Scream 2

I first became a fan of the Scream movies in the mid-2000s when I was in High School. At the time Scream 2 was my favorite, but as I've gotten older the film hasn't aged well. It's still a good film, much better than Scream 3. However, in retrospect I think that I loved the sillier and more over-the-top story as a teenager, and as an adult I find the movie a bit immature in it’s tone. While the same issue could be raised with Scream 4, that film does an overall better job of hitting the right notes.

The single biggest weakness of this film is probably the new characters. The core characters of Sidney (Neve Campbell), Gale (Courteney Cox), Dewey (David Arquette), and Randy (Jamie Kennedy) all do excellent work. However, Liev Schreiber comes across as phoning it in his expanded role as Cotton Weary, and I really can't see Derek (Jerry O'Connell) without thinking Sidney is dating Quinn from Sliders. I'd say Hallie (Elise Neal) is the only new character who comes across as compelling or interesting, and she's given fairly little to do before being killed.

The single weakest point, though, is the villains. The concept behind them is clever: Billy Loomis' mother (Laurie Metcalf) returns to get revenge on the girl who killed her son, and teams up with Mikey (Timothy Olyphant), an attention-hungry troll who wants to kill people and then blame it on the movies so he can have a high-profile trial. Unfortunately, both of these characters are only featured in passing prior to the reveal, so neither is properly set up. This lack of development is just weird, since Mrs. Loomis goes out of her way to create a false identity when she introduces herself to Gale, and Mickey is a college classmate. Both of these gave the villains an opening to interact with the protagonists. Instead, we get a number of long scenes establishing Cotton and Derek as suspects.

Beyond their lack of set-up, the villains are just downright cartoonish. Where Billy and Stu from the original Scream came across as realistically disturbed, the villains here immediately jump into insane ranting. It doesn't help that the villains have no loyalty to each other, with Mrs. Loomis shooting Mickey shortly after the reveal, keeping him down until she'd been dispatched. While having two killers still helps to explain how Ghostface could pop up at random and never tire in a chase, having them turn on each other means that at no point do the heroes have to deal with two killers at once.

There is one thing that this movie does perfectly thought: Killing off Randy. The fact that 3 and 4 limit the deaths to new characters reduces the impact of both films. The Cassandra sequence in this film is taken by some fans to imply that Kevin Williamson intended to kill Sidney off in Scream 3. Personally, I would have offed Gale, since Dewey's survival is something of a running gag in the series.

I know that many people disagree with me on this point, but knowing that writers refuse to kill off certain characters kills the tension. Killing a main character is what made Psycho a classic, and in horror giving certain characters immunity from death just comes across as cheap. Anyone can die, that’s where fear comes from.

I know that I'm harping on the bad points here, of which there are a lot, but this is still a good film. It pales next to the original, and even next to Scream 4, but it still gives you the classic characters, a lot of tense scenes, and a mystery that works fairly well. If you feel like marathoning the Scream movies, include this one.