by: Steve Loring

Scream/Scream 2...Hollywood's New Horror

One of the most interesting things about the "Scream" films is how perilously close, seemingly on purpose, they come to becoming exactly what they mock: schlocky b-horror flicks. In the first of the series (they are already working on the third), Sydney, the ever-embattled protagonist says this about horror movies -- "What's the point? They're all the same. Some stupid killer stalking some big breasted girl who can't act and is always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door. It's insulting." It is one of this movie's many strengths that eventually, this big breasted character develops a penchant for stairs.

Here we have a movie that desperately wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It both satirizes and employs the conventions of horror movies, and somehow, gets away with it. The film can work as either a hip, ingenious send up of hundreds of lesser horror movies, or, for the uninitiated viewer that won't get the in jokes, a fine example of the semi-reputable genre.

Writer Kevin Williamson has created a world where the characters know all the clichés of the type of movie they appear in. When murders start to take place in town, the horror section of the local video store is sold out. When the characters watch the horror video, the events on the screen satirically mirror the events that occur, or soon will occur, in the film.

The excessive, graphic violence somewhat detracts from the overall comic punch, but it comes with loads of irony and absurdist humor. It's difficult to forget the moment when one of the killers, drenched in his own blood, starts sobbing when he hears that Sydney has called the police because his "mom and dad are gonna be so mad at (him). It is, perhaps, a fruitless task to complain about the amount of violence in a mainstream horror movie, particularly when the writer is smart enough to have his characters do it for you.

In "Scream 2," which is wilder, funnier and more graphic, than its predecessor, Williamson does just that. His "freaky, Tarantino film student" explains to Dewey, the police officer in the first, the rules of a sequel in one of the film's comic highlights. The audience, he claims, has come to expect more violence in their sequels; they want their "gore candy." And, indeed, while doing a mental back check of sequels, I found that, from "Rocky II" to "Aliens," there is generally more violence served up in a sequel than the original.

What Williamson has in mind for the third installment of this mini-franchise is being held under tight wraps. However, I have a feeling it will feature young, self aware characters that know something about the quality of most sequels to sequels.