Word: screaming
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...actors are incidental; their characters are well-developed and are as well-known to the audience as soap opera faces, for Scream fans. Most are unimpressive, although Jada Pinkett proves again how far one can get by bubbly dramatic readings of a script...
...learned the problem with these early experiences and understood how it conditioned to accept violence, particularly towards women, and to grow up to be callous vidiots sensitive only to lassoing ad execs. We echo, of course, the blood-thirsty media vultures whose tabloid exploits also increased during the '80s. Scream 2 addresses this in the character of Courteney Cox, whose Gale Weathers is now a slimy reporter; in addition, throughout the film, people theorize about what motivated people to such gore...
Which is all well and good, but Craven doesn't seem satisfied with such commentary and fright-nighting; in Scream 2, he insists on going that one step more meta on our ass. Reenactments of reenactments of movies of movies. References to conversations about classes about sequels to movies existing in both our world and this alternative world that has the fictional slasher flick, Stab...
Like jaded cynicism applied to every-thing in the world 24-7, though, such meta-ness isn't really sustainable for long without wearing thin: expectations grow higher and higher, we're the rats at the cocaine drop bottle with the tap key, etc. Scream 2 can't go much beyond its first virtuoso scene, in which a woman is stabbed by a movie's fan(atic) in a movie theater raucous over the violence on the screen. We ourselves in the theater feel real fear that the same could happen...
After that, it'd be hard to deny that the strong points in Scream 2--a movie so meant to engage the audience's memory, expectations and self-reflexive reactions--are not the meta ones, but standard horror applied in ever more surprising ways (but not too surprising; things peter out quickly). For example, a man accompanied by two others in a wide open campus field in front of several buildings is stalked and killed by man. Trying to outwit his assailant as he speaks with him on a cell phone, the man is pied-pipered to his own doom...