Last night I watched
Scream 2 for the first time in a number of years.
Off the back of the original - which I watched four days earlier - this one holds up pretty well. It looks good and feels as though it builds on the legacy left by the earlier film. There are enough returnees from the first to make it satisfying, and not just in front of the cameras: Wes Craven, Roger L. Jackson and Marco Beltrami are also crucial pieces of the puzzle.
There's little sense of the film's rushed production and drastic writing changes on screen. It all looks polished and finished. All the same, I'd have been interested to see how it would have shaped up with the original reveal of Derek and Hallie as the killers.
The supporting cast is really impressive, with familiar faces everywhere you turn: Sarah Michelle Gellar; Portia de Rossi; Joshua Jackson; Heather Graham; Luke Wilson. And even that Tori Spelling cameo, picking up on a throwaway line of dialogue from the first film. Possibly my favourite of the smaller roles is
The Omen's David Warner as Sid's avuncular drama teacher, Gus Gold. It's just a cough and a spit, but it's done with such gravitas. I really wish he'd had a bit more to do, but at least he got to introduce the theme of fated destiny and draw parallels between Cassandra and Sidney (in much the same way as the classroom scene in
Halloween introduced similar themes for Laurie Strode).
But the more recognisable secondary players also represent a problem I have with the second film: it lacks the intimacy of the first.
Scream 2 works from a broader palette. It feels as though it operates on a bigger, more epic scale than the first film. This can be seen everywhere from the über-dramatic Cassandra performance (so big they had to wheel in Danny Elfman to score it) to the cafeteria jam with its
Top Gun homage to the elaborate death scenes promised in the film's own rules. They all serve to make the film feel both more ambitious and less intimate.
The aforementioned death scenes are similarly double-edged, being more vicious and violent (most victims are stabbed multiple times, with Jada Pinkett's death feeling particularly unpleasant. And of course there's the pole-through-the-eye car crash death of the heterosexual policeman). At the same time, they somehow feel less meaningful than those in the first film.
While I greatly miss Woodsboro, Neve, Courteney and Randy are a welcome injection of familiarity. Sid is as captivating as ever, still clearly carrying the psychological scars from the earlier film, while also being far more kick-arse when the going gets tough. Gale is arguably more developed and interesting in this second film than the first. She's even more pushy and hard, but this is balanced by her soft underbelly, especially in scenes between she and Dewey. Randy's arc is particularly memorable here, and his early exit works in the character's favour since he didn't have to schlep through
Scream 3. However, watching the film last night, I couldn't help wondering if it might have been Dewey's time to leave.
Having found Dewey perfectly acceptable in my rewatch of the first film, I started to question why my memory told me the character was irritating. With his arrival in this film, I didn't need wonder any longer. David Arquette is absolutely
insufferable here. He's just painful to watch. He's no longer playing the Dewey we saw in the first film. He's playing David Arquette playing Dewey. And he doesn't seem able to differentiate between characters and actors. Here he plays scenes with his real-life father and girlfriend, and those lines seem blurred. When Dewey is angry at Gale, David seems to play it with a subtext that loudly tells the audience "I can't be angry at Courteney because I wuvs her". This kind of thing is endearing now and then, but not all the time. In all of his scenes it comes across that he's having fun with his castmates, but for an audience to invest in the story there needs to be more to than this. He grimaces and grins simultaneously, alternately squinting and flashing his eyes while wrinkling his nose to try and look endearing. It feels he's permanently on the verge of supplying something for the gag reel. It's incredibly distracting. His character was hugely popular in the first film (if memory serves, the ending was re-written so that he survived), and it feels that he's riding that wave without even trying anymore, even though he's being paid generously to deliver a professional performance in a role many actors would crawl over glass to play.
At the other end of the scale, what a gem Liev Schreiber is. It blows my mind that Cotton Weary - a character shown wordlessly on a TV set for milliseconds in the original film - is one of the best things about this sequel. He's so intense, complex and unpredictable and helps really ground and sell the film's ending.
Of the new characters, Derek, Mickey and Joel are brilliant. Maureen and Phil also made a believable and relatable couple in the opening act. With the first film, I had this main complaint:
The younger men are played very broadly as gurning clowns who can't take anything seriously, and there are are too many "adorably clueless" or comic relief types among the men. Kenny and Randy are the exceptions as the lighthearted stuff feels appropriate for them and they both steal their respective scenes.
With so many terrific male characters, this film has well and truly rectified that. Even with Joel and Randy both supplying many of the film's wisecracks and quips (Joel's falsetto "Yes I got that on film" comeback never fails to make me laugh out loud) there's enough balance and diversity among the male characters this time that there's room for that.
If anything, it's the secondary female players who are the least developed this time round, with Cici, Hallie and probably "Debbie Salt" all suffering in the process of rewrites, while Lois and Murphy feel tertiary at best. All five get by mostly on the charisma of the actresses playing them. And fortunately, they all have charisma for days.
I've always had a problem with the Mrs Loomis reveal. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of her taking her revenge. It all makes sense. But, as enjoyable as it is to rewatch the film with the benefit of hindsight and enjoy the little exchanges between Debbie and Gale, it's also the laziest kind of murder-mystery reveal. Even though it feels as though there
must be a reason for Debbie popping up at key moments, there's next to no opportunity for first time viewers to guess what possible motive she would have. The only dialogue that hints at the truth is Debbie's mention that the killer could be from Woodsboro, but even with this, the reveal can only ever feel like a cheat.
I also feel there's more contrivance in this film. From the killer telepathically pre-empting Phil's response and knowing the exact moment and spot to strike through the wall of a toilet cubicle, to Sid running into the school's theatre just in time for the finale, there's an awful lot that's simply rather too convenient which makes it feel too cheesy and theatrical.
The meta references extend to discussion of sequels: "Sequels suck... by definition alone they're inferior films", says
Scream 2 Randy. It feels cheeky and audacious, and not a little egocentric. But it kind of works. After all, when it comes to this kind of reference in the
Scream films, the "core audience just expects it".
One angle I do enjoy with this film is the amped up suspense. Watching this in the cinema back in '97 I remember getting sweaty palms during the sequence where Sid and Hallie have to clamber over the unconscious killer to get out of the police car. It's very effective and utilises a lot of cliches while also playing against them. While it's never going to have the same effect on me past that first watch, I can still appreciated what a wonderfully tense sequence it is. And on repeat viewings there are layers of character, especially those close ups of Sid, with Neve Campbell's eyes showing so many different emotions. Back then I also found Ghostface's pursuit of Gale through the studio very suspenseful, and I still like the atmosphere of that one.
It was never going to outdo the unique impact of the first film, but it's fun to watch them trying. As first sequels to films of
any genre, I'd say
Scream 2 is a success. There's a lot to love about it.
