Scream 2

Merry Christmas. You're dead.

The worst thing I can say about this movie is the row of people behind us talked waaaayyyy too much. Sometimes at the screen but usually to each other, talking about how they knew who was going to bite it, etc. But what they came close to biting was a size 13 Doc Marten boot...

I was very pleased with this. The opening sequence isn't the thrill ride the first twenty minutes of Scream were, but they still poked fun at movies and the casting of them, and Sandra Bullock, not to mention the use of African Americans in horror movies (mainly, they never live to see the credits). The plot is this: it's four years after the Woodsboro murders. Sidney (Neve Campbell) and Randy (Jamie Kennedy, the geek who explains the rules of horror movies in the first movie), are both going to the same college, where Randy is a film student and Sidney is just trying to move on. The book that Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox in ultra bitch mode) wrote based on the events of the first movie, has been turned into a movie called Stab (The scenes of the movie within the movie are hilarious. They couldn't have cast it better, or worse, depnding how you look at it). Upon the movie's release, a copycat type killer pops up on campus. And I will say no more about the plot than that.

There are LOADS of references to other movie directors, stars and quotable lines (Brush up on your James Cameron trivia). This movie is funnier than the first, though it is missing some of the suspense. It can't be helped, it's a sequel. Fortunately, director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson are aware of this and adapt accordingly. There are some scenes that are so tension loaded the audience was visibly squirming in their seats, but there were also a lot of Boo Scenes where the audience is supposed to jump at a red herring. A horror requirement, I suppose, but I saw them all coming down Broadway.

The payoff, though, is more than sufficient. Don't even try to figure out who the killer is, you'll never guess. They definitely upped the gore ante on this, which in most movies is a sign of creative lapse. Scream 2 is better than that, if it still can't quite match the original. The filmmakers are smart about at least one thing: There will be only three Scream movies and then they are killing the franchise, before it becomes this lumbering ridiculous watered down joke of a horror movie like Friday the 13th or Halloween (Kevin Williamson, by the way, is writing a Halloween script starring Jamie Lee Curtis that will, supposedly. kill that franchise as well). So don't get too attached to those survivors, because my guess is, everyone dies in Scream 3.