Scream 2

You almost find yourself rooting for "Scream 2" to fail at the box office so that scripter Kevin Williamson will write something outside the horror genre. But the chances of that happening are about as slim as the odds that they won't make another "Scream" sequel.

It's not as if Williamson couldn't break out. He clearly has a talent for witty dialogue — which is much more obvious here than it was in the original. But for someone so intent on subverting horror conventions, he falls prey to a lot of the genre's cliches (especially the "killer-who-will-not-die").

And he still hasn't learned to write clever death scenes (those that are scarier than they are gory) and even more disappointingly, he wastes some situations in this film that could have led to better comedy sequences — instead, eschewing them in favor of scenes that up the body count.

Returning with Williamson and director Wes Craven are the last film's survivors — heroine Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), career-obsessed reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), the slightly dim Dewey Riley (David Arquette) and horror film buff Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy).

In the two years since the Woodsboro killings, they've all seemingly moved on — both Sidney and Randy are students at Windsor College in the Midwest, while Gale has written a bestseller that's been turned into a movie, and she's helped win the acquittal of Cotton Weary (Liev Schrieber), the man falsely accused of murdering Sidney's mother.

But that film, "Stab," has also seemingly inspired a copycat killer or killers who whack unsuspecting Jada Pinkett during one of the fictional film's sneak previews. And soon enough the murders start spreading to the Windsor campus.

Suspicion naturally falls on Sidney's boyfriend, frat boy Derek (Jerry O'Connell) and his friend Mickey (Timothy Olyphant). And then it shifts to Cotton, who's been making perceived threats directed at Sidney. And then . . . well, you get the picture.

Williamson and Craven do a good job spoofing the first film (having Tori Spelling play the Sidney role in "Stab," a direct reference to "Scream," is a very funny idea), but they continue to drive some of the same points home over and over again. And frankly, the filmmakers don't even follow their own rule about sequels — the killings are more gruesome but less scary than those in the original.

Still, the cast does have a lot of fun, especially Arquette, Kennedy, Schrieber and Laurie Metcalf, who plays a competing television reporter. But Sarah Michelle Gellar (from TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") is wasted in what amounts to little more than a cameo.

"Scream 2" is rated R for violence and gore, both up considerably from the first film, profanity and some vulgar references.