Scream 2: Critic Reviews

A yum-yum cast of pretties pull off the neat trick of affectionately counting the many ways available to horror sequels to suck, without making a sequel that sucks.

Scream 2 has so much tongue-in-cheek trickery that it virtually escapes the horror genre.

Wes Craven was born to direct this material. One of the most successful of horror filmmakers.

A horror movie balancing gore and terror with personality, humor and a nifty gimmick.

If you liked Scream there's no reason you shouldn't like this sequel.

Visceral, witty and appropriately redundant...

Smart and scary like its predecessor, it delivers the shocks and a fair amount of sly wit.

Scream 2 is an ingenious, often hilarious, movie that does nothing to diminish the well-deserved cult reputation of its director.

The movie is enjoyable.

There's enough ingenuity and scariness to please plenty of fans of the first film.

The first 10 minutes attain a deranged brilliance (especially considering Charlie Kaufman wouldn't introduce his own brand of narrative invention for another two years).

...a perfunctory (yet consistently watchable) sequel...

Bloody good fun.

A bland limp sequel that fails to follow the act of the charismatic first film...

Slightly milder sequel to the post-modern slasher.

There's a lot more going on here than in Scream... So why isn't it a slam dunk? Because of the writing, which is just lousy in any number of ways.

The weakest entry in the trilogy, but it's still smarter than the majority of horror films that get released each year.

This disappointing sequel to last year's horror sleeper gets trapped in the cliches it's trying to send up.

Clever parody of the sequel trend; once again we are treated to a movie mocking its own conventions. Some great comic -- and terrifying -- moments, but suffers for not being as original as the original.

Scream 2 is as clever and nerve-wracking as the original; on its own self-referential, crowd-pleasing terms, it's a success.

The film itself is stuck in a cycle of repetition, with slight variations.

Scream 2 isn't nearly as fresh, suspenseful or witty as it's inaugural bloodfest.

The secret to both Scream and Scream 2's success is that neither film condescends to its audience - instead the audience is let in on the joke.

At least as good as the original.

I truly hope that Scream 2 proves to all of the doubters that horror movies are not all the same. They are not all equally bad, and by God, they are not all equally good. However, they don't get any better than Scream 2.