By far the best Ghostface of them all!

I like it but it’s a major step down from 1 and it’s overrated.

The pacing gets quite flabby in the middle. Lots of Dewey and Gale ‘drama’ which drags, and is accompanied by the very distracting use of the (excellent) Broken Arrow score. The fact that they just threw in the temp score betrays how rushed the film was.

Despite Randy saying that sequels have gorier kills, this is actually much tamer than 1. There’s nothing here that remotely compares to the gutting of Casey and Steve in Scream’s legendary opening scene.

The killer reveal is underwhelming. Mickey was, as someone above said, a tag-along. The first film really messed with your head with Billy - first you suspect him, then you don’t, then you do, then you completely discount him once he gets ‘stabbed’, only for it to be him all along. You could argue that Stu was a tag-along but he just made a much deeper impression because of his brilliant portrayal by Lillard. Mrs Loomis is an idea that works, but seeing this cackling bug-eyed goofy housewife wielding a knife was more funny than scary.

Apparently they had to re-tool the killers once the script leaked, so not only was the film rushed to capitalise on the success of Scream, it then needed urgent last-second rewrites to change the killers. I wish they’d taken the time to really nail the script and make everything feel ‘of a piece’ rather than arbitrary.

Saying all that, there’s plenty I really like about the film and as far as slasher sequels go it’s well above what we had any right to expect.

The truly great Scream sequel is actually Scream 4, a vastly underrated movie where they were able to take the time to get it right.

Needless to say, 5 and 6 (and the no doubt equally shitty and woke 7) are atrocious, and even make Scream 3 look like a masterpeice.