Chapter Two: Scream 2
By Brett Beach
May 20, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Scream 2 (1997)
I remember catching Scream opening day in December of 1996 mid-afternoon in a near empty mall theater with no idea of the looming pop culture significance of what I was about to experience. I recall being shocked by the mixture of humor and brutal violence in the opening sequence featuring Drew Barrymore, a mini-movie of sorts with a macabre, chilling tone that still stands as the high-water mark of anything in the series. I had grown up on slasher films in the ‘80s (by default, since my mother would allow me to rent those but not the Porky's, Revenge of the Nerds, et al series. For those I had to rely on the sleep overs of my childhood best friend). Though my tastes don't run to horror as much as they used to, the 12-year-old in me still enjoys that kind of terror and moments of swift violence. Scream was like an homage to and a reboot of the genre.
As much as I enjoyed the hip humor and the famous faces in small roles (Henry Winkler, welcome back, next stops The Waterboy and Arrested Development!), it was the audaciousness of the conceit that truly rocked my ya-yas. Here was a film bold enough to mock all the cliches of its genre without simply being a parody. Director Wes Craven had experience with balancing horror with humor (everything from A Nightmare on Elm Street to his under-rated The People Under the Stairs) and could smoothly unfold screenwriter Kevin Williamson's transitions from brutal knifings to self aware discussions of why no one in the horror genre should ever say "I'll be right back."
Well-received for a horror film, Scream also performed unlike most horror films before or since at the box office. After opening with a so-so $6 million its first weekend (a figure that for most any film nowadays, let alone a horror film, would mean it would be dropping to the second-run theaters in a month's time, max), Scream played through the holidays and into the first quarter of 1997 and eventually cracked $100 million, meaning its final gross was over 15 times its opening weekend. Along with (on a much larger scale) Titanic, Scream is one of the last examples of a longevity and repeat business that wide releases in this decade simply don't experience.
A sequel was all but guaranteed and as Williamson had anticipated Scream to be a trilogy and had already mapped out where the story would go ahead of time, the possibility was there for this to be a series that retained its quality and wasn't simply cobbled together quickly to cash in on unexpected success. I enjoyed Scream, it is true, but I was as giddy as a schoolgirl anticipating a sequel that would attempt to both mock the nature of all sequels and succeed in quality where most of its ilk had failed..
Looking back, I think the excitement and anticipation of the experience significantly affected (positively) my enjoyment. I assembled a group of nearly a dozen people to see Scream 2, which opened almost a year to the day from Scream. Seeing it opening night with friends and a full audience laughing and (yes) screaming played to Scream 2's strengths and masked its considerable weaknesses. When I recently watched it for the first time in 12 years, it felt like a mid-1990s musical time capsule more than anything (some R&B courtesy of D'Angelo, jam rock from Dave Matthews Band, alt rock from Everclear and Collective Soul).Songs blared from the soundtrack at ridiculously ill-timed moments and seemed to suck any attempts at shifts in tone or mood down the drain. But a great film could have worked around that. Scream 2 is 1/4 a great film, 1/2 a so-so film and 1/4 interminable unwinding. The denouement is not a wow!
The first half-hour is the best and suggests that S2 might be up to the challenge of being as good as if not better than its predecessor. It is certainly meta enough. To wit: Set a year after the events of Scream, S2 begins at a premiere screening of Stab, a movie-within-a-movie inspired by the book that reporter Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) has written about the murders and events in the first movie. The quite clever running gag in the clips we see throughout from Stab is how Hollywood has gotten it wrong and how Stab differs from the "reality" of the first film. Cameos by the likes of Heather Graham portraying the characters from the first film create a fun-house mirror effect that's at least as much fun to ponder as it is to experience.
At the screening, a young couple (Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett, playing off each other with both sarcasm and tenderness) in the audience is brutally murdered. If not as shocking as the opening of Scream, this sequence is genuinely unnerving and spooky. Pinkett elevates her death throes to high tragedy and the sight of someone ironically dying alone in the middle of a full theater with most of the audience wearing the ghost face mask makes it the most poignant death in the all three films. Once word gets out about the killings, the survivors from the first film find their fates entwined again.
The large ensemble casts of the Scream series have always been one of their selling points but S2 is overstuffed with too many characters that seem to exist only to make it difficult for the audience to determine who the killer (or killers, as there were in the first one) may be. As a result, everyone either comes across as fresh-scrubbed and one-dimensional (new additions to the cast played by Jerry O'Connell, Timothy Olyphant and Sarah Michelle Gellar) or the quirkiness that once defined a character and made him lovable - I'm looking at you Deputy Dewey (David Arquette) and film geek Randy (Jamie Kennedy) - has been replaced by a blandness that renders him annoying instead of interesting.
[On a side note, it had completely escaped my memory that Portia de Rossi has a small role as a dim-witted blonde sorority sister. After observing her here and finally catching up with her morally compromised sibling on Arrested Development, it is obvious that she has a significant amount of natural self-effacing good cheer and crack comic timing that deserves more notice. I envision her and Anna Faris teamed up for some wacky Dumb and Dumber type hijinks for the Happy Madison banner]
It becomes apparent here and blatantly obvious with Scream 3 (which I felt brought the trilogy to a sad close) that neither Craven nor Williamson had the cajones to kill any one of their three most significant leading characters: Sidney (Neve Campbell), Dewey or Gale. This would have been the kind of bold move that could have brought back some of the darker dimensions of the series and given a true air of unpredictability to the increasingly mundane proceedings.
The biggest bust by far, especially if you are looking to a slasher series primarily for some creative kills, is that while the film does indeed follow its own self-proclaimed rule that the "body count must be higher" than in the original (and it is with ten corpses to Scream's seven), the deaths are significantly more spaced out (S2 drags on for two hours) and nothing is as memorable or elaborate as Rose McGowan's demise in the garage door. By the time the plot points are explained and discussed and regurgitated for nearly 20 minutes atthe end, the self-referential humor has been replaced with heavy-handed set pieces and a lot of noise and bluster. If indeed, the franchise is in the process of reinvention and Scream 4 will be coming out in the near future, I hope Craven and Williamson can find a way to make their horror and satire as relevant (or at least as enjoyable) as it once was.
Next time: A slasher series with no slasher. Hmmm, how.... metaphysical!