Not bad, but don't expect improvement.

Rating: Null/10 (28 June 2002)

This film is way better than all the other countless teen slasher movies being created out there but in terms of the sequel to the great Scream, it's not like its daddy.
The Scream series is almost directly responsible for reviving the horror genre with movies full of teens and masked psychos who always keep their identity sealed until the finale. After Scream, every horror movie copied its formula, hired hot teen actors, and made it a guessing game of who the killer would be. After a while it got too tiring. Now that the trend is dying off and movies like Friday the 13th and Halloween are pumping out more sequels this year, everyone can thank God that movie studios quit ripping off this great series. Sure, Scream started it all, but you have to realize that Scream is THE teen slasher of the '90s. It's the only slasher series that's actually worth a damn, and it's not the movie's fault that other people copied it to death. This series was almost ruined by imitators, making the audiences blame this series.
The story is a little different here in Scream 2. The heroine Sidney has graduated and gotten out of Woodsboro to a secluded college. The other survivors have gotten on with their lives, too. Gale the reporter got rich from a tell-all book, Dewey deals with his new limp, and Randy coincidentally attends Sidney's college (what are the odds?). When a new movie called Stab opens, which is the film counterpart to the events at Woodsboro and Gale's book, the past comes back again as another ghost killer stalks Sidney's college buds.
This movie delivers on all that Randy promises in the trailer. The body count is bigger, but some of the deaths are inconsequential unlike in Scream when the deaths were major characters. The death scenes are only more elaborate due to the new volume of blood. But compared to Drew Barrymore's scene in the first, this can't hold a candle to that. And the killer(s) should never be assumed dead because are they ever?
This movie may seem like a pointless attempt to cash in on the money from the first, especially since not even a year had passed since the first opened, but keep in mind this is a trilogy. Just like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.
Not everyone will be satisfied with this. Taking the characters from Scream and shipping them out of Woodsboro takes something out of the film. Woodsboro was a small town where terrible things were happening and everyone had something to hide. With great scenery and people, the setting was almost a character in itself in the first movie. Now that is all gone, replaced by a college campus. The set-up to murder is all the same here, even the killer's voice, but the scenes lack the impact they had in the first. The first had a better set-up. Most murders were out in the middle of nowhere. These occur on a campus with hundreds of kids about.
This movie jokes about sequels never surpassing the original. This movie only helps prove that, but is still definitely worth viewing. It can't beat Scream, but it can almost match it. As part two of a trilogy this movie does just fine. But don't expect it to be an improvement.