Silly, but on to itself

Rating: 8/10 (29 April 1999)

Not really a serious slasher movie, but a subversive swipe at our media culture, it succeeds grubbily where The Truman Show fails elegantly. It helps to have seen Scream 1, if only to recognize that Tori Spelling playing the Neve Campbell character in Scream 2's movie-within-a-movie version of the story of Scream 1, is the very thing the Neve Campbell character jokingly predicted would happen in Scream 1.
The punch line of Scream 2 comes at the very end. The movie's many lapses into false gore, false pathos and false sentimentality are probably necessary evils, and in any case they don't detract from the fun.
Things like "It was my head, but Jennifer Aniston's body," and "At least you were played by David Schwimmer," and that bitchy dissection of the latest Party of Five episode by two sorority girls, will all sail sadly over the heads (beneath the dignity?) of art house types who wouldn't be caught dead watching a sitcom. But there are other things they might get. There's the cell phone/cordless phone theme: Also, caller ID makes its first appearance in a movie in Scream 2 -- there's none of the anachronistic call-tracing nonsense we still see in other movies. (FBI agent whispers desperately: "Keep him on the line for another 45 seconds, for chrissake, we've almost got him!" -- and in real life the rest of us know who's calling on the first ring.)