SCREAM 2
... and with a brand new Scream just
around the corner, here’s the other zombie I wanted to resurrect…
Go,
zombie, go!
Shamble
across the Interwebz!
“Let’s face it, Sidney. These days, you
gotta have a sequel!”
-- Stu (from Scream)
The
menacing drone of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Red Right Hand” plays over the
opening credits of a film called Stab.
Yes, Stab--the film based on the novel The Hillsboro Murders, written by the
Antichrist of tabloid TV, Gale Weathers.
With
an audience of howling gorehounds in white masks and black cloaks, the sneak
preview of Stab (presented in
“Stab-O-Vision,” naturally) serves as the opening sequence of Scream 2, an opening that is both a
sobering indictment of how fanatical some gorehounds can get about their horror
movies, and a brilliant follow-up to Scream’s
taut opening; we even get to see Heather Graham (a long way from Twin Peaks, she is) do Drew Barrymore’s
Casey Becker, in a great Psycho
homage.
Slamming
us with a coda that is a chilling example of what Scream 2’s “freaky Tarantino film student,” Mickey (Timothy
Olyphant), terms “life imitating art imitating life,” the sequence drags us
bodily into the second chapter in Kevin Williamson’s envisioned trilogy, a
stunning continuation of the first film, many of its plot elements and
surprises logical ramifications of events that occurred in the original.
“It’s starting again, Randy.”
-- Sidney
Two
years after the bloodbath at Stu’s house in Scream’s
climax, Sidney (Neve Campbell, back for a second round) and fellow Woodsboro
massacre survivor Randy (Jamie Kennedy) have gone on to university, where they
are pursuing a “pseudo-quasi-happy existence,” trying to put the past behind
them. A past that refuses to go away, as not only has Gale Weathers (Courtney
Cox) written a book about Woodsboro, but a film has been made from that novel.
Then
there’s Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber), falsely accused by Sidney for the murder of her mother (as seen
in Scream), still trying to clear his
reputation by getting on the tube to tell his story.
With Stab’s opening just around the corner,
all these media prods set the stage for the renewed mayhem; as an Omega Beta
Zeta sister puts it so succinctly, “It’s that movie, Stab. It’s bringing out the crazies.”
“If there is some freaked-out psycho
trying to follow in Billy Loomis’ footsteps, you probably already know him. Or
her. Or them. They’re probably already in your life. They get off on that.”
-- Dewey
The
sly intelligence and self-referential wit evidenced in Scream is still here in the sequel, proving that Williamson’s skill
at writing a nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat horror film that is also a
statement on the genre and the medium, was not a one-off fluke.
From
the broad thematic (and cinematographic) nods to Psycho (and, to a certain extent, Psycho II) to the particular--and peculiar--workings of the Scream universe (what could just have
very well been a throw-away line from the first film crystallizes into
“reality” as we see Tori Spelling essay Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott in Stab; it’s just too bad we don’t get to
see David Schwimmer’s Dewey), Williamson displays firm control of plot and
character, taking the survivors from the original and bringing them two years
forward, each of them displaying scars--both physical and psychological--from
the events in Woodsboro.
And
given the strong sense of continuity between the first two chapters of the Scream trilogy, my mentioning Psycho may be very appropriate, since,
the way I see it, after all the trauma the survivors of Scream 2 go through, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Scream 3 opens with said survivors
running a motel just off the highway, dressing up in masks and cloaks and
murdering unsuspecting secretaries on the lam.
“So it’s our job to observe the rules of
the sequel. Number one: the body count is always bigger. Number two: the death
scenes are always much more elaborate. More blood. More gore. Carnage candy.
Your core audience just expects it.”
-- Randy
Though
the death scenes here are not necessarily any gorier than those in the
original, what are certainly more elaborate this time around are the set pieces
leading up to those deaths; the chases, the thrills, the suspense. In an
astoundingly nerve-wracking sequence, Williamson actually outdoes the “potential
slasher victim trapped in the back of a cop car” scenario in I Know What You Did Last Summer with the
one in Scream 2.
Williamson
and director Wes Craven also utilize the Windsor College setting to its utmost,
wringing all they can out of the “college campus as stalking ground” milieu.
Just
as Scream played with the slasher
setting archetype of the small town terrorized by the mad killer (as
established in Halloween and done to
death in many a subsequent film, such as The
Prowler and My Bloody Valentine),
Scream 2 trods the well-worn
footpaths of such slasher fare as Graduation
Day and Final Exam.
True
to form though, Williamson takes it that one, smart step further. The script is
so cognizant of its setting that the environment is exploited for all its thrill-worthy
potential.
At
one point, Kennedy, David Arquette, and Cox share a particularly intense scene
set on the sprawling campus lawn in broad
daylight, and in another (in what I like to think of as the film’s T.S.
Eliot “Who is the third” moment), Campbell does a great turn in a slightly
surreal dress rehearsal where Sidney plays the doomed prophetess Cassandra
amidst a masked Greek chorus.
Even
Sidney’s identification with Cassandra--who is doomed to live out a future she
is intimately familiar with, because she can convince no one of its impending
reality--is a stroke of genius on Williamson’s part. At one point in the film, Sidney laments, “I knew
this was going to happen”; the police stations and reporters are now a
painfully familiar sight for poor Ms. Prescott.
“Wow. That was intense.”
-- Cotton
Crackling
with an air of tense expectancy and boasting a climax that has some last-minute
mind screws and plot curveballs, Scream 2
is an expertly executed film that highlights not only the fascination of the
movie-going masses with violence, but also the omnipresence of the media in our
lives.
It is
a film that once again proves that, 1) Wes Craven is alive and well and still
quite capable of eliciting the scares, 2) it doesn’t hurt for horror to have a brain,
and 3) Kevin Williamson is a brilliant writer with a deep respect for the genre
and a great sense of humour.
Described
by one critic as “a fascinating piece of work for a post-media society,” Scream 2 is a film that holds a mirror
up to itself, the horror genre, and the audience, all in one graceful, knowing
gesture (the audience being a microcosm of society at large); a film that gives
you pause for reflection, as you’re running scared silly for your life.
“You do realize that if we were in a Scream movie, you'd be the prime suspect...”
-- Mark Gatela to me
[The above review existed in a former published
life, and in slightly altered form, in the year 1997, under the identity of “Scream
and Scream Again.”]
(Scream 2 OS courtesy of impawards.com.)
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