movie, Craven now finds himself in the position of having to parody his own parody, and ends up confirming his own thesis that a sequel is really just a shallow exercise in audience exploitation, the thin edge of the cash cow.

© Alex Sullivan 2010

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